America, reimagined
Hanya Yanagihara tweaks history of ‘a very young country’ in her new novel
When she wrote “A Little Life,” American writer Hanya Yanagihara created an unlikely cultural phenomenon — an 814-page book that became a pop-culture touchstone and on the Booker Prize and National Book Award shortlists, among other awards.
Now, Yanagihara, who was raised in Hawaii, has written another Big American Book. “To Paradise” runs to a little more than 700 pages and is set in New York in three different time periods: 1893, 1993 and 2093. The same New York house features in all three “books,” and similarly named characters — many Davids, Edwards, and Charles’s with the surname Bingham — provide a multi-generational continuity.
In addition to writing huge books, Yanagihara is editor in chief of the New York Times’ Style Magazine “T”. Ahead of this week’s publication of “To Paradise,” we caught up with her on the phone from New York where she was at the office.
A paradise is meant to keep people out, not allow people in. And so, has the mythology of America been positioned incorrectly all the way along? For almost everyone who chose to come over here, America is some kind of paradise,
including my own ancestors. HANYA YANAGIHARA AUTHOR OF ‘TO PARADISE’
Your first book, “The People In The Trees,” took 18 years to write; “A Little Life” took 18 months. What about this one?
It took me a couple of years to figure out what I would say in this book and how. I really started thinking about it before Trump got elected, in the fall of 2016, so it didn’t directly have anything to do with the election. After the inauguration in early 2017 I was, in retrospect, really moved and struck by the Muslim ban and this idea of America as a paradise and what exactly that meant. Of course, a paradise is meant to keep people out, not allow people in. And so, has the mythology of America been positioned incorrectly all the way along? For almost everyone who chose to come over here, America is some kind of paradise, including my own ancestors.
In the three time periods, it posits three different versions of the American experiment, but the history isn’t what we’d expect. In 1893, for example, gay marriage is accepted. Were you looking for what America might have been? America is a very young country.
Canada is as well. I think when you are a young country, you always have a very different sense of history than a very old country does, say, China. And you have this sense that anything could change at any time. The last four years have been a real challenge to this idea of a consistent American narrative. So this idea of what America would be if the dial of what this country was, was moved one degree, was something that I was interested in.
So what was that one degree? How did you change that prism?
In the first book (section), I wanted to explore an America that was not founded on the idea of Puritanism. It becomes a place where gender matters less. On the other hand, some problems stubbornly persist. It doesn’t make (the people) more tolerant towards the Native Americans, or to the Black people in their midst. In the second book, which is our world, it’s very much about America’s brief foray into imperialism in Hawaii. And in the third book, America basically becomes a vassal state of China.
There is the sense I think, that we don’t know where we are in the history of the country — are we at the beginning, are we at the end? Democracies usually only remain in one form for 250 years, and then they profoundly change. Are we at that moment of history? I think there’s a real collective unease because we don’t know where we are in the course of our history.
There’s an idea we have that history is progress. There’s a progress toward enlightenment, for example. But that idea is disrupted in this book — we can go backward, too.
We all accept that time is an arrow. I always say that history is a helix. And this idea that we progress, that we get better, we get more tolerant, we become more generous, that we become less fearful, that we become more accepting with each age is true in many senses — but it’s not true in all senses. And progress can always be overturned. We’ve seen this happen in this country, we’ve seen it happen in other countries. And often these things are overturned because we want to feel safe. When we choose to feel safe over everything else, we start giving up by small degrees different kinds of freedoms that we once had. There’s certainly no guarantee that the liberties and the equalities that have been hard-earned over the decades are permanent.
Your use of the present tense was something critics remarked on about “A Little Life,” and you use it here, too. What’s the attraction?
I think both of the books are in a sense against history. In “A Little Life,” it was against the specificity of time. One of the ideas I hope the book expressed is that there is no such thing as past history when it comes to trauma. I wanted to toggle between the past and present tense, sometimes even in a given sentence, to really try to communicate to the reader that for Jude there was no distinction, that the past was something that was written on his skin and it came with him in everything he did and breathed.
This book is against history in a different way. Fiction can be very beholden to the idea of history, and authors loyal to it.
One of the conversations we’re having in the United States right now is who has the correct version of history? Who gets to tell it? Who gets to populate it? Who gets to write it? Who’s correct?
And I think that kind of profound conversation leads to completely different understandings of who we are as citizens and what this country is. That conversation is one that we are having in the present tense and that the characters in this book have as well.
You didn’t set out to write a pandemic novel, so it’s pretty serendipitous that the final section ends up being the fallout of a pandemic.
I’ve always been interested in pandemics, and I’ve always been interested in disease. And so when I started interviewing doctors in 2017, they were all pretty certain that something else was coming along (because of) a variety of factors: seeing the encroachment of cities upon nature; the lack of funding dedicated to virology; the various test runs you’ve seen with SARS and things like that. So it was just a matter of inevitability.
How do you hope “To Paradise” informs a new mythology of the U.S or fits into the current mythology of America?
One of the things I think the book asks and many of us are asking is whether this country is a flawed country that can be fixed and resolved using the systems we have, or whether this country is so elementally damaged that it has to be shut down and (we have to) start over. In the space of a day, I can feel both ways. There are people in this country who either think that this country is not flawed at all, or that this country has properly dealt with its (past). So you have various groups of people who have passionately held beliefs about what America is and what it can become.
All novels begin with a set of questions. And when you’re finished, if you’ve done a good job, not only do you not have an answer, you have even more questions. Some of the questions this book asks, in all three sections is: what kinds of rights and freedoms will we sacrifice — our own and others — in order to be safe? At what point does trying to protect someone become a form of oppression? At what point do we forsake our individual liberties for the sake of the collective? How important is it to be a citizen and what are our responsibilities?
I think those are questions that people in this country, no matter where we are on the political spectrum, are actively asking ourselves. I think we need more people who can say, ‘I don’t know.’ I think the country could do with more people wondering aloud, instead of thinking they have the answer.