The lovelorn heiress of this tale is reimagined as an heir, a young gay man named David Bingham, whose sickliness and awkwardness have made him damaged goods on the marriage market. And sure enough, this section riffs on James' novel called "Washington Square," the story of a charming cad seeking to marry a shy, plain heiress. The way communities and nations, even allegedly progressive ones, define themselves by whom they exclude is a theme Yanagihara touches on frequently.Įvents here take place largely within a townhouse in Washington Square. The Free States have legalized gay marriage and given full rights to women but keep out Black and Indigenous people. It's set in 1893 in a New York that belongs to an independent nation called the Free States. But there are also long stretches that are so flat and opaque that only a looming deadline made me press forward.īook I of "To Paradise" is the most reader-friendly and contains some of the novel's most gorgeous language. I have all those responses to Yanagihara's novel. Virginia Woolf confessed she had to force herself to push past the first 200 pages. When "Ulysses" came out in 1922, it was hailed by a few critics as brilliant but dismissed by others as baffling and dull. But my own take on "To Paradise" does mirror the reactions of "Ulysses'" first overwhelmed readers. Perhaps that's why, when reading "To Paradise," I couldn't help but think of the coincidence that it's being published in the centenary year of another deliberately difficult novel, James Joyce's "Ulysses." "Ulysses" also weighs in at just over 700 pages and is also packed with repetitions, scenes where characters unknowingly repeat incidents from "The Odyssey." The same names and situations resurface every 100 years, and other random coincidences abound. Repetition is Yanagihara's organizing principle here. Each book is set in New York City a century apart and invokes an array of literary styles from the novel of manners to alternate history, from the old-fashioned epistolary novel to the explicit social commentary of speculative fiction. It weighs in at just over 700 pages and breaks into three distinct books, which read like semi-autonomous novels in their own right.
MAUREEN CORRIGAN, BYLINE: Beyond everything else it is, Hanya Yanagihara's new novel, "To Paradise," is a deliberately difficult novel. Here's Maureen's review of "To Paradise." Her 2015 novel, "A Little Life," dealt with the challenges of disability and trauma and became a bestseller. Our book critic Maureen Corrigan has a review of one of this year's most anticipated books - "To Paradise" by novelist Hanya Yanagihara.
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