Page 214 - A Little Life: A Novel

specific and, at times, marginal, that Willem’s accomplishments were
treated as neither more nor less important than their own. JB’s friends were
poets and performance artists and academics and modern dancers and

philosophers—he had, Malcolm once observed, befriended everyone at
their college who was least likely to make money—and their lives were
grants and residencies and fellowships and awards. Success, among JB’s
Hood Hall assortment, wasn’t defined by your box-office numbers (as it
was for his agent and manager) or your costars or your reviews (as it was by
his grad-school classmates): it was defined simply and only by how good
your work was, and whether you were proud of it. (People had actually said

that to him at these parties: “Oh, I didn’t see Black Mercury 3081. But were
you proud of your work in it?” No, he hadn’t been proud of it. He had
played a brooding intergalactic scientist who was also a jujitsu warrior and
who successfully and single-handedly defeated a gargantuan space monster.
But he had been satisfied with it: he had worked hard and had taken his
performance seriously, and that was all he ever hoped to do.) Sometimes he

wondered whether he was being fooled, if this entire circle of JB’s was a
performance art piece in itself, one in which the competitions and concerns
and ambitions of the real world—the world that sputtered along on money
and greed and envy—were overlooked in favor of the pure pleasure of
doing work. Sometimes this felt astringent to him, in the best way: he saw
these parties, his time with the Hoodies, as something cleansing and
restorative, something that returned him to who he once was, thrilled to get

a part in the college production of Noises Off, making his roommates run
lines with him every evening.
“A career mikva,” said Jude, smiling, when he told him this.
“A free-market douche,” he countered.
“An ambition enema.”
“Ooh, that’s good!”

But sometimes the parties—like tonight’s—had the opposite effect.
Sometimes he found himself resenting the others’ definition of him, the
reductiveness and immovability of it: he was, and forever would be, Willem
Ragnarsson of Hood Hall, Suite Eight, someone bad at math and good with
girls, an identity both simple and understandable, his persona drawn in two
quick brushstrokes. They weren’t wrong, necessarily—there was something
depressing about being in an industry in which he was considered an

intellectual simply because he didn’t read certain magazines and websites