The four friends — Willem, JB, Malcolm, and Jude — navigate their early twenties in New York. We are introduced to their living situations, ambitions, and the texture of their friendship. Jude's physical damage and secretiveness are established early.

The friends' careers begin to diverge. JB's art career accelerates; he begins a series of paintings based on the friends. Willem gets his first significant acting roles. Malcolm struggles. Jude's legal career advances, and we see the first explicit scenes of his self-harm.

The friends are in their thirties. Their lives have diverged substantially. We begin to receive the first partial revelations of Jude's past — the monastery, the abuse, the earliest years of his trauma. Harold Stein appears and deepens his relationship with Jude.

Jude's past is revealed more fully — Brother Luke, the trafficking, the years of abuse on the road. In the present, Jude and Willem's friendship deepens toward something more. Harold formally adopts Jude.

Jude and Willem are together. This is the novel's most sustained portrait of Jude experiencing something like happiness — their life together, travel, Willem's success. But Jude's self-harm continues beneath the surface, and his past is never fully past.

Caleb — a man from Jude's past whom he briefly dated — resurfaces as a catastrophic force. Malcolm and Willem die in an accident. Jude's psychological state deteriorates drastically. The self-harm becomes life-threatening.

The final section. Jude dies by suicide. Harold's closing monologue, addressed to Jude after his death, is the novel's last and most devastating section. The meaning of a 'little life' is held up and examined.

A consideration of the novel's formal structure — the deliberate withholding and revelation of Jude's past, the shifting narrative perspectives, and how the book's controversial relationship to suffering functions as an argument.