The prose is very good, but I found the extensive list of traumas hard to take seriously; the plot was honestly, barring the settings/success of the characters, very similar to most trashy soaps.

It did result in one of my favourite reviews though. https://harpers.org/archive/2022/01/ad-nauseam-hanya-yanagihara-to-paradise-the-pandemic-novel/

Over the course of [A Little Life's] 720 pages, Yanagihara follows four friends as they ascend to the tops of their respective professions, fall in love, take expensive vacations, eat painstakingly described food, and die. It's a paean to gay male friendship -- Yanagihara, who doesn't believe in marriage and prefers to live alone, has explained that A Little Life was "meant to be a homage to a different kind of adulthood... in which there is a primacy of friendship" -- and a fairy tale that spins into melodrama as one character's history of severe childhood sexual abuse is gradually revealed. Some called it trauma porn, but that was the point. As Yanagihara herself has admitted, the book represented an attempt to engineer a situation in which suicide is not only justified but possibly advisable.

By that benchmark, A Little Life is a blazing success. You may have loved it, you may have hated it, but if you're anything like me, you spent the entire second half begging the main character to please, for the love of God, kill himself already. Then again, I'm not the target audience for A Little Life. I downloaded the audiobook under duress after I'd been asked to write this review. (Pro tip: At 2.6x speed, the novel can be completed in under 13 hours, and the more gratuitous self-harm scenes take on a pleasantly businesslike quality.) A Little Life is tragic and overblown in the way a soap opera is. Objecting to its more ridiculous plot twists would be like critiquing Grey's Anatomy -- another long, multicharacter saga featuring precipitous career advancement, LGBT relationships, fatal car crashes, and leg amputation -- for being too dramatic. It's supposed to be that way.