Hanya Yanagihara’s century-spanning American saga promises more than it delivers

Hanya Yanagihara

To Paradise

Hanya Yanagihara

John Boyne

January 16 2022 02:30 AM

To Paradise Hanya Yanagihara Picador, €13.99

In his seminal work of non-fiction, Aspects of the Novel, EM Forster wrote, “Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.” One could turn this quote around and reflect on writers who deliver manuscripts that make Moby Dick look like a short story. To justify the length, every facet of the book needs to feel as if it is crucial to the whole and that the novel would suffer from further editing.

Hanya Yanagihara’s acclaimed second book, A Little Life, weighed in at over 700 pages, as does her follow-up, To Paradise. While the earlier novel justified an excessive word count, the second feels more indulgent – perhaps because it’s not really a novel at all, but three novellas gathered into one, each set a century apart, in 1893, 1993 and 2093.

It opens in Succession-like style, with the elderly patriarch of the Bingham family dispensing largesse to his three grandchildren in the form of six properties to be divided between them after his death – the most coveted of which, a home on Washington Square, provides a neat link to Henry James, another author fascinated by the antics of the super-rich.

The United States, however, is not the United States but the Free States, and the country is barely recognisable from the one we know, particularly when it comes to relationships between the sexes. Two of the 19th century Bingham grandchildren are in same-sex marriages, for example, while a third is being arranged for the youngest child, David, with the wealthy Charles. Children are taken from orphanages, their stocks routinely filled by refugees, and given instant hereditary rights. It’s an intriguing alternate universe that takes some getting used to.

From the start, themes of wealth disparity, duty towards family versus duty towards self, and illness dominate the book. David is a fragile, solitary character, whose own maladies are referred to in abstract terms while never being clearly defined, and, when he falls for a penniless music teacher, he finds himself torn between the expectations of his grandfather, in whose hands his security lies, and love.

It’s quite a shift for the reader when we move to 1993, where a second David, now Hawaiian, is romantically involved with a second Charles during the Aids epidemic, a subject which lay at the core of A Little Life and is often underwritten in fiction.

To Paradise

Fear and dread lie beneath these passages – “Was he losing weight? Were his fingernails discolouring? Were his cheeks hollowing? Had he sprouted a lesion? When would the illness write itself on his body?” – and it is to Yanagihara’s credit that she reminds us of a time when an epidemic spread across the world but was treated, by politicians and the public alike, with less sympathy or engagement than more recent phenomena. Again, financial mismatch is to the fore, only now it is David who is the less fortunate of the pair, but he remains equally delicate and uncertain of his place in the world.

The third and longest part of the book, however, ‘Zone Eight’, is where things become frustrating. Set in a dystopian future, a phrase guaranteed to leave any reader groaning, it bears something in common with the present day, in that plagues and viruses roam free, but here the narrator discovers a trove of papers that help inform us as to what has happened to damage the world so badly. There are more Davids, more Charleses, more reflected names from the past, but what each one represents, or how closely we are supposed to identify them with their earlier counterparts, is difficult to define.

The problem with such a lengthy novel divided in this way is that the concept can prove more intriguing than the execution. Unlike David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, for example, which employs a similar conceit, the connections between the sections are not sufficiently well drawn, so the novel – an art form that should have unity of purpose – ends up feeling much less cohesive.

Rather than surprising us with unexpected reflections between past, present, and future, Yanagihara forces us, in a rather cumbersome fashion, to imprint them upon the text ourselves, substituting the reader’s design for authorial intent.

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Hanya Yanagihara is a fine writer whose insights into social inequality and Aids have helped her build a bold reputation, but the discord between the sections of this book, each of which undoubtedly have their strengths, made it feel like less than a sum of its parts to me. Not quite a failure, then, but an honourable misstep. On the back of the copy I read, are printed the words, “Paradise is for some. Paradise is not for all.” One might say the same for To Paradise.

John Boyne’s most recent novel is ‘The Echo Chamber’