Locked Out of Heaven
In a novel that spans three centuries, Hanya Yanagihara asks if it is ever possible to desire freely
The literary moral police disapproved when Hanya Yanagihara’s first novel, A Little Life, became a runaway success. Yanagihara was an emotional pornographer, they tut-tutted; her readers were masochistic beyond the allowable limits of Discriminating Literary Goodtaste.
Like thousands of other readers in the anglophone world, I too, in 2015, set my life to pause mode for a long weekend so that I could surrender to the baroque pleasures of A Little Life.
The 800-page bildungsroman of four young men kept me riveted despite—or more likely because of—the sorrow and anguish I experienced while reading.
Readers who cried encore to A Little Life are forewarned that To Paradise
will demand more of them. As with A Little Life, relationships between men, familial and erotic, are the connective tissue of this novel, but To Paradise dislocates, it departs from the reliable form of the bildungsroman, that gave A Little
Life its Pain-on-Tap mouthfeel.
The novel is divided into three books, separated in time. In 1893, in a dystopian New York, homosexuality is unconstrained—though race and class distinctions are enforced via a system of arranged marriages. In 1992, Hawaii is hungry for an identity-giving nationalist utopia. And, familiarly, eerily— because Yanagihara started her book before the Covid-19 outbreak—in 2093, a dystopian America is ravaged by multiple pandemics.
People lead sterile clockwork lives in Yanagihara’s post-pandemic(s) world: international travel is (still) prohibited; full body suits are de rigueur (you can eat through your masks); the internet has been cancelled (no more dangerous fake news); books are controlled; a small number of storytellers are statesanctioned, their canned heartwarming tales sound as if riffed off The Gift of the Magi. Homosexuality is not illegal, but it is ghettoised. Since most people have become sterile from pandemic treatments, the state rewards reproduction and, therefore, heterosexuality (so what else is new?).
In each of the three books, there is a character who is torn between safety and desire. Each of them is plotting a way out. Each of the central characters, and several of the ancillary ones, reckon with the erotic shame of being unloved; they wrestle with the jarring differences in need and desire that are the spoilers of romantic friendships. Grandfathers are writ large in this book: they love their grandchildren, they arrange their marriages, they want them to be safe.
To add inflection to the jumps in time, 100 years at a go, between the book sections, the names of the characters also repeat and disorient. Each section of this triptych has Davids and Charleses, sometimes they mirror in some emotional register the David or Charles that went before them. Each section closes with the longing for paradise—is it the right to desire freely?
If you get there, To Paradise—704 pages long—reminds us that love—and perhaps the love of reading—has the capacity to give us back our memories. But whether you can match Yanagihara’s relentless capacity to inhabit other—most often unlucky— bodies, depends upon your psyche’s tensile strength for shame. ■