TO PARADISE
HANYA YANAGIHARA
Picador, 720pp, £20 Hanya Yanagihara scored a worldwide bestseller with her 2015 novel A Little Life. So expectations were high for her latest. To Paradise comes in at over 700 pages and reviewers seemed not altogether sure what to say about it. Many felt it was so difficult to understand that it might be a masterpiece. ‘I felt the impulse a few times to put down the book and make a chart – the kind of thing you see TV detectives assemble on their living-room walls when they have a web of evidence but no clear theory of the case,’ confessed Jordan Kisner in the Atlantic.
In the Spectator, Claire Lowdon was baffled but thrilled. ‘Ingeniously, improbably, all this hangs together to make a sui generis whole that’s decidedly greater than the sum of its very weird parts. The thing with the repeating names: it sounds bonkers, but it works. The genes of the same basic story express themselves again and again in myriad variants. Utopias, dystopias, nested narratives, multiple genres, intricate world-building. Shameless swathes of exposition, crude indulgence of our darkest fears. Formidably fluent, morally simplistic, conceptually audacious, aesthetically overblown.’ In Slate, Laura Miller thought this amounted to a bit of a tease: ‘Yanagihara toys, dominatrix-style, with her readers’ desire for narrative fulfilment.’
But in the New Republic, Siddhartha Deb simply found a maximalist novel with minimalist returns. ‘Why has Yanagihara written a novel that announces such large questions and over such enormous length while showing little interest or ability to deliver on them?’