Yanagihara’s To Paradise challenges utopia

STORY LINDA YUN ILLUSTRATION ETHAN LYONS

To Paradise is the latest work of Hanya Yanagihara, acclaimed author of the tear-jerking BookTok starter pack, A Little Life. Despite her reputation as a writer of what some may call “misery porn”, Yanagihara’s tormenting stories come folded in the most unexpected shapes — sometimes in the peculiarity of hope.

The novel is broken into three books, all a century apart. Interweaving the past, present, and future, Yanagihara presents a candid portrait of love and loss in an alternate rewriting of a gay New York, a disorienting reimagination of the AIDS epidemic in Hawaii, and an Orwellian portrayal of the future to disrupt the exhausting fairytale of paradise.

Nicknamed “Washing Square”, Book One takes place in a parallel dimension of post-Civil War America, where New York is a part of the Free States - one of four sovereign nations. In this rewrite of history where gay marriage is legal, an odd, reserved David falls hopelessly in love with Edward, while being bound to a wealthy suitor - Charles, in a love triangle gone wrong. When Edward has to move across the country, David is torn between duty to his family and his love for Edward, to which the book furiously ends before he chooses.

The exciting storytelling puts the reader on the edge, only to leave the last sentences empty of a resolution, and the reader full of wondrous head-scratching. Some readers appreciate Yanagihara’s artistic choice, while others are enraged by its ambiguity.

Perhaps the most interesting snippet of the first section is the profundity of wealth in its ability to seep into the fabric of relationships. When they are together, Edward - of a lower class than David, often feels the need to prove himself worthy of David’s love even when David seems to be preoccupied with everything but material status.

Book Two, “Lipo-Wal-Nahele”, follows another David - a young Hawaiian man who descends from royalty as he is pushed and pulled in different directions. Fraught with fears of his own past, this “reincarnated” David grapples with his relationships with both his partner Charles, and his father, Wika.

Themes of generational trauma, race, class, disability, and longing lace the first and second sections together, as Yanagihara’s intricate world building collapses in an emotional downpour. Readers almost want to reach through the pages, and knock Wika out of his state of passivity to his illness. While the first narrative was hard to warm up to, the second was nothing short of a rollercoaster. Wika’s letter is an honest sketch of fatherhood, not afraid to trace over the breakdown of family and the longing to find a place in an earthly paradise.

Book Three, “Zone Eight”, follows a young woman in the distant future in an America ravaged by pandemic after pandemic. It is also told in parts: one through the perspective of Charlie - a sterile young woman, and the other through Charles - her grandfather.

Of all the things Yanagihara captured with her writing, the complexity of human emotion is one that she has mastered. Among such characters is Charles, patron of the state, who grew to resent the world he helped build. As he slowly breaks down into a puddle of himself, his status tumbles, from an influential scientist down to a statesman, until he becomes one with the rest - another victim of the regime.

Inspired by a pandemic near at hand, “Zone Eight” raises the interesting question of what humanity would become if physiological needs are threatened only by pandemics, and what would arise when those threats are heightened by an institution’s indifference to the outcries of its citizens.

While the plot was at times compromised by line after line of purple prose, the rich, layered portrayal of utopia’s undoing checkmates the certainty by which we say that the future will be an unquestionably better one. To Paradise is a novel as beautiful as it is deeply disturbing, with characters knee-deep in grief, but never too sunken to look up with hope.

Each book ends with the words “to paradise”, as the respective Davids leave the cards to fate to deal out the next chapter of their lives. With each line of voluptuous prose, Yanagihara’s To Paradise masterfully paints the complexities of the human experience and the elusive promise of utopia.