To Paradise
fiction
Hanya Yanagihara started writing To Paradise shortly after the 2016 US election in an atmosphere of partisan politics and uncertainty, well before COVID 19 hit and so it is a strange coincidence that her novel deals with epidemics. To Paradise has three sections set one hundred years apart, and features themes familiar to readers of her 2015 phenomenon, A Little Life: Illness, vulnerability, shame, what it means to bond with one another and the pain of isolation. It began as a reimagining of Henry James’ serialized novel, Washington Square, one where gay marriage was legal. In this alternate 1893 New York of the first part, a fragile and fretful young man from a wealthy family lives a sheltered life until he falls headlong for an impoverished music teacher with a mercenary bent. In 1993 a young Hawaiian man grapples with the past he hides from his older lover and the well-heeled circles they move in as the AIDS crisis stalks the margins. The final section of the book presents a bleak 2093, ravaged by pandemics, climate change and totalitarian rule. The main character is deeply damaged by the scorched-earth treatment taken as a child in the early days of the plague. Its a book with interesting devices across its three interconnected parts, like the repetition of character’s names, and the story taking place in the same house on Washington Square. It suggests the the rise and fall of fortunes and power structures, and how the idea of utopia is ultimately unattainable, although some of the threads end abruptly and sometimes, I felt frustrated with the ambiguity. But, as Yanagihara said in her interview early this year, “It never occurred to me to write something people want to read.”