A Little Life follows four close friends (Jude, Willem, Malcolm, and JB) as they graduate from college and move to New York in pursuit of fame, success, and wealth. The friends are all ambitious and talented, and over the course of the novel, each achieves great success in his chosen field (Jude is a lawyer, Willem is an actor, JB is an artist, and Malcolm is an architect). Yet, as they advance in their careers, they discover that success doesn’t guarantee happiness and personal fulfillment. What’s more, they find that success often comes at a cost. After years of being overlooked, for instance, JB finds fame and success as a painter, but he develops a drug addiction and alienates some of his closest friends in the process. JB’s first solo show is called “The Boys,” a series of paintings he modeled after photographs he took of Jude, Willem, and Malcolm. Though JB had promised Jude, who is extremely private and guarded against the way people see him, that he would seek Jude’s approval before painting any photographs of him, JB goes back on his promise and hangs a photo of Jude, looking exposed and vulnerable, at his first show. Jude and Willem take JB’s betrayal badly, and their friendship with him is never the same. JB prioritizes ambition over friendship, and he suffers for it. Jude, meanwhile, joins Rosen Pritchard and Klein—one of the city’s most prestigious law firms—to ensure that he’s wealthy enough to afford proper, dignified care as his health and mobility worsen with age. After Willem dies suddenly in a car crash, though, Jude wishes he had spent less time at work and more time with Willem. And while the trajectory of Jude’s life might be outwardly successful—he overcomes an abusive childhood to become a brilliant, wealthy lawyer with a movie-star partner—ultimately, his childhood trauma continues to haunt him throughout his life. A Little Life suggests that outward success does not guarantee inner happiness and fulfillment—and more often, prioritizing success and ambition leads to unhappiness, alienation, and regret.
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Success and Happiness Quotes in A Little Life
It was a great painting, and he knew it, knew it absolutely the way you sometimes did, and he had no intention of ever showing it to Jude until it was hanging on a gallery wall somewhere and Jude would be powerless to do anything about it.
When did pursuing your ambitions cross the line from brave into foolhardy? How did you know when to stop?
Perhaps because of this, he felt he always knew who and what he was, which is why, as he moved farther and then further away from the ranch and his childhood, he felt very little pressure to change or reinvent himself. He was a guest at his college, a guest in graduate school, and now he was a guest in New York, a guest in the lives of the beautiful and the rich. He would never try to pretend he was born to such things, because he knew he wasn’t; he was a ranch hand’s son from western Wyoming, and his leaving didn’t mean that everything he had once been was erased, written over by time and experiences and the proximity to money.
But now he knows for certain how true the axiom is, because he himself—his very life—has proven it. The person I was will always be the person I am, he realizes. The context may have changed […]. But fundamentally, he is the same person, a person who inspires disgust, a person meant to be hated. And in that microsecond that he finds himself suspended in the air, […] he knows that x will always equal x, no matter what he does, or how many years he moves away from the monastery, from Brother Luke, no matter how much he earns or how hard he tries to forget. It is the last thing he thinks as his shoulder cracks down upon the concrete, and the world, for an instant, jerks blessedly away from beneath him: x = x, he thinks. x = x, x = x.
“It’s such a beautiful house,” I said, as I always did, and as I always did, I hoped he was hearing me say that I was proud of him: for the house he built, and for the life he had built within it.
