Hanya Yanagihara’s second novel, A Little Life, was garlanded on its US release with the kind of fervid encomia that are the speciality of peppy American book reviewers. It has been longlisted for the Man Booker and is already 2-1 favourite to win the prize come October. The novel takes us on a 700-page tour of the life of an emotionally and physically damaged man, Jude St Francis, and the friends who try to stand between him and the demons (or “hyenas”, as he sees them) that torment him. It is a book about the limits of friendship, about the depths of pain and shame that a human can endure about the unending legacy of abuse.

Reading the novel over an intense three-day period this summer, I was struck by an eerie sense of déja-lu. Not that it is derivative, exactly, but rather that A Little Life feels snatched from another time, specifically the 1990s. It is partly the resemblance to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, which is a clear precursor, but also that the book’s introspection, its focus on individual suffering, abuse and self-harm seemed to draw upon a peculiarly 90s obsession that stretched from A Child Called It to Richey Edwards of Manic Street Preachers and Marilyn Manson cutting themselves on stage to Girl, Interrupted and The Virgin Suicides. It is a serious book, taking itself seriously in what seems to me a very American, very 90s manner.

A Little Life makes for a far more interesting read than some tired, realist bildungsroman

It is also – and this has occasioned some teeth-sucking on the other side of the Atlantic – that the novel is stridently ahistorical. Despite spanning some 60 years, A Little Life is set in a perpetual almost-now, where the characters have email and mobile phones, but where 9/11 doesn’t seem to have happened and the only politics that are allowed to intrude into the lives of Jude and his friends are personal politics. The world outside the affluent north-eastern US only exists to provide locations for films or destinations for travel. It is as if Francis Fukuyama were right all along and, at least in the world of this novel, history has ended. Carol Anshaw, writing in the New York Times chided Yanagihara for writing a novel that “almost seems allegorical”. She has, and it makes for a far more interesting read than some tired, realist Bildungsroman with pious nods to the great absence of the Twin Towers.

We first meet Jude and his impossibly bright friends in New York. They have finished studying at an unnamed university (seemingly Harvard) and are setting out on their professional lives. Willem is a dishy actor of Icelandic/Swedish descent (soon to win wild success and Oscars); Malcolm is an architect, son of a fabulously wealthy African-American financier; Jean-Baptiste (known as JB) is a gay Haitian painter whose figurative artwork centres upon his friends. They are godless (god is left uncapitalised throughout the novel) and postmodern – “Ambition is my only religion,” says JB – and live in a giddy whirl of parties and erudite conversation. They also exist in a kind of utopia of alterity where, at least in hipster New York, everyone is a minority – usually several minorities at once – and revels in his (and it is almost always his – Yanagihara often seems like the only woman involved) otherness. Jude’s race is unclear, his sexuality muddled or nonexistent, but rather than these being “issues”, his difference is celebrated, nurtured, accepted. JB calls Jude “the Postman … post-sexual, post-racial, post-identity, post-past.”

Increasingly, the novel winnows down to focus on Jude and Willem. JB and Malcolm appear largely off stage, making their own rather unlikely leaps towards the American Dream, but we come to realise that the little life in question is Jude’s and that Willem will play a leading role in it. We are drawn a layer deeper into Jude’s misery – we see him cut himself, we trace scars on his back, we understand that there was an accident many years ago that has left his legs badly damaged – and we recognise that the mystery of his life is the narrative engine that drives the novel. Late on in the book, we are told of the friends: “When they were young, they had only their secrets to give one another: confessions were currency and divulgences were a form of intimacy.” Yanagihara expertly drip-feeds us confessions and divulgences about Jude’s life – flashbacks (so discouraged by creative writing courses) that electrify as they horrify. There have been too many superhero origins films colonising our cinemas recently, but Jude’s story is exactly that. His superpower? Merely enduring.

I spluttered often while reading A Little Life – it is a book that teeters regularly over the abyss of ridicule. The friends’ successes are the absurd dreams of a teenager; the quality of the writing is decidedly mixed, with many an ugly sentence; it is a humourless novel, even when it tries to be funny.

There is also something chillingly relentless about the way that Yanagihara subjects the reader to Jude’s suffering. It is unremitting and it is ghastly, and I had to put the book down several times when I was reading it. Here, for instance, she is describing Jude’s ruined legs: “Wounds open overnight: the suppuration, the sick, fishy scent, the little gash, like a foetus’s mouth, that would appear burbling viscous, unidentifiable fluids.” In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry talks of the way that “physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it”; Yanagihara gives Jude’s pain intimate, visceral voice.

In the end, though, it is the very relentlessness that makes this a book unlike any other I’ve read. The novel is brilliantly redeemed by Yanahigara’s insistence on Jude’s right to suffer, her unwillingness to embrace the approved message that we get from Dave Pelzer et al (“Even in its darkest passages, the heart is unconquerable,” Pelzer writes in A Child Called It). A Little Life asks serious questions about humanism and euthanasia and psychiatry and any number of the partis pris of modern western life. It’s Entourage directed by Bergman; it’s the great 90s novel a quarter of a century too late; it’s a devastating read that will leave your heart, like the Grinch’s, a few sizes larger.

A Little Life is published by Picador (£16.99). Click here to order it for £11.99