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Doubleday, 2022

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Hamilton cain, more online by hamilton cain.

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To Paradise

By hanya yanagihara, reviewed by hamilton cain.

In 2015 Hanya Yanagihara published A Little Life , which chronicled the troubled psyches and relationships among four friends in Manhattan. The novel was a kind of Rorschach test for critics and readers alike: many fans swooned over the cult hit, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and named a finalist for the National Book Award. A few contrarians shrugged it off as overwrought, but few could deny that a major talent blazed beneath its cloyingly operatic scenes.

To Paradise, Yanagihara’s dense, ambitious new novel, is a leap forward: she constructs a wildly speculative story that enthralls even as it challenges readers. With impeccable control, she examines the rot at the heart of the American experiment, reimagining the nation’s legacy at three different junctures in an alternative history.

The first section, “Washington Square,” set in 1893, depicts an America where the postbellum Northern Free States are governed by rigid hierarchies, the Southern “Colonies” preserve their racist institutions, and the West is an enchanted place of escape. In New York, same-sex marriages are accepted (and arranged) just like heterosexual unions, albeit constrained by considerations of wealth, class, and citizenship. As To Paradise opens, the elderly patriarch of the Bingham family meets with his three grown grandchildren in his elegant Greenwich Village townhouse to divvy up his fortune. The frail David receives the coveted prize of the townhouse, but there’s a catch: his grandfather would like him to exchange vows with an older suitor, Charles, to maintain the ruling class family’s power—a proposition David rejects once he meets a handsome, charismatic and impoverished music teacher. The language of “Washington Square” is rich and exacting, calling to mind the social novels of Henry James and Edith Wharton, and the lavish textures of Martin Scorsese’s 1993 film adaptation of The Age of Innocence . Cinematic and lyrical, “Washington Square” appeals to the eye as well as the ear.

The second section, “Lipo-Wao-Nahele,” set in 1993, is about another David—this one a young Hawaiian man living with his older partner Charles in AIDS-ravaged New York. Here Yanagihara captures the opprobrium visited upon victims of the epidemic, with strong echoes of Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia (also released in 1993). David’s fraught past, and the lengths he goes to in order to hide his secrets, propel “Lipo-Wao-Nahele” forward. Here Yanagihara plays with Hawaiian legend and erasures large and small. As Yanagihara writes of David: “He wondered now if he was another one of those people in Charles’s life, someone whose appeal would not only be ruined by the complications of his history but who had indeed been chosen because he seemed to have no history at all.” There are familiar names in this episode—Bingham, Bishop, Griffith, David, Charles, Edward—but do they relate to the 1893 tale? Yanagihara, who has a few tricks up her sleeve, doesn’t tell us outright.

Flash forward to 2093. In “Zone Eight,” To Paradise ’s longest section, the narrator Charlie—the granddaughter of an esteemed scientist—clings to sanity in a chaotic city. As she pieces together the puzzle of her husband’s disappearance, she relies on letters written by her deceased grandfather, a Hawaiian transplant, to find out the truth. “Zone Eight” leans heavily on current headlines as well as our vogue for dystopian fiction. It’s set against a backdrop of authoritarian rule: Manhattan is carved up into concentration camps, echoing the 1981 film Escape from New York. Yanagihara looks to apocalypse movies and literary classics alike, influences that she melds into an achievement all her own. “Zone Eight”   is long, but, in this case, more is more.

Charlie looks back on the twenty-first century as a brutal, unsparing series of pandemics which has precipitated a breakdown of order. Her glimpse of Washington Square is chilling, as we recognize our own civilization beneath its red-brick trappings. Yanagihara thwarts reader expectations as she confronts climate-change and authoritarianism. Like other recent world-building tours de force , such as Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, she comes at her story prismatically, shifting perspective and mood to expose enduring social ills. To Paradise’ s fractured structure is itself a commentary on our morally disjointed moment. Yet the Washington Square townhouse brings together the book’s disparate strands. The first David Bingham’s musings, from 1893, mirror our own experience of To Paradise as a sort of literary time machine:

Later, David would have the sense that the house, already capacious, had cleaved new rooms, that new wings and spaces had magically revealed themselves to accommodate them, that the room he came to call his own (and still did) had been conjured out of need and not simply remade into what it was from what it had been, a little-used extra sitting room.

For all the darkness, Yanagihara offers glimmers of human connection as a kind of balm, the sign of a paradise regained. To Paradise expands on the promise of A Little Life with a layered narrative that’s more daring yet more restrained, executed with a dazzling technique that raises the novel above its peers.

Published on January 11, 2022

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By Gish Jen

• Published Jan. 7, 2022 Updated Jan. 12, 2022

TO PARADISE By Hanya Yanagihara

Can an Asian American woman write a great American novel? Ought a great American novel range from New York to Hawaii, skipping the Midwest? Can it cross from realism to dystopia? And — most important of all, perhaps — can it center on gay men?

It is to Hanya Yanagihara’s considerable credit that her new novel raises these questions. At more than 700 pages, with a span of 200 years, “To Paradise” begins in New York in 1893. We are given a patriarch, wealth, children; there is an arranged marriage, an inheritance, a true love, a class divide and a significant twist. Deftly paced and judiciously detailed, the tale makes hay with the conventions of the 19th-century novel. But that’s not all. With breathtaking audacity Yanagihara rewrites America, the Civil War having produced, in this account, not a united country but a conglomeration of territories, including one called the Free States. In this nation-within-the-nation, gay marriage is allowed — although, lending nuance to the picture, arranged marriages are, too.

Yanagihara, who is the editor of T: The New York Times Style Magazine, goes on to rewrite history in other centuries as well, even as she moves the action from New York to Hawaii and back again, negotiates three major and nine minor time shifts and, most strikingly, ushers her characters offstage only to bring them back, in other eras and other guises, multiple times. To give just one of myriad examples, David Bingham, the heir of a mansion in Part I, returns a century later as a paralegal, passionately in love with one Charles Griffith. (We’ve met Charles before too, as the older, stolid suitor who was spurned by the David Bingham of Part I. Now he’s an even older yet dashing and worldly partner in David’s firm; David, moreover, formerly fair-complexioned, is now mixed-race.)

There are dozens of other such reincarnations, and they simultaneously bedazzle and befuddle. If in a Russian novel one struggles to keep track of who is related to whom, here we struggle to keep track of who has turned into whom, especially as Yanagihara masterfully repurposes themes, situations and motifs as well. It isn’t only arranged marriages and class differences that recur. Pandemics, mansions, triangles, illnesses, abandonments, deaths, letters and inheritances also kaleidoscopically reappear, as do grandfathers, lovers, invalids, caretakers, utopians and more.

Each section of the book is helpfully anchored by its own drama. A mansion is bequeathed; a man helps host a farewell dinner for his lover’s dying former lover; a man and his family grapple with his unconscionable professional choices. There is purpose behind the repurposing. At one point one of the Davids wonders, what if things were different — what then? “Would they still know each other? Would they still have fallen in love? Would David still have need for Charles? … Would David still find something to love in him?”

And indeed we see, over the course of the book, that as the characters morph, so do their relationships. At one point one of the Charleses — voicing, it seems, Yanagihara’s preoccupation with “the truth of who we are, our essential selves, the thing that emerges when everything else has been burned away” — writes that the pandemic he is enduring “clarified everything about who we are; it revealed the fictions we’d all constructed about our lives.” Furthermore: “It revealed how brittle the poetry of our lives truly is — it exposed friendship as something flimsy and conditional; partnership as contextual and circumstantial. No law, no arrangement, no amount of love was stronger than our own need to survive.”

Suggestively, this Charles relates a story his Hawaiian grandmother once told him, about a hungry lizard who, having eaten everything on earth, finally eats the moon and explodes. The earth recovers, as does the moon; and the lizard comes back as a man who in time also ill-advisedly eats the moon. But the moral is not what we might expect. Rather, it is that “we are the lizard, but we are also the moon. Some of us will die, but others of us will keep doing what we always have, continuing on our own oblivious way, doing what our nature compels us to, silent and unknowable and unstoppable in our rhythms.”

Limited and circumstantial as they may ultimately be, acts of love and goodness do leaven this book, which is finally as much concerned with the vulnerable as the inescapable. What wonder, though, that history is on repeat, social progress ephemeral and freedom a flickering hope.

In its evocation of eternal recurrence and the illusory nature of life, “To Paradise” recalls Buddhist ideas and so large a wisdom that it may seem absurdly worldly to critique the novel as a piece of craft. But 700-page books will sag in places, and this one is no exception. It loses steam in the Hawaii section and only fitfully regains momentum until its gripping end.

As in her second novel, “A Little Life,” Yanagihara evinces a preoccupation with the horrific, and the dystopian future depicted in the final section is horrific indeed. But reading of the societal developments, we may yearn for the fineness of touch with which the novel opened. In place of Yanagihara’s trademark emotional probing, the last section confronts us with chunks of exposition, not only in the letters of a troubled, brilliant scientist but also in the recollections of his mentally compromised granddaughter. She writes, for example, that his labs “sometimes worked with various ministries, especially the Health and Interior Ministries, but the state had no jurisdiction over any of their work. After ’56, though, that changed, and in ’62, when the state was established, it was given oversight of all the country’s research facilities. The following year, the 45 states were divided into 11 prefectures, and in ’72, the year after the zones were established, the state was one of 92 countries that signed a treaty with Beijing.”

In contrast, earlier in the book, one of the Charleses recalls seeing his mother with his doomed brother: “In her left arm, she was cradling the baby. But in her right hand she was holding an odd instrument, a clear glass dome, and she would fit the dome over the baby’s mouth and nose and then squeeze the rubber bulb attached to it. … Every 10 squeezes or so she would stop for a second, and I could hear, barely, the baby’s breath, so quiet. …

“It didn’t work, of course. … But lately, I’ve been thinking about … who will hold that little air pump for me when it’s my turn. Not because they think it’ll revive me, or save me. But because they want to try. …

“They were silent for a long time, and although David was thinking many things, he mostly thought about how good this moment was, lying next to Charles in a warm room, with snow outside. He thought that he should tell Charles that he would hold the air pump for him, but he couldn’t.”

This ambitious novel tackles major American questions and answers them in an original, engrossing way. It has a major feel. But it is finally in such minor moments that Yanagihara shows greatness.

Gish Jen’s forthcoming collection is entitled “Thank You, Mr. Nixon.”

TO PARADISE By Hanya Yanagihara 720 pp. Doubleday. $32.50.

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'To Paradise' is an inspired and vivid puzzle that doesn't quite come together

Maureen Corrigan

Hanya Yanagihara's much anticipated 700-page novel is a deliberately difficult work, made of up dazzling moments that tend lose their luster when pressed together.

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The luxurious fantasy of suffering in Hanya Yanagihara’s novels

The author of A Little Life and To Paradise writes long, voluptuous books all about human pain.

by Constance Grady

One of the most talked-about new books of this January is also one of the oddest. Hanya Yanagihara, the author of the much-beloved and much-debated 2015 novel A Little Life , has now released her third novel, To Paradise . And like its predecessor, To Paradise has arrived to both rapturous praise and furious debate.

Yanagihara is an unusual figure in America’s literary scene. The current fashion is for sentences so dry they rasp, but Yanagihara’s prose is rich and sumptuous. So, too, is her evocation of her favorite subject: human suffering. A Little Life is filled with exquisite, loving descriptions of the tormented life of her protagonist, including the violent abuse he experiences as a small child. Likewise, To Paradise luxuriates in long descriptions of abusive relationships and profound depressions and dystopian deprivations. It is never so alive as a book as when its characters are in deep pain.

For some readers, Yanagihara novels make for a profoundly moving and emotional reading experience. Fans describe sobbing through A Little Life , emerging days later feeling tear-stained and fundamentally changed. For others, Yanagihara novels can feel unsettlingly voyeuristic. Why, these readers ask, are we being invited to linger so voluptuously through passage after passage of unrelenting misery? And in our #OwnVoices era, a persistent discomfort lingers around Yanagihara’s choice to consistently write about gay men as a straight woman, and specifically about male-male child sex abuse.

A Little Life was a big word-of-mouth hit, but it was a sleeper hit: The critical debate over whether the novel was great or whether it was exploitative developed slowly, in the months and years since its release. But now To Paradise has arrived with a ready-made debate waiting to encircle it.

The big questions that review after review and think piece after think piece has been asking are: Is To Paradise a good book? And is Hanya Yanagihara a good writer?

Cards on the table: My answer to both of those questions is no. To Paradise and A Little Life both seem to me to be so self-indulgent that reading them feels like a day spent gorging on candy and so dishonest that the candy might as well come from a box labeled “salad.”

But I want to deal with these books in good faith. Let’s start by taking Hanya Yanagihara at her word when it comes to what she says she’s trying to do.

Yanagihara’s books are all about a binary between safety and pleasure

In interviews, Yanagihara has described her central theme as the duality between dull, enervating safety and flamboyant, enervating danger. Her books are designed to play these two poles against each other, and to make the case for danger over safety — for, as she sometimes seems to put it, the pleasure of life over life itself.

That’s part of why the suffering in A Little Life is so overwhelming, why her protagonist Jude suffers more than Job: because she wanted to make the case that it is possible for life to become so unpleasant that it should simply end.

“So much of this book is about Jude’s hopefulness, his attempt to heal himself,” Yanagihara explained to Electric Literature in 2015 , “and I hope that the narrative’s momentum and suspense comes from the reader’s growing recognition — and Jude’s — that he’s too damaged to ever truly be repaired, and that there’s a single inevitable ending for him.”

She went on to explain that she fundamentally mistrusts talk therapy, which operates under the idea that no depressed patient should die by suicide. “Every other medical specialty devoted to the care of the seriously ill recognizes that at some point, the doctor’s job is to help the patient die; that there are points at which death is preferable to life,” she said. “But psychology, and psychiatry, insists that life is the meaning of life, so to speak; that if one can’t be repaired, one can at least find a way to stay alive, to keep growing older.”

A characteristic of depression is to convince the depressed person that they have grasped a deep truth about the universe: that pleasure has gone from the world and will never return, that nothing will ever change or get better, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is deluded. The oddity of Yanagihara’s stance is that it treats this common and well-understood symptom of depression, which is treatable, as though it were fatal.

To Paradise is designed to play with the same duality A Little Life did, now extrapolated out from the level of the individual to the level of society. The structure is complicated and a little messy, so bear with me here.

To Paradise is made up of three sections: one novella, one set of paired short stories, and one final novel. All take place in the same townhouse in New York’s Washington Square at hundred-year intervals, and all concern a cast of characters with the same names, all in various configurations. At the center of each section are David, Edward, and Charles or Charlie.

In 1893, David is a wealthy young man of society in a world where gay marriage is legal, in love with poor and charming Edward but betrothed to rich and respectable Charles. In 1993, there are two Davids: one a young man in New York, living with his wealthy older lover Charles, and that David’s father, living in Hawaii, in an abusive relationship with impoverished Edward. In 2093, the protagonist is a young woman named Charlie who lives in a dystopian New York ravished by pandemics, in a loveless marriage with Edward, fascinated by a mysterious stranger named David.

Much has been made of the impossibility of finding any continuity between the various Davids and company. But while it’s true that none of the characters of To Paradise are the same from section to section despite their shared names, there is a certain thematic coherence at play. The Davids are generally the protagonist of each section, laboring to choose between a life of safety and order that may grow stultifying and a life of danger and excitement. They are choosing between one imagined paradise — gay New York, Hawaii, a utopia that became a dystopia — and another.

Generally, the Charleses stand for safety and the Edwards for danger. Too much of either a Charles or an Edward, in this schema, is dangerous. The David Senior of the second section finds himself destroyed by the terrible pleasure of his relationship with Edward. In the third section, the Charles-ish power of constrictive society has grown so strong that our central figure, who should by all rights be a David laboring against the Goliath of social pressures, has become a Charlie herself.

It’s the same binary that Yanagihara was playing with in A Little Life , the same push and pull between an ideal of pleasure and love and human fulfillment, and between prioritizing the continuation of human life at all costs. And as she did in A Little Life , Yanagihara is once again pushing against the grain. She is making the case that our social need to protect and prolong human life should not come at the cost of all that makes human life worth living. This idea comes through most clearly in the final section, in which America has been purged of books, art, movies, television, and even access to the internet — all in the name of pandemic safety.

It is unnerving for many reasons to see a serious novel draw a straight line from mask laws to fascist death camps, as To Paradise attempts to do. But what is most disconcerting about this argument is the callousness it demands from the reader toward people with disabilities.

At one point in the 2093 section, we enter the point of view of Charlie’s grandfather. He’s also named Charles, and he’s a public health official who was one of the architects of the dystopian fascist state that took over America. Charles describes meeting a pair of children, twin boys who were the victims of a pandemic. The experimental drugs they were treated with left them severely immunocompromised and unable ever to leave their parents’ home. And even Charles, committed as he is on a social level to prolonging human life, falters in the face of their individual misery.

He imagines that their mother must be racked with guilt over having chosen to treat their fatal illness. “How could you live with the sorrow and guilt,” he wonders, “that you had condemned them to a life stripped of all that’s pleasurable: movement; touch; the sun on your face? How could you live at all?” He considers that the boys would be better off dead.

The idea that the boys might value their life, constrictions and all — that people with disabilities might consider their lives meaningful and worth saving, even if they don’t look like life as Yanagihara thinks of it — does not appear in these books. Yanagihara’s world is one in which people with disabilities, much like gay men, exist only to suffer, long for death, and eventually, with great relief, meet it.

The dual structure I’ve outlined here is intellectual. But reading Yanagihara’s novels makes it clear that their primary force is not intellectual, but purely and deeply at the level of sensation. That’s what’s most compelling about these books, what makes them so readable at the same time that they are so grotesque in their tragedies.

There is a V.C. Andrews-like quality to Yanagihara’s depictions of pain, a delighted and lascivious panting over the concept. In A Little Life , Jude’s suicide feels inevitable not because in some cases suicide is the correct answer, but because it is the only possible aesthetic climax to the ever-increasing torment his author piles on.

That torment seems to me to be responding to a very specific fantasy. And it answers that fantasy by taking on the form of a genre that’s all about life’s less savory fantasies and how to make them into stories: fanfiction.

There’s a deeply common, deeply juvenile fantasy at the heart of these books

Many critics have already compared Yanagihara’s work to fanfiction. In particular, it feels analogous to the genre of hurt-comfort, in which writers subject their favorite characters to elaborate torture, and then allow them to be tended to in similarly elaborate detail by their beloveds. Yanagihara’s books feel id-driven in the same way that this genre of fanfiction can be; when Yanagihara says, as she did in a recent profile for the New Yorker, that she writes only for herself, you believe her.

A peculiarity of fanfiction frequently confusing to those outside the community is how often it tends to involve romances between male characters, written by straight or mostly straight women. Here, too, Yanagihara follows suit. In A Little Life , Jude eventually falls in love with his male best friend. In every section of To Paradise , all of the central love stories are between two gay men.

“I don’t think there’s anything inherent to the gay-male identity that interests me,” Yanagihara mused to the New Yorker in January . “If I were putting on my dime-store-psychologist hat, I would say more that it’s easier, freer, and safer to write about your own feelings as an outsider when cloaked in the identity of a different kind of outsider.”

This attitude, too, is similar to a certain type of fanfiction, the most self-indulgent kind. There, the eroticized characters are gay men because this identity allows the presumed female reader the space to project herself into the lives of the characters without embarrassment. She becomes the beloved object of the gaze, the adored, without having to weather either the dehumanizing force of the patriarchy or the white-hot humiliation of knowing that such fantasies are childish.

The fantasy of Yanagihara’s books is: What if I were beautiful and talented, and I suffered more than any other human being had suffered? Would this make me interesting? Would this make me lovable? Would all my enemies be hated and all my friends angelic?

In A Little Life , Jude is so brilliant that he has a master’s in pure math from MIT, is an accomplished classical singer, and a professional-level home baker — all in his spare time from his day job as one of New York City’s top litigators. In To Paradise , the various Davids are beautiful, are great artists, are creative and attractive and the object of everyone’s desires. All of them, without fail, suffer endlessly.

It seems clear to Yanagihara that this fantasy of ultimate attraction and ultimate suffering is juvenile and ripe for mockery, because she tends to project it onto unlikable side characters. In A Little Life , Jude’s friend J.B. laments his happy childhood, which he fears has doomed him to artistic mediocrity: “What if, instead,” he muses, “something actually interesting had happened to him?” He fantasizes about being Jude, with his “mysterious limp” and equally mysterious past. Later, J.B. viciously mocks Jude for his limp, revealing his inherent weakness and small-mindedness. Noble Jude responds by cutting J.B. out of his life, but not before he singlehandedly saves J.B. from his crystal meth addiction.

There is nothing in and of itself wrong with taking on this fantasy and its attendant embarrassment, which surely many people have indulged in, as a subject for fiction. An interesting approach literary fiction might take to this fantasy is to confront it, to blow it up and explore it; to try to work out why the fantasy feels so embarrassing, why it appears to be so compelling anyway, what emotional needs it’s sating. Or a compelling novel might be written defending the right to write from the id, to indulge even unadult desires.

Yanagihara’s response instead seems to be to hide from the humiliation that comes with this storyline. The suffering of her novels occurs within the othered body of her protagonists, safely distanced from the identity of the presumed reader. We are asked to face nothing, to risk nothing, to fear nothing; only to wallow and wallow and wallow.

And as a result, Yanagihara’s great argument — that sometimes suffering overwhelms what makes life worth living, that it can be a mistake to prioritize physical safety and the continuation of life over emotional freedom — comes to feel self-indulgent too. After all that, all that , you still don’t get to hope for anything better. Death is the only release.

In the face of so much self-indulgence, that grim idea doesn’t feel like a great and hard truth. It only feels like an author luxuriantly twisting the knife before she plunges it in again, one last time.

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clock This article was published more than  2 years ago

The remarkable worlds of Hanya Yanagihara’s ‘To Paradise’

Almost seven years have passed since Hanya Yanagihara published “ A Little Life, ” a devastating story about four friends in New York City. The novel earned a large audience and widespread critical acclaim — all deserved — but even readers who loved “A Little Life” may still feel traumatized by the plot’s unrelenting agony.

Brace yourself.

Yanagihara is back with a daunting new book titled “ To Paradise .” The emotional impact of this novel is less visceral than “A Little Life,” but only because the author’s scope is now so vast and her dexterity so dazzling. Presented as a triptych of related novellas, “To Paradise” demonstrates the inexhaustible ingenuity of an author who keeps shattering expectations.

Calling the three parts of “To Paradise” novellas is stretching the term and calling them related is an act of faith. The last one, at almost 350 pages, could have been published as a stand-alone novel. But the way these disparate stories speak to one another across 200 years through a chorus of echoes makes their subtle coalescence all the more tantalizing. Keep that in mind: This isn’t a novel to be sampled 10 pages at a time before bed. Yanagihara makes strong demands on her readers; those who forsake all else and let this epic consume them will find it most rewarding.

Book Review: ‘A Little Life,’ by Hanya Yanagihara

The first section, “Washington Square,” immediately signals its debt to Henry James’s story about a wealthy young woman whose father doubts the sincerity of her dashing suitor. Yanagihara delivers an uncanny homage to James’s ever-parsing style as she re-creates the refined world of 19th-century New York, but the context has been systematically transformed.

In her version of “Washington Square,” the sheltered heir is a young man named David Bingham with a history of “nervous troubles.” While his successful siblings have moved out, David still lives with his loving grandfather in a domestic situation that’s comforting if slightly humiliating, like being a figurine in a Victorian terrarium. “He felt at times as if his life were something he was only waiting to use up,” Yanagihara writes, “so that, at the end of each day, he would settle into bed with a sigh, knowing he had worked through a small bit more of his existence and had moved another centimeter toward its natural conclusion.”

David’s entombed life is finally rattled when his grandfather gently prods him to consider marriage. Given the rumors about his emotional stability, this is not an easy match to arrange, but David is a single man in possession of a good fortune, and his grandfather thinks he may have found the perfect gentleman for him to marry.

You read that right.

How deftly Yanagihara weaves this radical social innovation into her version of 19th-century New York. But the acceptance of same-sex marriage isn’t the only variant she introduces. Although the romantic drama of David Bingham takes place after the Civil War we know, the history of the United States in these pages has followed a very different path and resulted in a continent now fractured into separate territories with violently different attitudes about the rights of Black people and gay people.

The result is a fascinating alt-history that forces us to consider that the social and political order we consider inevitable is, in fact, the result of innumerable variables that could have evolved entirely differently. And in the foreground of this reconceived land, Yanagihara stays close to the tender, frightened efforts of David Bingham to imagine a kind of freedom beyond his grandfather’s prudent arrangements. “To live a life in color, a life in love,” David thinks, “was that not every person’s dream?” In this exquisitely paced, achingly sympathetic story, that dream could save him — or kill him.

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The second part of “To Paradise,” called “Lipo-wao-nahele,” abandons that plot and picks up in the late 20th century with a story that possesses its own distinctive tone. But the grand house in Washington Square persists along with the characters’ names. A young paralegal — a different David Bingham — is in a pleasant though dependent relationship with a wealthy older man. “He knew he should feel infantilized by how obviously unequal their life together was,” Yanagihara writes, “and yet he didn’t — he liked it, he found it relaxing. It was a relief to be with someone so declarative; it was a relief not to think.” It’s not, though — not really. And that’s the tension Yanagihara keeps drawing tighter throughout “To Paradise.”

This second David is haunted by his peculiar experiences as a child when he lived in Hawaii. Much of the section is presented as a letter from David’s estranged father, a descendant of Hawaiian royalty who once believed that the restoration of the kingdom was imminent. The plot here is sometimes frustratingly oblique, and the letter format can feel artificial for such a lengthy and literary deathbed confession, but it allows Yanagihara to explore in detail the fantastical delusion that David’s father was in thrall to. Once again, she explores the dream of freedom that lures all these characters to risk everything for a paradise they desire but can barely envision.

No matter the setting — past, present or future — the allure of “To Paradise” stems from the hypnotic confluence of Yanagihara’s skills. She speaks softly, confidentially, with the urgency of a whisper. She draws us into the most intimate sympathy with these characters while placing them in crises that feel irresistibly compelling. And those forces reach a fever pitch in the novel’s last book, a medical dystopia called “Zone Eight.”

Plagues have long infected novelists. Daniel Defoe — by some measures the first English novelist — published “A Journal of the Plague Year” 300 years ago this March. And, of course, the canon of modern-day flu-fiction was spreading long before covid-19. Emily St. John Mandel’s “ Station Eleven ” — now a series on HBO Max — appeared in 2014. Last year, while we were still bickering about lockdowns, Gary Shteyngart , Jim Shepard , Louise Erdrich and others published covid-related novels.

More of these unsettling stories are surely developing in febrile imaginations around the world. But none is likely to be as devastating as what Yanagihara presents here. “Zone Eight” depicts the disease-ravaged hellscape that is the United States in the late-21st century. Get ready to feel nostalgic for social distancing.

Yanagihara moves back and forth across several decades to tell the story of a researcher named Charles who serves as a powerful adviser to the government during an era of successive pandemics. In the national petri dish of fear, scientific illiteracy and xenophobia, America becomes something like “1984” but with better-fitting masks.

In response to each new virus, Charles helps impose increasingly stringent regulations until the United States has been transformed into a police state of total surveillance. The infected are sent to “relocation centers”; the dying are subjected to experiments. I’ve endured nothing so unnerving about the slippery slope of moral expediency and social decay since I saw Cecil Philip Taylor’s classic play “Good” about a professor gliding toward Nazism.

This final section is a blistering analysis of what an endless cycle of pandemics can do to a society. With allusions to the AIDS epidemic, Yanagihara illustrates the way, given a surfeit of fear, acceptance of others gradually reverts to deadly prejudice. “Of all the horrors the illnesses wreaked, one of the least-discussed is the brisk brutality with which it sorted us into categories,” Charles writes to a friend. “The disease clarified everything about who we are; it revealed the fictions we’d all constructed about our lives. It revealed that progress, that tolerance, does not necessarily beget more progress or tolerance.”

In some ways, “To Paradise” concludes with an elaborately dramatized vision of the loss of civil rights that today’s conservatives have been predicting throughout the coronavirus pandemic with its capricious lockdowns, vaccination mandates and work restrictions. The government that Yanagihara imagines feeds off the interaction of disease and dread to suck up ever more power unto itself, creating “a comprehensive welfare state.” How ironic that this spectacular queer novel could become the rallying cry of the MAGA crowd. (There is no chance of that happening.)

But what really makes “Zone Eight” so gripping is its focus on Charles’s granddaughter, Charlie. She’s a young woman physically and mentally impaired during one of the plagues that swept across the country. Despite his callous disregard for most people, Charles is wholly devoted to protecting her, even if that means trapping her in a place without love.

In alternate sections, Charlie describes her own life in a voice perfectly calibrated to sound almost simple, almost without affect, odd but not exotic. For an author, this is a delicate, perilous act of creation. One slip and Charlie could have become a fount of touching insight, like the sappy environmental prodigy in Richard Powers’s “ Bewilderment .” But Yanagihara breathes real life into a young woman who, despite all evidence to the contrary, dares to believe that she deserves love and freedom. Her story, equally terrifying and poignant, reverberates through our current crisis with such force that it’s almost unbearable.

Ron Charles writes about books for The Washington Post and hosts TotallyHipVideoBookReview.com .

To Paradise

By Hanya Yanagihara

Doubleday. 708 pp. $32.50

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Fiction Meets Chaos Theory

Hanya Yanagihara’s new novel tweaks American history and traces the disorienting consequences.

W hile reading To Paradise , Hanya Yanagihara’s gigantic new novel, I felt the impulse a few times to put down the book and make a chart—the kind of thing you see TV detectives assemble on their living-room walls when they have a web of evidence but no clear theory of the case. To Paradise , which is in fact three linked novels bound in a single volume, is constructed something like a soma cube, with plots that interlock but whose unifying logic and mechanisms are designed to baffle. The first book, “Washington Square,” takes place in the early 1890s in a New York City that the reader quickly realizes is off-kilter. There the prominent Bingham family runs the primary bank of the Free States, one of a patchwork of nations (including the southern Colonies, the Union, the West, and the North) sustaining an uneasy coexistence after the War of Rebellion. In the Free States, homosexuality and gay marriage are perfectly ordinary, but Black people are not welcomed as citizens—the Free States are white, and committed only to giving Black people safe passage to the North and the West. David, the sickly grandson of the Bingham clan, falls in love with a poor musician named Edward, though his grandfather is attempting to arrange his marriage to a steady older man named Charles.

Book 2,“Lipo-Wao-Nahele,” also follows a David Bingham, this time a young Hawaiian man living with his older lover, Charles, in the same house on Washington Square owned by the Binghams in the previous book. David is a descendant of the last monarch of Hawaii, whose legacy is defended by a Hawaiian-independence movement. It is the 1990s, and AIDS is ravaging David and Charles’s world in New York, an erasure of a generation that is counterposed to David’s ambivalent denial of his homeland, his lineage, and his father—who narrates half the book.

Book 3, which, at nearly 350 pages, constitutes almost half of the entire novel, tells the story of a United States that slides into a totalitarian dictatorship in response to recurrent pandemics and climate disasters. “Zone Eight,” as it’s titled, unfolds from 2043 to 2094, again in Greenwich Village (now Zone Eight), and is narrated, alternately, by Charles, a Hawaiian-born virologist and influential adviser to the government, and Charlie, the daughter of Charles’s son, David. Charlie survived one pandemic as a child but lives with lasting neurological effects. These are, I promise, the barest possible bones of the trilogy.

Read: A Little Life : The great gay novel might be here

To Paradise , though its plots are too various and intricate to even begin to capture in summary, moves smoothly and quickly. Yanagihara’s previous novel, A Little Life , also a bulky page-turner, amassed critical praise and a near-frantic fandom on the strength of her gift for mapping deeply felt lives on an epic scale, and for dramatizing the way that people are driven, and failed, by their love for one another. To Paradise shares these qualities. Yet Yanagihara avoids the gratuitous violence and abjection that set the tone of A Little Life , a dark saga of four college friends who make their tormented way into middle age. To Paradise is a softer book, with a classic, almost old-fashioned set of plot arcs (a wealthy, fragile man is taken in by an opportunistic lover; a father longs for the son he alienated; utopian dreams produce a dystopia). It is executed with enough deftness and lush detail that you just about fall through it, like a knife through layer cake.

But what is Yanagihara doing with all these Davids and Charleses?

A few notes from my TV-detective chart: Characters called David, Charles, Peter, and Edward appear in all three books of the novel. Surnames repeat as well—though sometimes those who share surnames across centuries seem to be related, and sometimes not. Two of the books prominently feature Hawaii; all have butlers named Adams. All three are anchored by the same townhouse on Washington Square. Though the first and third books take place in a version of America that is notably speculative, it is not clear whether these alternative Americas are meant to be continuous, shared across the novel. Each book could just as plausibly be playing out its own version of history.

Two have powerful grandfathers who fail in their efforts to protect their legacy and their vulnerable grandchildren (often from themselves). All center gay men. All dramatize the horrors of illness, horrors that reverberate through generations. Two follow men whose frailty leads them to throw their life into the hands of untrustworthy men; a different two books are set amid plagues. Every book ends with the same phrase and the same image: a character reaching out to someone else through time and space, willing or imagining their way “to paradise.” None seems to imagine paradise in quite the same way.

The further I read, the more I suspected that the challenge Yanagihara sets for the reader isn’t so much to decode a puzzle as to survive a plunge into chaos theory . The warped harmonies of the three plotlines seem engineered to reveal how ensnared humans are in inscrutable coincidences and consequences, how oblivious we are to the long arcs of causation. To Paradise evokes the dizzying way that minor events and personal choices might create countless alternative histories and futures, both for individuals and for society. Reading the novel delivers the thrilling, uncanny feeling of standing before an infinity mirror, numberless selves and rooms turning uncertainly before you, just out of reach.

The butterfly effect—an underlying principle of chaos theory—holds that tiny, apparently inconsequential changes can produce enormous, globally felt repercussions. The butterfly effect was formalized by the meteorologist Edward Lorenz , who noticed, while running data through his weather models, that even the seemingly insignificant rounding up or down of initial inputs would create a big difference in outcomes: A flap of a wing, as he once put it, would be “enough to alter the course of the weather forever.”

Yanagihara plays with shifts on different scales in the altered Americas that populate the novel. What if, after the Civil War, race and class had still been fulcrums of injustice and oppression in society, but sexuality had not? What if Hawaii declared independence, a jolt of a less systemic degree? What if, in the face of devastating pandemics, the American government prioritized virus containment and maximizing lives saved, forcibly isolating the ill and ignoring concerns about civil liberties and human rights? How much would have to change for the world to be different? What seemingly momentous changes would leave the world fundamentally the same?

In Book 2, David is struck, looking at his lover, Charles, by how partially they know each other, and how circumstantial their relationship is. He finds himself reflecting that “each of them wanted the other to exist only as he was currently experiencing him—as if they were both too unimaginative to contemplate each other in a different context.” His thoughts begin to spiral outward.

But suppose they were forced to? Suppose the earth were to shift in space, only an inch or two but enough to redraw their world, their country, their city, themselves, entirely? What if Manhattan was a flooded island of rivers and canals … Or what if they lived in a glittering, treeless metropolis rendered entirely in frost … ? Or what if New York looked just as it did, but no one he knew was dying, no one was dead, and tonight’s party had been just another gathering of friends.

These kinds of “what if”s haunt all three plot arcs. Story after story within each book focuses on missed gestures of care and thwarted intimacy: If the grandfather in Book 1 had shared his doubts about Edward earlier, would that have rescued or stifled David? What if the David in Book 2 had been honest about his family background when he moved in with Charles? What if the Charles in Book 3 had been gentler when David got in trouble at school? Would their relationship have retained the possibility of repair? What if Charlie had told her Edward, the husband she acquired in an arranged marriage, that she loved him? Again and again, the question arises: What if this or that interchange had gone just a little differently ? What swerve might have followed? What could have been saved?

The book that grapples most directly with this torturous uncertainty is “Zone Eight.” It is written, in part, as letters from the scientist Charles Griffith to a friend and colleague named Peter over nearly five decades, updating Peter on his life—an account interwoven with his granddaughter, Charlie’s, narration of a year of her adult life, after Charles’s death. We meet Charles first as a young husband and father who has accepted a position at a prestigious lab in New York. His husband resents the move, but Charles feels he can do good at this new lab, which is engaged in the crucial work of anticipating and preventing pandemics. As his son grows up, as Charles and his husband grow apart, as global pandemics grow more dire, the reader begins to see in Charles’s letters the incremental nature of disaster.

His decisions—to collaborate with the government, to avoid confronting his son in an argument, to behave poorly at a dinner—are barely noticeable in the course of the weeks and months that his letters relate. But slowly, they accumulate into something all wrong. Many years into the correspondence, when the United States has become a totalitarian regime that Charles—trying to save lives—helped build, and when the islands around Manhattan serve as brutal internment camps for the ill, he confesses to his friend: “I have always wondered how people knew it was time to leave a place, whether that place was Phnom Penh or Saigon or Vienna.” He knows he has missed his window to escape the state he played a part in creating.

I had always imagined that that awareness happened slowly, slowly but steadily, so the changes, though each terrifying on its own, became inoculated by their frequency, as if the warnings were normalized by how many there were. And then, suddenly, it’s too late. All the while, as you were sleeping, as you were working, as you were eating dinner or reading to your children or talking with your friends, the gates were being locked, the roads were being barricaded, the train tracks were being dismantled, the ships were being moored, the planes were being rerouted.

At every step, Charles writes, he was trying to do the right thing. But “I made the wrong decisions, and then I made more and more of them.” That some of those missteps led to the devastation of his family, the transformation of Roosevelt Island into a crematorium, the supplanting of neighborhoods by militarized zones—and ultimately to a generation of children who can remember neither the internet nor civil liberties—is harder to contemplate, because this man is a normal enough man, a concerned scientist. As he made his decisions, none of them seemed to hold the potential for fatal error.

Small choices leading to unforeseen consequences are a conventional feature of fiction, but Yanagihara’s execution of this trope feels compelling and chilling because Charles’s world is so plausibly near to our own possible future. We, too, live in a world rocked by pandemics and storms , well aware that more are coming. We, too, live in a country that is vulnerable to authoritarianism. Charles arrives in New York in the early 2040s, and the setting looks reasonably like the New York of today. What apparently insignificant choices are we making, or not making, that will determine the disasters—or disasters averted—of our future? What vital relationships are in the balance at school pickup? Yanagihara taps into the anxieties of a moment crowded with warnings about apocalypses that might be narrowly avoided if we (who?) take action (what action?) now. One has the feeling, as an American in 2021, of being both the butterfly and the storm.

Yanagihara’s feat in To Paradise is capturing the way that the inevitable chaos of the present unrolls into the future: It happens on both global and intimate levels, always. The potential and kinetic energies that drive massive political shifts are also at work within the private push and pull of a marriage, between generations. The nature of energy is not to appear and disappear; it simply transfers. That invocation of continuity and possibility can sound hopeful, but here it is also daunting, entrapping. No matter what century, no matter which shifting variables—no matter how compellingly we spin stories out of uncertainties—chaos (the chaos of love, of crisis, of injustice, of alienation) is inescapable, uncontrollable. In the novel, as in life, humans are both the architects and the refugees of that chaos, determined to pursue meaning and connection no matter how impossible we have made that pursuit.

“For just as it was the lizard’s nature to eat, it was the moon’s nature to rise, and no matter how tightly the lizard clamped its mouth, the moon rose still,” goes a fable that Charles relays in Book 3, one he learned from his grandmother, who learned it from her grandmother. The voracious lizard in the tale consumes everything on Earth until there is nothing left, and then he eats the moon. But the moon rises inexorably and the lizard, unable to contain it any longer, explodes. “The moon burst forth from the earth and continued its path.”

“We are the lizard, but we are also the moon,” Charles writes. “Some of us will die, but others of us will keep doing what we always have, continuing on our own oblivious way, doing what our nature compels us to, silent and unknowable and unstoppable in our rhythms.”

This article appears in the January/February 2022 print edition with the headline “Hanya Yanagihara’s Haunted America.”

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'To Paradise' review: 'A Little Life' author Hanya Yanagihara returns with elegant epic

Hanya Yanagihara 's new novel, the epic tome "To Paradise" (Doubleday, 720 pp., ★★★★ out of four, out Tuesday), is a re-imagination of New York City in 1893 and 1993, and a forecast of 2093, presented uniquely in three books with three different plot lines. Yanagihara ("A Little Life") cleverly presents characters with the same names who appear in different roles in each book: There are multiple David Binghams and Charles Griffiths, and Adams is always a butler.

"Book I: Washington Square" opens in New York City in 1893, right after the Civil War, which Yanagihara calls the War of Rebellion. This portion of the book is reminiscent of Henry James and Edith Wharton in language and setting, and incorporates period artifacts, including the newly constructed Brooklyn Bridge, Washington Square Park and hansoms, which glide across the avenues of Manhattan.

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The characters, many of them gay men, are divided into socioeconomic classes. Grandfather Nathaniel Bingham runs the most respected bank in New York. His grandchildren, including David, the weakest Bingham, are born into the same high class. Their butler, Adams, is a proletariat. Then there is the mysterious Edward Bishop, a penniless musician whom David adores. Grandfather Bingham pushes David to marry in his class: “I have had an offer of marriage for you … A good family – the Griffiths, of Nantucket. How old is the gentleman? One-and-forty.” David might placate his grandfather and marry Charles, or he may listen to his heart and follow Edward west.

"Book II: Lipo-Wao-Nahele," set in New York in 1993, features another version of David Bingham, a paralegal who has Hawaiian royal blood running through his veins. David lives with the older Charles Griffith, a lawyer. There is a plague ripping through the city – AIDS, although it is never named. Yanagihara uses the death of Peter, Charles’s ex-boyfriend, whose “wrists grown so bony that he had traded his metal watch for a child’s plastic one” to set the mood for the saturnine book.

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Yanagihara's unparalleled storytelling skills shine in the dystopia of "Part III: Zone Eight," which opens in 2093 near Washington Square Park. Several pandemics have spread through New York, and the city is divided into zones: Washington Square Park is located in Zone 8, Harlem falls in Zone 11 and Times Square is situated in Zone 9. A totalitarian regime has a stronghold on New York denizens. There are no movies, no television, no internet. One can’t spend an evening debating an article or a novel, because none of those things is possible any longer.

Yanagihara creates a cloistered society in which human suffering, even the killing of infants, is a daily occurrence. The narration alternates between Charlie, a lab tech, and her scientist grandfather, Dr. Charles Griffith, “one of the architects of the camps” where the sick go to die. Diseases are manufactured in labs and American scientists report findings to China. Bears run wild and people eat horse meat and broiled raccoon.

"To Paradise" is a novel of the highest order. Yanagihara writes with elegance, evoking emotion and rendering believable characters who move the plot. Her perceptive eye is evident in the three separate settings, placing the reader in each time frame through multiple narratives, which she orchestrates with great acuity. Themes of love and belonging reign in Book I and Book II. In Book III, fear trumps love for a mimesis of reality, hitting close to home for all of us right now.

Review: 'To Paradise,' by Hanya Yanagihara

A deeply moving cri de coeur about the power of love to fight despair.

By May-lee Chai

"To Paradise," Hanya Yanagihara's ambitious follow-up to "A Little Life," a National Book Award finalist, is an epic in size and scope. The novel is divided into three books, each featuring characters with the same names living in the same house in New York City but in different dystopian eras.

In Book One, "Washington Square," Yanagihara envisions an alternate 19 th- century history for the U.S. The protagonist, David Bingham, lives in the Free States, roughly equivalent to the Northeastern states today, where same-sex marriage is legal and wealthy white families practice arranged marriage, the better to perpetuate their privilege.

But David cannot quite imagine a future with the elderly, sweet but dull man, Charles Griffith, chosen for him by his grandfather. Instead he is drawn to Edward, an impoverished but clever man around his own age. Channeling both Henry James and Edith Wharton, this section focuses on a man of privilege bridling against the conventions of his era in order to feel real love, perhaps to his peril.

Book Two, "Lipo-Wao-Nahele," most closely resembles actual U.S. history. Taking place in the mid-20th century, one thread explores how a member of the royal family of Hawaii chooses love over security while his grown son leaves the island to live in New York City with his much older, wealthier lover amid the AIDS crisis.

Yanagihara addresses multiple forms of oppression: the colonization of Hawaii and marginalization of the native people, homophobia and discrimination, as well as multiple forms of resistance and resilience.

Book Three, "Zone Eight," is a suspenseful and terrifying glimpse of a future New York City set amid endless waves of pandemics. A new authoritarian government has banned travel, the internet, same-sex marriage and most civil liberties, all in the name of supposedly maximizing the surviving humans' ability to procreate.

Dr. Charles Griffith, a once important government scientist, cares for his granddaughter, Charlie, who has survived a childhood bout of an unnamed virus but has been left severely injured. When Griffith is reclassified as a state enemy, he must race against time to find a way to protect Charlie. Here Yanagihara brings to fruition the novel's themes: how queer men's networks formed to enable their love and to resist oppression by society can become the very life force by which civilization (meaning art, human connection, love itself) in America might be sustained. I must admit that I cried pretty much continuously while reading the riveting final 100 pages.

Ultimately, the novel is a cri de coeur about the revolutionary power of love and choice to fight oppression and despair. As one character proclaims as he decides to join a lover rather than remain safely at home: "That was someone else's Heaven, but it was not his. His was somewhere else, but it would not appear in front of him; rather it would be his to find."

May-lee Chai is the author most recently of "Useful Phrases for Immigrants," winner of a 2019 American Book Award. Her new collection, "Tomorrow in Shanghai & Other Stories," is forthcoming in August.

To Paradise By: Hanya Yanagihara. Publisher: Doubleday, 720 pages, $32.50.

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