To Paradise is made up of three sections: one novella, one set of paired short stories, and one final novel. The structure is complicated and a little messy, so bear with me here. 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 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. “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.”Ī 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. “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. She went on to explain that she fundamentally mistrusts talk therapy, which operates under the idea that no depressed patient should die by suicide. “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.” 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. 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. In interviews, Yanagihara has described her central theme as the duality between dull, enervating safety and flamboyant, enervating danger. Yanagihara’s books are all about a binary between safety and pleasure Let’s start by taking Hanya Yanagihara at her word when it comes to what she says she’s trying to do. 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.”īut I want to deal with these books in good faith. 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?Ĭards on the table: My answer to both of those questions is no. But now To Paradise has arrived with a ready-made debate waiting to encircle it. 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.Ī 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. For others, Yanagihara novels can feel unsettlingly voyeuristic. Fans describe sobbing through A Little Life, emerging days later feeling tear-stained and fundamentally changed. It is never so alive as a book as when its characters are in deep pain.įor some readers, Yanagihara novels make for a profoundly moving and emotional reading experience.
Likewise, To Paradise luxuriates in long descriptions of abusive relationships and profound depressions and dystopian deprivations. 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. So, too, is her evocation of her favorite subject: human suffering. The current fashion is for sentences so dry they rasp, but Yanagihara’s prose is rich and sumptuous. Yanagihara is an unusual figure in America’s literary scene. And like its predecessor, To Paradise has arrived to both rapturous praise and furious debate. Hanya Yanagihara, the author of the much-beloved and much-debated 2015 novel A Little Life, has now released her third novel, To Paradise. One of the most talked-about new books of this January is also one of the oddest.
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