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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.

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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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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

New York Times Bestseller

IndieBound Bestseller

TO PARADISE

by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 11, 2022

Gigantic, strange, exquisite, terrifying, and replete with mystery.

A triptych of stories set in 1893, 1993, and 2093 explore the fate of humanity, the essential power and sorrow of love, and the unique doom brought upon itself by the United States.

After the extraordinary reception of Yanagihara's Kirkus Prize–winning second novel, A Little Life (2015), her follow-up could not be more eagerly awaited. While it is nothing like either of her previous novels, it's also unlike anything else you've read (though Cloud Atlas , The House of Mirth , Martin and John , and Robertson Davies' Deptford Trilogy may all cross your mind at various points). More than 700 pages long, the book is composed of three sections, each a distinct narrative, each set in a counterfactual historical iteration of the place we call the United States. The narratives are connected by settings and themes: A house on Washington Square in Greenwich Village is central to each; Hawaii comes up often, most prominently in the second. The same names are used for (very different) characters in each story; almost all are gay and many are married. Even in the Edith Wharton–esque opening story, in which the scion of a wealthy family is caught between an arranged marriage and a reckless affair, both of his possible partners are men. Illness and disability are themes in each, most dramatically in the third, set in a brutally detailed post-pandemic totalitarian dystopia. Here is the single plot connection we could find: In the third part, a character remembers hearing a story with the plot of the first. She mourns the fact that she never did get to hear the end of it: "After all these years I found myself wondering what had happened....I knew it was foolish because they weren't even real people but I thought of them often. I wanted to know what had become of them." You will know just how she feels. But what does it mean that Yanagihara acknowledges this? That is just one of the conundrums sure to provoke years of discussion and theorizing. Another: Given the punch in the gut of utter despair one feels when all the most cherished elements of 19th- and 20th-century lives are unceremoniously swept off the stage when you turn the page to the 21st—why is the book not called To Hell ?

Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-385-54793-2

Page Count: 720

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021

LITERARY FICTION | DYSTOPIAN FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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PERSPECTIVES

SEEN & HEARD

by Percival Everett ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 19, 2024

One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.

Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.

This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.

Pub Date: March 19, 2024

ISBN: 9780385550369

Page Count: 320

Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2022

Pulitzer Prize Winner

DEMON COPPERHEAD

by Barbara Kingsolver ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 18, 2022

An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.

Inspired by David Copperfield , Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.

It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.

Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922

Page Count: 560

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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Book Reviews

'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.

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. Our book critic Maureen Corrigan has a review of one of this year's most anticipated books - "To Paradise" by novelist Hanya Yanagihara. Her 2015 novel, "A Little Life," dealt with the challenges of disability and trauma and became a bestseller. Here's Maureen's review of "To Paradise."

MAUREEN CORRIGAN, BYLINE: Beyond everything else it is, Hanya Yanagihara's new novel, "To Paradise," is a deliberately difficult novel. It weighs in at just over 700 pages and breaks into three distinct books, which read like semi-autonomous novels in their own right. Each book is set in New York City a century apart and invokes an array of literary styles from the novel of manners to alternate history, from the old-fashioned epistolary novel to the explicit social commentary of speculative fiction.

Repetition is Yanagihara's organizing principle here. The same names and situations resurface every 100 years, and other random coincidences abound. Perhaps that's why, when reading "To Paradise," I couldn't help but think of the coincidence that it's being published in the centenary year of another deliberately difficult novel, James Joyce's "Ulysses." "Ulysses" also weighs in at just over 700 pages and is also packed with repetitions, scenes where characters unknowingly repeat incidents from "The Odyssey."

There, the comparisons end. But my own take on "To Paradise" does mirror the reactions of "Ulysses'" first overwhelmed readers. When "Ulysses" came out in 1922, it was hailed by a few critics as brilliant but dismissed by others as baffling and dull. Virginia Woolf confessed she had to force herself to push past the first 200 pages. I have all those responses to Yanagihara's novel. It's inspired and vivid. But there are also long stretches that are so flat and opaque that only a looming deadline made me press forward.

Book I of "To Paradise" is the most reader-friendly and contains some of the novel's most gorgeous language. It's set in 1893 in a New York that belongs to an independent nation called the Free States. The Free States have legalized gay marriage and given full rights to women but keep out Black and Indigenous people. The way communities and nations, even allegedly progressive ones, define themselves by whom they exclude is a theme Yanagihara touches on frequently.

Events here take place largely within a townhouse in Washington Square. That's Henry James territory. And sure enough, this section riffs on James' novel called "Washington Square," the story of a charming cad seeking to marry a shy, plain heiress. The lovelorn heiress of this tale is reimagined as an heir, a young gay man named David Bingham, whose sickliness and awkwardness have made him damaged goods on the marriage market. As David reflects, he was a man living in his grandfather's house, waiting for one season to shade into the next, for his life to announce itself to him at last. What ensues is a melancholy story about seduction, willed self-delusion and the cruelty the world inflicts on the vulnerable.

The second book of "To Paradise" takes place 100 years later in 1993, partly in that same townhouse in Greenwich Village. The David of this story is a cash-strapped, young Hawaiian man living with a debonair, older lover named Charles. The AIDS epidemic imbues this section with a twilit mood. But unfortunately, Book II drifts into a dense ending monologue narrated by David's father, who belongs to the Hawaiian royal family.

The final and longest book of "To Paradise" drags us deep into dystopia. New York, in 2093, has been ravaged by climate change and mutating deadly viruses. That Washington Square townhouse is now chopped into apartments. Among the characters we meet here are two reincarnations of the Charles character - a Charles who's a renowned virologist and his granddaughter, Charlie, who's emotionally and physically compromised. It's her grandfather's effort to save her from the ruthlessness of an authoritarian government that propels this narrative after a sluggish start.

The greatest pleasures of "To Paradise" are technical ones - the seemingly effortless variety of Yanagihara's writing styles, the changes she rings on a fixed group of characters and situations. But unlike other sprawling books that are also explicitly contrived - yes, "Ulysses," or Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" and, most recently, Anthony Doerr's "Cloud Cuckoo Land" - "To Paradise" sacrifices emotional depth to artistic design. With the exception of the fully realized David in Book I, characters seem summoned up simply to serve the novel's pattern. And that pattern of eternal return makes this big novel feel confined. Sometimes a complicated puzzle contains dazzling individual pieces that lose their luster when pressed together.

GROSS: Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed "To Paradise" by Hanya Yanagihara. Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, my guest will be Brian Cox, one of the stars of the HBO series "Succession." He plays the patriarch of a family that owns a conglomerate which includes a conservative cable news network, a cruise line and theme parks. The series is a political, social, family satire embedded in a drama. Cox has written a new memoir that begins with nearly dying at birth. The drama on and off stage and screen continues from there. I hope you'll join us.

(SOUNDBITE OF HANS-PETER KLIMKOWSKY'S "RELAXING ON A BEAUTIFUL MORNING: RELOADED FOR PIANO SOLO, PT. 1")

GROSS: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salit, Phyllis Myers, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Therese Madden, Ann Marie Baldonado, Thea Chaloner, Seth Kelley and Kayla Lattimore. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. I'm Terry Gross.

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To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara – a masterpiece for our times

The follow-up to A Little Life is a complex tour de force in three interrelated sections that has emerged from the white heat of the moment

T o Paradise , Hanya Yanagihara’s vast, complex follow-up to her Booker-shortlisted A Little Life , is a novel of many faces. I could tell you, for instance, that it’s about colonialism and racism in America today; or that it’s a queer counterfactual history (and future) that asks what would happen if sexuality were destigmatised (and then restigmatised); or an elegy for the lost kingdom of Hawaii. Most readers, I think, will concentrate on the book’s longest section, the third, in which Yanagihara writes of a series of pandemics and the way they reshape society in the decades ahead.

To Paradise is arranged in three discrete but interrelated parts. The first, Washington Square, is set in the 1890s in a fictional New York. History has gone through a delicious skew, so that the north-eastern states have seceded from the rest of the US, part of a more general post-civil war rearrangement. Our hero for this section is David Bingham, the dreamy and foppish scion of a banking empire. He lives with his grandfather, Nathaniel, in a beautiful house in Washington Square. The “Free States” based their independence on the question of gay marriage – it seems that, with all stigma stripped away from homosexuality, around half of the citizens choose same-sex relationships.

This section is in essence a love story, as David, “still almost-young”, falls for the 23-year-old Edward, a music teacher. There is another potential suitor for David: the bluff, genial Charles Griffiths, a New Englander. As David attempts to choose between the two men, Nathaniel Bingham looks into Edward’s past and finds that all may not be as it seems. David is faced with a choice: the certainty of life in the Free States or a journey westwards, to California, to paradise.

The second part of the book, Lipo-Wao-Nahele is itself divided in two sections. The first is about another David Bingham, this one a junior paralegal carrying out a semi-illicit affair with his boss, the wealthy Charles Griffiths. It is the 1980s, deep in the heart of a pandemic (which we presume is Aids – it is never named). Even from Griffiths’s opulent Washington Square home (the house is one of the constants in the novel), there is the sense of a city under siege. Yanagihara has always been brilliant on the trappings of the good life, but here there’s an almost fetishistic caressing of material goods, a celebration of luxury as necessity at a time of crisis.

We discover in this second section that David Bingham is “from one of the oldest families in Hawai’i… If things had gone differently, I would have been king.” David is Kawika, heir to a throne that no longer exists. The dark history of the US annexation of Hawaii is too complex to unpack here, but it is one of the key themes running through the novel; how American capitalism warped and curdled Hawaii’s sense of itself. The drifting, gentle David/Kawika, and the narrator of the second half of this section, Wika, David’s damaged and dying father, are collateral damage in this half-forgotten act of colonialism.

The final part of the novel is Zone Eight. Again, the section is split in two, although these two parts interweave and reflect upon each other. One thread is set in the 2090s, two centuries after the novel opens, and is narrated by Charlie, who we learn is a survivor of one of the terrible zoonotic pandemics that swept the globe in the course of the 21st century. She is a strangely blank, affectless character: she fell ill as a child in the pandemic of 2070 and the experimental drug that was used to cure her has half-destroyed her mind. Charlie lives, again, on Washington Square, although the house has been divided into apartments. The world is ruled from Beijing and all the marks of classic dystopia are there: the internet has been shut down, the press is state-controlled, books are banned, the secret police spy on people using insect drones.

This narrative is intercut with letters from another Charles Griffiths, Charlie’s grandfather, who is writing to Peter, a fellow scientist in “New Britain”. His letters begin in 2043 and take us through the dark years of the second half of the 21st century, where each new wave of disease becomes an excuse for increasingly totalitarian modes of control. It’s brilliant and horrifying in equal measure, particularly if, like me, you’re temperamentally disinclined to worry too much about the loss of freedoms in the face of a pandemic. I’m not about to burn masks in Parliament Square, but this is a novel that really forces you to examine your woolly liberal assumptions about the motives behind lockdowns.

Put together, the three sections of the novel combine to deliver a series of powerful statements about progress and utopia, about those who are excluded from our visions of a better world. Yanagihara asks us in particular to move beyond binary configurations of sexuality, race and health, to challenge any political movement that seeks to privilege one group or another based on narrow definitions of identity. We are all multiple selves in the world of To Paradise .

Nabokov said that names carry “coloured shadows” in a novel and the repetition of names across the three sections is on one level quite simple: this is a multigenerational family saga, showing how fortunes rise and fall over centuries, questioning the idea of inheritance and examining ideas of family that extend beyond blood ties. There’s something more than this, though, something that chips away at the verisimilitude of the novel, that asks us to engage in a complicated way with the very idea of characters in a book: these are figures facing similar challenges in different times, but the points of correspondence reveal essential truths about what it means to be human at a time of crisis.

Sometimes literature takes time to digest momentous events: the great novels of the Napoleonic wars, of the Holocaust, of the plague, weren’t published until decades after the episodes they describe. Occasionally, though, a masterpiece emerges from the white heat of the moment: The Great Gatsby , The Decameron , The Waste Land . There’s something miraculous about reading To Paradise while the coronavirus crisis is still playing out around us, the dizzying sense that you’re immersed in a novel that will come to represent the age, its obsessions and anxieties. It’s rare that you get the opportunity to review a masterpiece, but To Paradise , definitively, is one.

To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara is published by Pan Macmillan (£20, AU$32.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply

This article was amended on 11 April 2022. An earlier version had stated that the other Charles Griffiths was Charlie’s father. He is in fact his grandfather.

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Review: 'to paradise,' by hanya yanagihara.

"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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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 by Hanya Yanagihara review: An evocative novel about echoes, cycles, and regrets

A much-anticipated follow-up to a cult novel is top of Jane Graham's reading pile.

Washington Square Arch. Image: Joshua Woroniecki / 250 Images

This month sees the long-awaited publication of literary sensation Hanya ‘ A Little Life ’ Yanagihara’s new novel, To Paradise . There is not room here to summarise the many issues this ambitious novel covers in its 700 pages. Suffice to say, throughout the two centuries it spans, starting in a fin-de-siècle 1890s New York and ending in a totalitarian, climate-ravaged future, it poses fascinating ‘what if’ questions about sexuality, race and government responses to existential threats. What stays longest for the reader though, is the elegant, evocative writing with which Yanagihara tells her emotionally powerful stories.

We read of fragile temperaments and broken bodies, the corrupting stench of wealth and unearned privilege

Interesting territory is opened up in all three of the ‘books’ which make up the novel. In Book One, ‘Washington Square,’ (a reference to a popular early Henry James novel), we are introduced to a 19th century New York in which same sex relationships are commonplace and uncontroversial.

Bearing in mind how deeply the world described by obvious influences Henry James and Edith Wharton relies on uncontested, oppressive gender-based rules, how are ranks & hierarchies arranged in this alternative universe? A fun parlour game; imagine Pride & Prejudice if Mr. Bennett was taxed with marrying off his sons to the sons of rich families. 

Yanagihara’s conclusion is that freedom regarding gender does not guarantee a more liberated society for either sex. Oppression based on racial prejudice, class division, and rigid, myopic family rules remain. She suggests that human beings tend towards imposing judgment, control and power imbalances regardless of contemporary social trends. In short, life is always made difficult for someone.

This idea is threaded through all three books, into Aids-blighted 1990s Manhattan and a dystopian future characterised by fear of disease, climate catastrophe and state control.

A Little Life divided readers into two camps: those deeply affected by a tragic tale of trauma and abuse, and those who felt cynically manipulated by a grim and unrelenting fictional misery memoir. To Paradise is altogether a more gentle read and may prove more palatable for Yanagihara naysayers. Its most profound ‘what ifs’ are those involving its authentically portrayed relationships, some joyful, some agonisingly dysfunctional. These tend to be between either gay male lovers or young men and fathers or grandparents fraught with regret over their mishandling of fragile childhood moments.

There are sorrowful tales, and sad endings. We read of fragile temperaments and broken bodies, the corrupting stench of wealth and unearned privilege. But some gorgeous writing also produces memorable scenes of tenderness akin to Scott Fitzgerald or EM Forster. Despite a frustrating feeling of repetition which sets in after 500 pages – the pitfall of a long tome fixated on cycles and echoes – these passages are worth sticking around for.

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The Follow-Up to  A Little Life  Is a Lot of Disappointment

To paradise denies readers the pleasures that made her 2015 novel a hit..

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The first question most readers will have about Hanya Yanagihara’s new novel, To Paradise, is whether it replicates the appeal of her surprise bestseller, 2015’s A Little Life . The answer is no, or not much. A polarizing doorstop that begins as a four-college-friends-in-New-York soap opera and resolves into a saga of the elaborate physical, sexual, and emotional mortifications of a character named Jude St. Francis, A Little Life has a cloistered, obsessive quality reminiscent of fanfiction. It is that rare product of a complex, acutely private fantasy life that successfully communicates the intensity of that life on the page. Reading it, I was often reminded of a fanfiction subgenre known as “hurt/comfort,” in which the sufferings of one character provide a cathartic emotional payoff when that character’s beloved rushes to console him, as Willem does for Jude over and over again in A Little Life.

The fetishistic aspect of this scenario means that it enthralls some readers while putting others off, sometimes to the point of moral indignation. But literature is full of fetishistic charms of one kind or another. That’s one of the things that makes it pleasurable, and we all have our own preferences. With hurt/comfort, the thrill isn’t (typically) sadistic. It’s just that the extremes of the hurt character’s wretchedness are required to pry the utmost concern, tenderness, and care from the comforting character, closing the circle and affirming their love. That’s what makes it a story, because the erotics of hurt/comfort is an erotics of narrative , not pain.

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With To Paradise, Yanagihara toys, dominatrix-style, with her readers’ desire for narrative fulfillment. The novel consists of three “books,” each almost the length of the average novel, the first and third of which set up considerable suspense about what will happen to their central characters and then refuse to resolve it. All three parts are inspired, to varying degrees, by the short Henry James novel Washington Square . This is most obvious in the first part, which is set, like Washington Square, in New York City in the late 1800s. To Paradise ’s alternate version of the city, however, belongs to a political entity called the Free States, where same-sex marriage is commonplace and women pursue the same professions as men. Other parts of the North American continent, which has fractured into different nations, are not so enlightened.

Like Washington Square, To Paradise is essentially about class. For David Bingham, the central character of the 19 th century portion of the novel, his family’s wealth and status are both a fortress and a prison. The Binghams don’t just have money, they have old money, and arranged marriages within their set aren’t remarkable. Unlike his enterprising married siblings, David is adrift and psychologically fragile. David, along with the grandfather who raised him after his parents’ deaths, refers to his “confinements,” which sound like the down swings of bipolar disorder. David is safe in the townhouse on Washington Square where he lives with his grandfather, but he’s sequestered from life’s rewards as well as its risks. Until, that is, he meets Edward, a charming bohemian music teacher, with whom he falls in love. Edward invites David to join him in starting a silk farm in California, but David’s grandfather, who has found evidence that Edward is a fortune hunter, threatens to disinherit David if he accepts. To complicate matters, the two men will have to conceal their relationship on the West Coast, where homosexuality is illegal.

Despite some clumsy and anachronistic language, this is the most engaging of To Paradise ’s three parts, and it’s with a frustrating wrench that the reader submits to the transition to Book II, set in the 1980s during the AIDS crisis. Book III is set in the mid- and late-21 st century, when America has been reduced to a totalitarian dystopia after a series of pandemics. Throughout, the Washington Square house serves as a refuge, provided by a loving older figure, that nevertheless divides a younger, protected person from some essential vitality. Characters named David, Edward, and Charles (an adoring older suitor rejected by the David Bingham in Book I) recur in ever-shifting patterns. In Book II, David is a younger native Hawaiian living in New York with his older lover, Charles, mourning his father, also named David, who fell, disastrously, under the spell of a radical Hawaiian nationalist named Edward. Both of these Davids are descendants of the Hawaiian royal family deposed by Western colonists, rich and privileged among their own people, but also trapped in an obsolete identity. In Book III, a Hawaiian epidemiologist named Charles accepts a prestigious job in New York that will eventually destroy him, as he oversees the setting-up of containment camps for the infected.

This kaleidoscope of Davids, Edwards, and Charleses is bookended by two stories of people who must decide between security and uncertainty, whether to stay home or to strike out for the unknown. Yanagihara evidently disdains simplistic imperatives. Maybe the ambitious epidemiologist should have stayed in Hawaii, where he would have died in a pandemic but not ended up with blood on his hands, and maybe the Hawaiian prince should have left the islands where he “knew that what I was would always be more significant than who I was—indeed, what I was was the only thing that made who I was significant at all.” This choice feels most sharply drawn for the novel’s original David, left poised between Washington Square and what sounds like a pretty bad bet in the original Edward, but convinced that, “ This was happiness, this was life,” when in his lover’s arms.

To Paradise

By Hanya Yanagihara. Doubleday.

The novel ends with Charlie, the granddaughter of the epidemiologist, similarly mid-adventure. As a child, she survived “the illness” thanks to a drug that changed her physically and mentally, scarring her skin and subduing her emotions and spirit. Even as her grandfather mourns this loss, he wonders if it might actually be a blessing, that perhaps “her affectlessness is a kind of stolidity,” or that she’s “evolved and become the sort of person who’s better-suited for our time and our place.” The future New York of Book III is an unrelentingly grim place, where food and water are rationed and books and TV are prohibited. In this world, no one would want to feel more than a drone does, especially when, Charlie’s grandfather reflects, “If we have lived, it is because we are worse than we ever believed ourselves to be, not better. … We are the left-behind, the dregs, the rats fighting for bits of rotten food, the people who chose to stay on earth, while those better and smarter than we are have left.”

But Charlie is offered an out. Will she make it? It’s only fair to warn potential readers of To Paradise that, as with the original David’s fate, they will never know. Yanagihara will even taunt them about it. Charlie listens to a storyteller recounting a tale “about a man who had lived here, on this very island, on this very Square, 200 years ago, and who had forsaken great riches from his family to follow the person he loved all the way to California, a person who his family was certain would betray him,” but the storyteller is arrested by the authorities, leaving her to wonder for years afterwards what happened. It’s to Yanagihara’s credit that To Paradise kindles such desire in its readers, even if the novel is too rangy and diverse to satisfy the hurt/comfort fans who adored A Little Life. To leave that desire unsatisfied, however, seems imperious and even a bit cruel. Seven hundred and twenty pages makes for a very long tease.

'Good beach read': Local author's Sanibel mystery books 'love letters' to island

Jennifer Schiff fell in love with Sanibel Island 12 years ago, moving there part-time in 2016 and full-time three years later.

Before long, she was settling into island life and began writing about it in her Sanibel Island Mysteries series with her first work published in 2017. She wrote more since then about the popular oasis in the Gulf.

Then Hurricane Ian roared across Sanibel in September 2022, washing away her home and leaving her and her husband, Kenny, to pick up the pieces.

Moving to paradise, then watching it get washed away

“We lived on Sanibel in our beautiful home that got hit with nine feet of pounding water from a hurricane, which destroyed our beautiful house we had just finished renovating that spring,” said Schiff, who moved with Kenny from Connecticut.

Schiff’s Sanibel Island Mysteries series takes place prior to Hurricane Ian. Reading it now can transport readers back to the island’s prime years.

“The books are really love letters to Sanibel,” Schiff said. “It was my happy place… I finally found a place and a community where I felt I belonged.”

The idea for the first book in the series, “A Shell of a Problem: A Sanibel Island Mystery,” came to her in a dream. In it, the series’ main character ― Guinivere Jones ― takes on the mystery of a missing shell. This lost shell ― a rare Golden Junonia ― is connected to a murder on the island.

Readers loved her books, so Schiff wrote more

The book’s success motivated Schiff to write more Sanibel Island Mysteries. Now, the series ― with 10 published books and another in the works ― is a glorious remembrance of Sanibel as it once was.

“I really wanted to honor (Sanibel),” Schiff said. “All of the places in the book are either actual places or modeled after real places.”

The most recent book in the series, “Framed in Naples,” has Guinevere Jones investigating another murder. While Jones ― an investigative reporter ― is covering a major art retrospective at the Baker Museum in Naples, a dead body is discovered there. Something about the obvious lead suspect is not quite right, leaving Jones to paint herself as a detective once again.

The descriptiveness of the books certainly highlights what Schiff so greatly admires.

“Nothing makes me happier than when people say ‘I’ve never been to Sanibel, but reading your books, I feel like I’m there,’” she said. “And that really was what I was going for when I wrote them. I wanted to share my love of a special place.”

Reviewers enjoy Schiff's books, solid praise like 'good beach read'

Each book in the series is rated at least 4.3 out of five stars on Amazon. The fifth and sixth books in the series ― “Shell Shocked” and “Trouble in Paradise” ― are rated highest at 4.7 out of five stars.

“The author brought me back to Sanibel and west coast FL, and I haven't been in almost 30 years,” an Amazon reviewer said in a five-star rating.

“Kinda drawn out....but good beach read,” according to a more critical reviewer, who gave a three-star rating.

The majority of Amazon reviewers do provide positive feedback: 55% of the reviews gave five-star ratings and 26% gave four-stars.

Following the devastation of Hurricane Ian, when she was left with nothing but her husband, their cats, and no insurance reimbursement after the loss of her house and car, Schiff still chose to donate half the proceeds to organizations around the island to support the recovery.

This included not just the beloved book series, but also a calendar that Schiff designed with photos from around the island. She raised thousands through her sales, with Sanibel lovers uniting to support the cause.

Relocating to Naples after Hurricane Ian

“Sanibel isn’t just a beautiful place, but the people who are there really love the island and want to preserve that environment where we honor nature, we honor the environment. They’re shell collectors, they’re birders. There are plenty of people who go for the beach and to play golf or tennis.”

Schiff has taken up residence in Naples since the hurricane. While Sanibel was her true happy place, reminders of Hurricane Ian’s devastation would be too much for her to face on a daily basis.

Before deciding to become an author in Southwest Florida, Schiff worked in fact-checking and researching, freelance writing and editing for various magazines and book publishing companies, and at a marketing communications agency.

Lovers of Sanibel can purchase the Sanibel Island Mystery books through Amazon ( https://www.amazon.com/stores/Jennifer-Lonoff-Schiff/author/B077BRJKTS ) and anywhere else books are sold online. Schiff’s works are also available in select bookstores across Southwest Florida and through the Lee and Collier County library systems.

Mafia doctor, mystery writer: Page-turners from local authors arrive in time for holidays

Schiff also has two non-Florida-specific books ― “Something’s Cooking in Chantai,” which takes place in Italy, and “Tinder Fella,” in New York. “A Mocktail for Murder,” another Guinivere Jones mystery set in New York, and “Finding Gemma Lovegood,” a novel set in England, are also in the works.

All of Schiff’s works are published through Shovel and Pail Press. More information available at shovelandpailpress.com , sanibelislandmysteries.com and the Sanibel Island Mysteries Facebook page.

What is aliveness? That’s not a trick question.

In the new book ‘on giving up,’ psychotherapist and essayist adam phillips explores what it means to really participate in life.

At the start of 1900, 10 days into the new century, a 17-year-old James Joyce delivered a lecture to the Literary and Historical Society at University College Dublin. His topic: “Drama and Life.” His conclusion: that ordinary experience is sufficient to yield up the stuff of literature: “I think out of the dreary sameness of existence, a measure of dramatic life may be drawn. Even the most commonplace, the deadest among the living, may play a part in a great drama.” It’s a striking phrase, “the deadest among the living.” We know, I think, instinctively what it means, though Joyce provides a gloss, too — “the most commonplace” — and we’ll come back to that. But it asks us to think of aliveness as something more than a biological state.

Adam Phillips’s new essay collection, “On Giving Up,” presses at this same theme. What, other than the obvious, is aliveness? Phillips’s background is in psychoanalysis, both as a practitioner and an explicator. He is a prolific essayist whose other collections include “On Balance” (2010) and “On Wanting to Change” (2021), and since 2003, he has served as the general editor for Penguin’s retranslations of Freud. Naturally then, it is through the lens of psychoanalysis that Phillips views the question of aliveness.

In “The Interpretation of Dreams,” published the year before Joyce’s youthful lecture, Freud had announced similar conclusions about the universality of the great drama: “By … showing us the guilt of Oedipus, [Sophocles] urges us to recognize our own inner self, in which these impulses, even if suppressed, are still present.” Everyone, even the deadest among the living, plays the lead role in their own Sophoclean tragedy.

Like Freud, Phillips is an analyst steeped in literature. The touchstones on show here are the European writers of the early 20th century, the generation working in the era when psychoanalysis was making its first, greatest impact on European thought: Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Viktor Shklovsky and, most prominently, Franz Kafka. Phillips takes Kafka’s aphorisms and pulls at them until their immediate wit or strangeness unravels to reveal something else behind. When Kafka writes in his diary that the advantage of lying on the floor is that there is nowhere left to fall, Phillips points to the difference between freedom from — which is what Kafka offers us with the pretend-solution of lying on the floor — and freedom to . What is aliveness without the potential to participate in life? “If Kafka has a subject,” Phillips notes, “it is exclusion — the feeling of being left out.”

Most of the essays have been published as individual pieces elsewhere, in the London Review of Books, the Raritan, Salmagundi. The variety of sources means sometimes ideas we have encountered in earlier chapters are reintroduced later, a glimmer of almost-repetition as Phillips reminds us of Kafka’s failure to marry or of Freud’s attempt to control the boundaries of the discipline he had founded. There is a sense — quite a satisfying one, in fact — of circling around ideas, of each essay being ostensibly on a different theme from the others, but really treating the same concerns from a slightly different starting point.

Along with Kafka, another recurrent voice is that of the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas, whose essay “The Fascist State of Mind” was first published in the early 1990s but feels more relevant now than ever. For Bollas, the fascist state of mind is not a politically partisan concept, but rather the narcissistic narrowing of one’s perspective, “a simplifying violence” that shuts out doubt or conflict — or, in Phillips’s terms, “an anxious and determined refusal of the complexity of one’s own mind and the minds of others.” When Hamlet vows to “wipe away all trivial fond records” — to erase all the clutter and whimsy of a real personality — and to become solely the instrument of his father’s vengeance (“thy commandment alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain”), he is in thrall to the fascist state of mind. Not indecisiveness but over-decisiveness.

Though Phillips doesn’t quote it here, Bollas has another useful example from the “Revolutionary Catechism” of 1869: “All the tender feelings of family life, of friendship, love, gratitude, even honor must be stifled by a single cold passion for the revolutionary cause.” What do we feel when we read this? Disgust? I hope so. But also perhaps a seduction, an envy? It must be nice to be so sure of oneself. We have seen it before, not only in Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, but also in the self-congratulatory stridence of some of our modern political discourse.

One form of aliveness, then, is to resist the foreclosure of our overbearing convictions, to hold at bay our impulse to simplify the world. As William Blake noted: “To generalize is to be an idiot.” Put another way, one way to stave off the deadness of the commonplace is by countering the urge to assimilate people, opinions, experiences into commonplaces in the first place — to be attuned to detail, alert to specificity, curious about difference. In one of these essays, “On Not Believing in Anything,” Phillips reminds us that belief, in one sense, represents the “the fear of curiosity” and that the word curiosity has its root in the Latin cura, meaning care.

This is a wise, generous book. Phillips has a mild, expansive way of explaining the insights that psychoanalysis offers into our everyday drama, its glimpses of differently shaped problems behind the ones we thought we had. Why does being a grown-up not feel like what we thought being a grown-up would feel like? Why does getting what we want produce anxiety rather than satisfaction? But a book about psychoanalysis is not an analysis. There is no program here, no self-help regimen. These essays won’t cure us, but they may make us curious.

Dennis Duncan is a lecturer in English at University College London and author of “ Index, A History of the .”

On Giving Up

By Adam Phillips

Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 160 pp. $26

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To Paradise: From the Author of A Little Life Kindle Edition

The No.1 Sunday Times bestseller from the author of A Little Life. To Paradise is a bold, brilliant novel spanning three centuries and three different versions of the elusive idea of utopia; driven by Hanya Yanagihara’s understanding of our desire to protect those we love – lovers, children, friends, family and even our fellow citizens – and the pain that ensues when we cannot. In an alternate version of 1893 America, New York is part of the Free States, where people may live and love as they please (or so it seems). In a 1993 Manhattan besieged by the AIDS epidemic, a young Hawaiian man lives with his much older, wealthier partner, hiding his troubled childhood and the fate of his father. In 2093, in a world torn apart by plagues and governed by totalitarian rule, a powerful scientist’s damaged granddaughter tries to navigate life without him – and solve the mystery of her husband’s disappearance. What unites these characters, and these Americas, are their reckonings with the qualities that make us human – fear, love, shame, loneliness – and the longing to find a place in an earthly paradise. 'I’m not sure I’ve ever missed the world of a book as much' - Observer ‘Not only rare . . . revolutionary’ - Michael Cunningham ‘Prepare to weep in public and be utterly transformed’ - Stylist

• Print length 721 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher Picador
• Publication date January 11, 2022
• Reading age 18 years and up
• File size 4158 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
• See all details

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com review, about the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., product details.

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B092DRHXSK
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Picador (January 11, 2022)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 11, 2022
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 4158 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 721 pages
• #1,065 in LGBTQ+ Literary Fiction (Books)
• #1,869 in Alternative History
• #3,539 in Alternate History Science Fiction (Books)

About the author

Hanya yanagihara.

Hanya Yanagihara lives in New York City.

http://instagram.com/hanyayanagihara

https://instagram.com/alittlelifebook/

https://www.instagram.com/toparadisenovel/

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A Novel of Lost Daughters and Waylaid Lives

Prison, pregnancies and other operatic turns propel Caroline Leavitt’s latest book, “Days of Wonder.”

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By Michael Callahan

Michael Callahan’s third novel, “The Lost Letters From Martha’s Vineyard,” will be published in May.

DAYS OF WONDER, by Caroline Leavitt

When the unfairness of life overwhelms you, does it bring out your grit and resolve, or send you down a rabbit hole of grievance and desperation?

Such is the crossroads facing three deeply damaged people in Caroline Leavitt’s 12th novel, “Days of Wonder”: Ella Fitchburg, newly released from prison after being convicted of trying to poison her wealthy boyfriend’s father; her teenage love, Jude, a victim of domestic abuse who’s lugging his own millstone of guilt; and Ella’s mother, Helen, who was cruelly cast out of her Hasidic Jewish community as a pregnant teenager.

Ella, too, is pregnant when she begins her 25-year sentence, but is pressed to give the baby girl up for adoption. Freed nearly two decades early thanks to a governor’s intervention, Ella, now 22, tracks down the child, who has been adopted and named Carla, and hastily moves from Brooklyn to Ann Arbor, Mich., to be close to her — without disclosing her real identity to her daughter’s new parents. A cross between Sylvia Plath’s sardonic Esther Greenwood and Allison McKenzie from “Peyton Place” (the Mia Farrow iteration), Ella mostly covets security and a bigger place in the world, clinging to a deluded dream of her, Jude, Carla and a life they can never have.

All along we feel Ella’s deep longing, her pain at having been so spectacularly cheated by life. Alas, that doesn’t prevent her from coming off as a creepy stalker: She hides in a back booth at the bar where her daughter’s new dad works, pops up like a disturbed jack-in-the-box to sneak cellphone pictures of Carla and anonymously leaves knitted mittens in the family mailbox.

We’re also asked to sustain some serious suspension of disbelief. Despite a closed adoption, Ella quickly discovers her daughter’s location when a lawyer sloppily exposes a file with the family’s address; Ella meets Carla after the little girl’s errant ball miraculously rolls in front of her feet at a playground, a trope for the ages. Perhaps most ludicrous: With zero experience Ella lands a job as a freelance “Dear Abby”-style columnist for a weekly newspaper in Ann Arbor and is able to support herself on it. That’s worthy of the same eyeroll we collectively delivered when Carrie Bradshaw was somehow able to afford all those Cosmos and pricey shoes.

Leavitt is clearly in her element here: Her previous novels are a soapy collection of women experiencing pain, regret and, ultimately, redemption. But the task of untangling the characters’ myriad secrets and the foggy mystery that binds Ella, Jude and Helen together is harrowing, and leads to some cutting of corners (Ella’s alacrity at becoming best friends with Carla’s adoptive mother seems a tad convenient). It also results in a denouement that feels as overly tidy and soulless as a sample home.

While it moves intermittently between the trio’s individual story lines, the narrative is largely driven by Ella — Jude and Helen seem to serve as more of a supporting cast, present to both reflect her pain and mark the road of broken promises she’s trudged. The sometimes clichéd plotting is helped by Leavitt’s graceful prose: Ella sees her mother as “a dry, twisted sponge that could no longer expand”; falling for the high school dreamboat Jude, she finds herself out of her depth in his social circle, not knowing “how to dress in the casually-mussed way of the teenage elite”; upon release from prison, she threads her way through a throng of reporters, “their voices like thorns.”

The novel’s title is a tad misleading; the book is far less about wondrous days than about the tenacity required to survive life’s bad ones. Ultimately — and despite enough melodrama for “General Hospital” — it heralds the power of steady perseverance, sturdy faith and the raw restorative power of love.

DAYS OF WONDER | By Caroline Leavitt | Algonquin | 320 pp. | $29

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