The world as it is
Hanya Yanagihara’s speculative new novel imagines different kinds of utopia—and finds them wanting
One of the most unbelievable things about Hanya Yanagihara’s bafflingly successful second novel, A Little Life, wasn’t the horrific traumas experienced by its main character, Jude St Francis, but its cloying representation of male friendship. Jude’s life was marred by sexual abuse, extreme violence and self-harm, but his close friends—an artist, an architect and an actor—made up for this by not only being beautiful, rich and wildly successful in their respective fields, but by being, for the most part, preposterously nice.
Some critics saw in Yanagihara’s celebration of friendship a radical reclamation of a kind of relationship that has historically been neglected by the realist novel. Writing in the Atlantic, the novelist Garth Greenwell argued that in prioritising friendship over romantic love, and in playing with “aesthetic modes long coded as queer: melodrama, sentimental fiction, grand opera,” Yanagihara had written the first “great gay novel.” But when drawn out over 700 pages, A Little Life’s representation of friendship not only felt too good to be true, it also didn’t feel all that revolutionary. “Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship?” Jude’s friend Willem asked himself at one point. “Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.” If this really was a new kind of love, it was one that sounded a lot like the old kind.
Perhaps that was the point. The tension between conservatism and utopianism—between representing the world as it is and imagining it as you want it to be— is one of Yanagihara’s recurring themes.
It’s there in her first novel, The People in the Trees (2013), a Nabokovian confection in which an unreliable narrator tries to justify child sexual abuse and neocolonial exploitation by appealing to the liberatory potential of scientific discovery. It’s there in A Little Life, where the horrors, recounted in gratuitous detail, were accompanied by equally overblown depictions of luxury and excess (lavish meals, exquisitely designed apartments, grand and significant works of art) and acts of life-changing generosity. And it’s there most directly in To Paradise, in which the question of whether it’s possible—let alone desirable— to invent new ways of living is a central element of the plot. But whereas A Little Life’s commitment to its own extremism, both good and bad, felt at times like manipulative wish-fulfilment, Yanagihara’s new novel is a far more ambivalent—and therefore interesting—proposition.
The most obvious way this ambivalence announces itself is in terms of genre. To Paradise is three novels in one. The first begins in New York in the run up to New Year’s Eve, 1893. Nathaniel Bingham, aged patriarch of an illustrious banking family, is bestowing an inheritance on his three orphaned grandchildren. In this alternative history, fin de siècle New York is one of eight “Free States” that form a semiautonomous nation within a nation, established by dissenting religious utopians (think sexually liberated Shakers) in the 18th century. Citizens of the Free States think they live in a progressive paradise— slavery has been abolished and same-sex marriage is normal. But their liberalism has its limits. The founding fathers of the Free States were just as keen on slaughtering Native Americans as their equivalents in the south and west, and although “negroes” are no longer enslaved, neither do they possess full citizenship.
Nathaniel’s grandson David is the delicate, damaged heir to the Bingham family’s main residence, a grand house in Washington Square. His siblings are all happily married to their same-sex spouses, but at 28 he’s still single, and so his grandfather has found him a potential husband in Charles Griffith, who is kind and rich but also old and slightly gauche. Rejecting his grandfather’s choice, David falls instead for Edward Bishop, a penniless music teacher full of the “promise of free-spiritedness, a blithe disregard for conventions, a dispensing of old modes of behavior and formality.” Hopped up on idealism, together they plan their escape to a new life in the west. Nathaniel is suspicious of Edward’s motives, but David’s love trumps his respect for his grandfather. “Was this not the point of life,” he thinks, “the reason his ancestors had established this country at all? So he might be allowed to feel the way he did, so that he might entitle himself to happiness?”
Other than in subject matter, Yanagihara is not a particularly flamboyant writer. A Little Life, despite its operatic scope, was conventionally put together: a communal bildungsroman that owed something to Mary McCarthy’s The Group, written in straightforward prose enlivened by a sprinkling of portentous foreshadowing (“they would never be as happy again as they were that night” might be the archetypal Yanagihara sentence). In To Paradise the writing is more sure of itself, partly
because Yanagihara allows herself more leeway with parody and pastiche than she has previously. The first section reads like a détourned 19th-century realist novel not just in terms of its plot—who will marry whom, who will inherit the estate, is the charming young seducer really a conman?—but in its style, which is full of fusty, Jamesian circumlocutions (“he had come into the habit, before dinner, of taking a walk around the park”) and judiciously judged moralising (“he knew what he was doing was wrong, even wicked—intimacy was encouraged before an arranged marriage between men, but it was usually to be explored only once or twice, and only to determine one’s compatibility with one’s possible intended.”)
This self-assuredness continues in the novel’s second section, which opens in the same house on Washington Square 100 years later. This time the inhabitants are another David, now a young paralegal, and another Charles, his wealthy older boyfriend, who is a partner at the law firm where they both work. 1990s Charles grew up in luxury (he still, rather improbably, has a butler), but David’s childhood was one of faded glamour and misplaced snobbery: he was raised by his grandmother when his father abandoned the family home to establish a nationalist utopian community in the wilds of Hawaii.
Back in New York, the pair host lavish dinner parties for their rich friends, while Aids quietly ravages their community in the background. In a long, digressive letter to his son, written from the hospital in which he is now confined, David’s father explains his motivations for leaving the family home. His father’s attempt to establish a new way of life outside mainstream society was “not a folly,” David thinks when he reads this letter, “not make-believe, not an impossibility, but something his father—and even he—had once believed in with all the hopefulness they had, a place where history was meaningless.”
The final section of To Paradise is also the longest—taking up half the length of the whole novel—and the best. Most of it is narrated by Charlie, a naive young woman living in a dystopian future. New York in the 2090s has been ravaged by war and disease (Covid is mentioned in passing as the first of many 21st-century global pandemics) and is run by a fascistic, shadowy government referred to as “the state.” Central Park is now a giant municipal farm, the internet is banned, food is scarce (horse meat is a particular treat), and homosexuality has been driven underground. Because the birth rate has plummeted, brokered marriages, encouraged by the state, have become the norm.
Charlie works as a technician in a laboratory, where she is responsible for exterminating mice and harvesting their foetuses for experimentation, a job she takes great pride in (and which Yanagihara has written about before—“I rather enjoyed killing the mice,” Norton Perina, one of the unreliable scientist-narrators of The People in the Trees, deadpans). Her grandfather—another Charles Griffith, this time wearing a lab coat—was once a famous epidemiologist and was responsible for justifying the use of brutal quarantine camps during earlier disease outbreaks, something his son, another David (“that’s a lot of Davids,” says Charlie) can’t forgive him for. Worried that Charlie has been left brain damaged by an experimental treatment given to her during an earlier pandemic, Charles uses a broker to arrange for her to marry a closeted gay man who will take care of her after his death. We glean most of this from letters Charles has written to his first and most enduring love, an Englishman named Peter, now a civil servant in “New Britain.”
Though the names recur, you’re never sure whether the various Charleses and Davids are supposed to be related to each other. There are hints of a connection between the sections—1990s David watches a play at school, the plot of which mirrors that of the first section, and the same tale is told by a wandering storyteller to Charlie in the 2090s—but it’s unclear if we’re in the same timeline throughout the novel. Instead, the three sections read as selfcontained parables or thought experiments about how utopian thinking has limits, how self-congratulatory liberal societies are often blind to their own prejudices, how progressiveness isn’t necessarily linear and how governments tend to erode personal freedoms in times of crisis, especially for those who would normally dwell outside of mainstream society.
A Little Life was a curiously ahistorical novel, set in a New York in which global events (9/11) and modern technology were conspicuous by their absence. In To Paradise, in contrast, history is presented not as an irrelevance, or as a backdrop to social life, but as something people are actively trying to give shape to, or extricate themselves from. That this is impossible to achieve is what gives Yanagihara’s novel its unsettling power.
Writing fiction is an inherently utopian pursuit, and utopias, as Thomas More pointed out when he coined the term in 1516, are inherently fictional (the term “utopia” was a play on eutopos—“good place”—but also outopos: “no place”). But certain kinds of fiction are more utopian than others. Rather than creating new and better worlds, Yanagihara’s method here suggests a more depressing possibility: that utopias, and the novels in which they can be imagined, are inevitably only variations of the world we already know. ♦