A cri de coeur about love’s power
“To Paradise,” Hanya Yanagihara’s ambitious follow-up to “A Little Life,” a National Book Award finalist, is an epic in size and scope. The novel is divided into three books, each featuring characters with the same names living in the same house in New York City but in different dystopian eras.
In Book One, “Washington Square,” Yanagihara envisions an alternate 19th-century history for the U.S. The protagonist, David Bingham, lives in the Free States, where same-sex marriage is legal and wealthy white families practice arranged marriage, the better to perpetuate their privilege.
But David cannot quite imagine a future with the elderly, sweet but dull man, Charles Griffith, chosen for him. Instead he is drawn to Edward, an impoverished but clever man around his own age. This section focuses on a man of privilege bridling against the conventions of his era in order to feel real love, perhaps to his peril.
Book Two, “Lipo-WaoNahele,” most closely resembles actual U.S. history. Taking place in the mid-20th century, one thread explores how a member of the royal family of Hawaii chooses love over security while his grown son leaves the island to live in New York City with his much older, wealthier lover amid the AIDS crisis. Yanagihara addresses multiple forms of oppression: the colonization of Hawaii and marginalization of the native people, homophobia and discrimination.
Book Three, “Zone Eight,” is a suspenseful and terrifying glimpse of a future New York City set amid endless waves of pandemics. A new authoritarian government has banned travel, the internet, same-sex marriage and most civil liberties, all in
the name of maximizing the surviving humans’ ability to procreate.
Dr. Charles Griffith, a once important government scientist, cares for his granddaughter, Charlie, who has survived a childhood bout of an unnamed virus but has been left severely injured. When Griffith is reclassified as a state enemy, he must race against time to find a way to protect Charlie. Here Yanagihara brings to fruition the novel’s themes: how queer men’s networks formed to enable their love and to resist oppression by society can become the very life force by which civilization (meaning art, human connection, love itself ) in America might be sustained.
Ultimately, the novel is a cri de coeur about the revolutionary power of love and choice to fight oppression and despair. — May-lee Chai, Minneapolis Star Tribune
‘Mermaid Confidential’ is the 25th slapstick-noir
novel in which Tim Dorsey chronicles the antics of obsessive-compulsive serial killer Serge Storms and his drugged-out sidekick, Coleman, as they devise fiendishly inventive ways to murder a rogues’ gallery of Florida grifters
and thugs who all had it coming.
This time the pair settles down in the Florida Keys to give condo living a try. There they encounter a physician who bankrupts a couple with indefensible medical bills and investors who buy up condo units and rent them to vacationers who harass longtime tenants with pranks and loud music. As Serge plots their demise, a drug kingpin living in a nearby mansion is targeted by a rival gang. Meanwhile, a team of thieves who don’t know who lives in the mansion are driving south from Maine to rob it. Dorsey ties the seemingly unconnected plots together at the end in a wacky, violent conclusion.
Dorsey’s novels are apt to offend those who believe that drug abuse and grisly murders are unfit subjects for humor, but his fans find an abundance of chuckles and belly laughs in his books. The trouble with humor, however, that it has to be funny, and occasionally, Dorsey’s attempts fall flat. For the most part, “Mermaid Confidential” lacks the hilariously clever observations and satirical pokes at the weirdness of Florida that characterize his best work.