The remarkable worlds of Hanya Yanagihara’s To Paradise

Almost seven years have passed since Hanya Yanagihara published A Little Life, a devastating story about four friends in New York City. The novel earned a large audience and widespread critical acclaim – all deserved – but even readers who loved A Little Life may still feel traumatised by the plot’s unrelenting agony.

Brace yourself. Yanagihara is back with a daunting new book titled To Paradise. The emotional impact of this novel is less visceral than A Little Life, but only because the author’s scope is now so vast and her dexterity so dazzling. Presented as a triptych of related novellas, To Paradise demonstrates the inexhaustible ingenuity of an author who keeps shattering expectations.

Calling the three parts of To Paradise novellas is stretching the term and calling them related is an act of faith. The last one, at almost 350 pages, could have been published as a standalone novel. But the way these disparate stories speak to one another across 200 years makes their subtle coalescence all the more tantalising.

The first section, Washington Square, immediately signals its debt to Henry James’ story about a wealthy young woman whose father doubts the sincerity of her dashing suitor.

In her version, the sheltered heir is a young man named

David Bingham with a history of ‘‘nervous troubles’’. While his successful siblings have moved out, David still lives with his loving grandfather in a domestic situation that’s comforting if slightly humiliating.

David’s entombed life is finally rattled when his grandfather gently prods him to consider marriage – and thinks he may have found the perfect gentleman for him to marry. You read that right.

How deftly Yanagihara weaves this radical social innovation into her version of 19th-century New York. But the acceptance of same-sex marriage isn’t the only variant she introduces. Although the romantic drama of David Bingham takes place after the Civil War we know, the history of the United States in these pages has fractured into separate territories with violently different attitudes about Black and gay people.

The second part of To Paradise , called Lipo-waonahele, picks up in the late 20th century with a story that possesses its own distinctive tone. But the grand house in Washington Square persists along with the characters’ names. A young paralegal – David Bingham – is in a pleasant though dependent relationship with a wealthy older man.

This second David is haunted by his peculiar experiences as a child when he lived in Hawaii. Much of the section is presented as a letter from David’s estranged father, a descendant of Hawaiian royalty who once believed that the restoration of the kingdom was imminent.

No matter the setting – past, present or future – the allure of To Paradise stems from the hypnotic confluence of Yanagihara’s skills. She speaks softly, confidentially, with the urgency of a whisper. She draws us into the most intimate sympathy with these characters while placing them in crises that feel irresistibly compelling. And those forces reach a fever pitch in the novel’s last book, a medical dystopia called Zone Eight.

Yanagihara moves back and forth across several decades to tell the story of a researcher named Charles who serves as a powerful adviser to the government during an era of successive pandemics in which America becomes something like 1984.

This final section is a blistering analysis of how, given a surfeit of fear, acceptance of others gradually reverts to deadly prejudice.

To Paradise concludes with an elaborately dramatised vision of the loss of civil rights that today’s conservatives have been predicting throughout the pandemic with its capricious lockdowns, vaccination mandates and work restrictions.

But what really makes Zone Eight so gripping is its focus on Charles’ granddaughter, Charlie. She’s a young woman physically and mentally impaired during one of the plagues that swept across the country.

In alternate sections, Charlie describes her own life in a voice perfectly calibrated to sound almost simple, almost without affect, odd but not exotic. Yanagihara breathes real life into a young woman who, despite all evidence to the contrary, dares to believe that she deserves love and freedom. Her story, equally terrifying and poignant, reverberates through our current crisis with such force that it’s almost unbearable.