The year is 2094. In Washington Square of New York City, which has been renamed Zone Eight, Charlie Bingham is opening a box of notes that someone sent her husband. As she rereads them, she realises, “They didn’t say anything that interesting – they were just everyday words. And I somehow knew that they were never the sort of notes that my husband would write me or that I would write him. I knew this, but I couldn’t explain how they were different.”
This character from Hanya Yanagihara’s latest novel, To Paradise, could have been talking about Yanagihara’s writing. She uses the same 26 letters given to us all for English, yet creates sentences and evokes emotions that are unique – and we can’t explain how they are different. From her very first novel, The People in the Trees, her prose has been confident, expressive, and addictive. It is the nature of her prose that keeps us flipping through To Paradise, where all the characters are scrambling to find their idea of heaven.
Aside from her enviable command over words, Yanagihara’s novel also impresses with its range of geography and chronology. The novel is split across three centuries, with the second book telling two stories, and the third book further split into two eras. The setting is New York City and Hawaii, or, when being physically in Hawaii is not possible, at least the mental map of the state. In all these three books, our protagonists are named, most confusingly and perhaps unnecessarily, David, Edward, and Charles/Charlie.
The first book introduces us to the affluent Bingham family in 1893. In a story that some have compared with Washington Square by Henry James, we find a loving grandfather seeking a good match for his seemingly depressed grandson, David. It is the America we know, with remnants of the civil war, and yet it is a completely fictionalised country, with marriages being arranged, and relationships accepted, between the same genders.
In this semi-strange New York City that has established itself as a utopian free state, David luxuriates in the attention bestowed on him by the wealthy Charles Griffith, and yet he can’t lure himself away from the charms of penniless Edward Bishop. At the end of the book, David must choose his paradise, and which is it to be? Comfort or adventure?
This is a conundrum that all other characters in the novel face – whether to shelter in the security of the known, or to venture recklessly into the unfamiliar. Book I is quite readable, with a simple yet surprisingly arresting love triangle. Enjoyable, but nothing extraordinary.
A century later, we meet another David Bingham in New York City, in a relationship with a much older and powerful Charles. We learn of David’s father on his deathbed in Hawaii, and then are transferred headlong into a saga in his childhood. This incident is both bizarre and pitiable, and yet the circumstances that lead to it are completely logical: how else are you supposed to react when your ancient land is usurped by invaders, who then proceed to rule and exploit it? When you are rendered so helpless, and the other becomes so powerful, what weapons do you have to retaliate save your fantasy and imagination?
The Blacks and the Hawaiians, they are “One group of people sent away from their land; another group of people stolen from their land…That sin, that mark, never goes away, and although we didn’t cause it, we were all infected by it.” This section is studded with instances of thought-provoking outrage against racism and colonialism, and yet these flare up and disappear as if inconsequential.
This century passes, and we are now catapulted into the future. It is a bleak and dismal New York City where Central Park has been converted into a farm, there is a new pandemic every few years, and people have designated days to wash and walk and shop, and are not allowed to keep any books. For all her writing prowess, the world-building of Hanya’s dystopian America is uncharacteristically clumsy and disappointing. Indeed, it is like a bad caricature of Hunger Games or even Echo Boy.
The storyline is mildly interesting, of a world unravelling in front of a scientist’s eyes, and his attempt to keep his granddaughter safe in the future. But it is so long, and redundant, and rambling, that it becomes difficult to stick till the denouement. It would have benefited from being less longwinded.
And by the time this saga ends, you are left wondering about the connection between the three books, and the need to cram them into one novel. Oh, of course, there are plenty of resonances. There are motifs of the search for identity, roots, love, companionship, justice, security, and above all, freedom. All the stories depart from the American dream, exemplifying how it was concocted by the connected and powerful, and how impossible it is for the ordinary mass to attain. “There is no fixing what America is,” says a character, “There is no way to do work around the margins and say justice has been restored.”
Perhaps the pieces of this puzzle do not fit well together because Yanagihara does not intend them to. This is how mismatched this country and our ideals are, she wants to assert. But we are left more bemused than enlightened, more disordered than appreciative. The novel also disappoints in its lack of emotional stirring. There are romances and grandfather-father-child equations and even an infatuation, but none of them tugs at the heart. It is all strangely detached and dispassionate.
In an interview to The Guardian in early January, Yanagihara proclaimed, “I have the right to write about whatever I want,” and indeed she does. There seems to be a fascination, even an obsession, with certain elements – sadism, misanthropy, loneliness, bullying, disease, defilement, and just plain misery. The narrators in her novels take an obscene pleasure in savouring the sorrows of people, lengthening them, highlighting them, and lingering on them until it becomes quite unbearable.
Eventually, what appears here is a shapeless, messy, overwhelming plot, with only the sustained beauty of the writing to carry you through it.
To Paradise, Hanya Yanagihara, Picador.