Kiran Dass reviews To Paradise, by Hanya Yanagihara

Hanya Yanagihara. Photo / Supplied

To Paradise
by Hanya Yanagihara
(Picador, $38)

Hanya Yanagihara's second novel, 2015's sensational A Little Life, remains one of the most harrowing but most richly rewarding literary experiences I have ever had. It left me shell-shocked, a stark reminder of the powers of fiction. Dense and immersive, it is a confronting exploration of the fallout of trauma but above all it is about care, love and recovery, a beautifully observed study of the restorative capabilities of friendship.

Expectations for Yanagihara's highly anticipated follow-up To Paradise run high and, while some of the themes such as disease, outsiders, love, and collective and national trauma - which reoccur in all of her novels - echo throughout the book, it is a significant departure and an audacious feat of dexterity. It is about the hope and terror we experience individually and collectively.

Like A Little Life, it's an epic brick of a book that clocks in at over 700 pages long. But, in fact, To Paradise is three books in one, spanning 200 years, each set in different versions of New York City in the same Washington Square house with different characters in each book who share the same names - David, Charles and Edward. It's about outsiders who are all trying to find love, authenticity and beauty - paradise.

The finesse with which Yanagihara has structured and plotted this book is remarkable. The first segment, "Washington Square", is set in 1893 and is a riff on Washington Square, the 1880 novel by Henry James. In a compelling twist, the 1883 in To Paradise is a liberal world where New York is part of the Free State and same-sex marriage is not only legal but commonplace. But it's not completely progressive. Arranged marriage is also common, and while approaches to gender and sexuality are fluid, attitudes to race and class are not.

Moving between Washington Square and Hawaii in the 1950s and early 1990s, the second segment "Lipo-Wao-Nahele" is in two parts, set in 1993 where David, a 25-year-old descendent of the last monarch of Hawaii, lives in the Washington Square house with his partner Charles where they collect art and host lavish parties as the Aids epidemic rages.

The third segment, "Zone Eight", is a terrifying 2093 besieged by pandemics and the devastating destruction of the climate crisis that has resulted in a totalitarian state of closed borders, surveillance and terror.

Charlie is a brilliant scientist who falls out with his family. His granddaughter has been ravaged by a virus. As in the previous two segments, this section deals with the difficulties of tossing up between obtaining authentic happiness or being accepted. While the pandemic in this novel is horribly recognisable, Yanagihara conceptualised To Paradise in 2016, pre-Covid-19. In 2017 the author interviewed virologists who predicted a pandemic.

While many have compared To Paradise to Henry James and Edith Wharton, it is more overtly similar in form and concept to Michael Cunningham's ambitious 2005 tripartite novel Specimen Days. There are themes of wealth, patriarchy, inheritance, gender, colonialism, and prejudice, and within the book's many nuanced layers, aficionados of American history will find much to delight in.

Yanagihara luxuriates in detail and everything, right down to dates, places and characters' names is freighted with significance. She is questioning the mythology of America as well as the notion of paradise and imagined utopias - the very concept of paradise suggests exclusivity and the novel invites us to consider whether a country that invented modern democracy while denying less privileged citizens fundamental rights is built on a lie, and to think about what might be possible when the imagined ideal is challenged.

With To Paradise, Yanagihara repeats themes and motifs (the same house in each section bears witness to the lives of each different character who inhabits it), and seems to be making the point that time and history aren't necessarily linear but instead, a repetitive loop which sees the shape of us formed by history's cyclical repetition. Each segment ends with the novel's title, looping us back.

Yanagihara is a brilliant storyteller and a careful, attentive writer. To Paradise is a symphonic triumph. Dive in.