Paradise found
There is nothing small about Hanya Yanagihara’s superb new three-part novel.
Fans of Hanya Yanagihara’s Booker-shortlisted A Little Life are in for a completely different treat with this one. To Paradise, another doorstopper at 700 pages, is divided into three separate books. Book I is set in an imagined 1893 in upper-class New York. The young protagonist suffers from “nervous troubles” and “confinements”. Knitting and drawing use up time as a doting grandfather works to arrange a marriage.
So far, so Edith Wharton. Except the nervous, idle grandchild is a male, David, and New York is in the Free States where same-sex marriages are legal. David hesitates over his grandfather’s proposed suitor and instead falls for Edward, a man full of the vitality David lacks but who is “lower class” and possibly untrustworthy. Will David break free from his gilded cage, sacrificing his inheritance?
On one level this is a realistic and pitchperfect period piece full of restrained yearning, Grand Tours and hansom cabs. But the Free States concept – free on sexuality, oppressive on race – elevates it to something altogether different.
The first half of Book II is set in 1993 New York with HIV/Aids hovering in the background. David, a 25-year-old Hawaiian, lives, with his rich, white and much older lover Charles, in the same fancy Washington Square apartment featuring in Book I. There’s angsting about flowers and food for stylish parties, and tender caring for sick friends. But David has kept his family background a secret and privately frets about how he has just handed over his life to the benevolent Charles.
There’s much more plot in the second half of Book II, which is set in Hawaii from the 1950s to 1993 and tells the life story of David’s father, Wika. Issues of race, Hawaiian sovereignty and loneliness play out in a Hawaii that is sometimes sunlit and pleasant and sometimes desolate. Though now living in New York, Yanagihara is fourth-generation Hawaiian so it’s no surprise Hawaii feels completely authentic. There’s a gentle sadness about Book II. Wika and David are sweet, directionless men, both struggling to shape their lives.
Book III is a gripping contribution to the present wave of pandemic fiction. In a dystopian future America, confinement camps, zoning and permanently closed borders are used to control recurrent waves of infection, while books and the internet are banned to limit misinformation and insurgency. There’s also Stasi-like population surveillance.
Scientist Charles enjoys a stellar career and happy same-sex marriage, until he falls dangerously out of favour and family life breaks up. His beloved granddaughter Charlie is physically and emotionally broken by a virus. She works hard at her menial lab job and accepts a marriage that Charles arranges because it is risky for her to be alone and unprotected. Around them society – once joyful – grows increasingly lonely, barren and mean.
On one level this is a pitch-perfect period piece. But the Free States concept – free on sexuality, oppressive on race – elevates it.
This vivid dystopic world feels less fantastical than it would have two years ago. There is a lot of world-building detail but it doesn’t crowd out the creation of some striking characters or Yanagihara’s many insights, such as how fear can degrade our humanity – our willingness to respond to those outside our immediate family – if we let it. “If we weren’t in contact with the outside world then nothing would be asked of us and we would be safe,” one character says.
The three books are linked by themes and recurring names and places, rather than by characters or events. Each is completely absorbing, with the last also being terrifying.
Superb. ▮
TO PARADISE, by Hanya Yanagihara (Picador, $37.99)