Split into three asymmetrical sections (the third is the size of the first two combined), To Paradise imagines three versions of the United States set in 1893, 1993, and 2093. Instead, the key difference is that To Paradise is boring. The key difference between To Paradise and Yanagihara’s earlier novels isn’t that To Paradise wants to be about ideas and politics in a way the other novels do not, or that its ambition overruns its capabilities, although both are true. Over three sections and 700 pages, familiar Yanagiharan interests reappear: the novel is set in New York, populated by scientists and gay men, and obsessed with experiences of deprivation and pain. Likewise, in A Little Life, the characters inhabit a charmed world of professional and material success that frees their attention (and the novel’s) from the demands of history and politics.Īt first, To Paradise, Yanagihara’s third novel, appears to hold with the pattern. In The People in the Trees, a scientist discovers turtles whose meat grants a kind of eternal life the novel becomes so mesmerizing because the vein of fantasy powers an otherwise familiar narrative world. Her fidelity is not to realism, but to narrative and emotional effect.

There’s a kind of principle of fantastical parsimony at work: a Yanagihara novel does not depart from the real gratuitously, but rather with purpose, as a method of intensification.

Unbound to the strictures of realism, the signature of the Yanagihara novel is the single, pointed swerve into the speculative. It helps too that she’s essentially a fabulist. Yanagihara is an excellent storyteller she understands the obsessive feeling that a good mystery produces, and at her best, the cruelty and violence her characters constantly suffer and inflict give the mystery a threatening bite. What makes the page-turning easier in her first two novels- The People in the Trees and A Little Life-is precisely their resemblance to page-turners. The difficulty in a Yanagihara novel lies not in figuring out what’s going on, but in seeing clearly what’s going on, and turning the page anyway. A Yanagihara novel does not test our ability to untangle long, looping sentences, or follow abstract arguments, but rather to withstand illustrations of emotional and physical distress, which pop up implacably like boxing dummies. They attempt to be less stylistically or conceptually dense than emotionally dense. In internet terms, her novels are a lot: long, serious, and interested in the psychology of horrible people, or of un-horrible people trapped in horrible situations.

Hanya Yanagihara is not merely a maximalist she is more specifically a writer of extremity.

Hanya to paradise