Hanya Yanagihara’s To Paradise: An Epic Novel For All Queer Times
By Wally Suphap
In his 2015 review published in The Atlantic, Garth Greenwell heralded Hanya Yanagihara’s previous novel, A Little Life, as potentially “the great gay novel,” praising its perceptiveness in depicting the gay male experience in America and positing that the book was “the most ambitious chronicle of the social and emotional lives of gay men to have emerged for many years.” To some extent, Yanagihara’s latest novel, To Paradise, might be considered an even greatergay novel. Not only is it queer in its foregrounding of gay protagonists and socio-political themes of discrimination, non-traditional relationships, the AIDS epidemic, and racial and class-conscious intersectionality, but also in its upending of literary forms and transgressive world-building. Yanagihara excels at blending the recognizable with the inventive and also at times the absurd to tell tales of unconventional love, desire, and longing. Like its predecessor, To Paradise deserves a place on the mantel of esteemed genre-bending queer fiction, alongside Renee Gladman’s The Event Factory, Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren, and other novels engaged in radical world-building.
In a series of three books spanning three centuries (1893 to 2094), the novel follows the lives and affairs of several interrelated characters, many of whom are in a same-sex or non-heteronormative relationship. As the characters search for contentment, acceptance, love, and belonging, they encounter obstacles such as the suffocating confinements of the law, politics, and family expectations: a man is compelled to choose between following his heart and acquiescing to his grandfather’s demands; a young woman is forced into a brokered sexless marriage of political necessity. There are also disturbing instances of family members and loved ones separated or cast away to “relocation centers,” reminiscent of internment camps.
Stylistically and narratively, To Paradise is a hybrid epic of radical proportions, innovatively subverting a mix of tropes and genre expectations to tell queer tales in an alternate rendering of America. Book I, entitled “Washington Square,” begins à la Shakespeare’s King Lear with an inheritance meeting involving a grandfather and his three grandchildren. The story then graduates into a Austenian contest between competing suitors, with a queer twist: a Bennet brother, not sister, is pursued by two bachelors. The second book, “Lipo-Wao-Nahele,” first centers on a Mrs. Dalloway-like high-society dinner party among a group of friends, one of whom is dying of AIDS, then shifts into the form of a long letter from a father to his estranged son. With lines like, “I want to talk to you, my son, my Kawika, though I know you will never hear me, as I will never be able to say any of this aloud to you, not anymore,” the section’s wistful epistolary prose is crafted with a lyricism and sentimentality that recalls the enigmatic opening of Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. The final and longest book takes place in an apocalyptic, virus-stricken New York—in this way, similar to Ling Ma’s Severance, not to mention the current era of Coronavirus outbreaks in real life—jumping back and forth between different decades in the later half of the twenty-first century.
Despite frequent and abrupt shifts in literary style, the trio of books is nonetheless united in a shared linguistic sensibility: Yanagihara’s syntactically intricate and ruefully meandering prose recontextualizes past trauma and grief to an embodied present, extending well into an imagined future. This is most strikingly exemplified in the fade-out sentences at the end of the three books—in each case, consisting of long, winding lines, punctuated by the novel’s titular phrase, “to paradise”—intimating a never-ending journey. It is fitting that the primary setting and title of the last book is “Zone Eight,” the figure eight symbolizing infinite loops.
If A Little Life was about how trauma remains ever present over a lifespan, then To Paradise might be about how it can extend beyond that, intergenerationally and collectively—a samsaric cycle repeating across time and space. Hopeless-romantic readers looking for a straightly told trauma plot might initially be disappointed. While all the books contain desolating story lines, none match the intensity and melancholia of the Jude-Willem tragic love story in Yanagihara’s previous novel. And yet, To Paradise’s collective parts amount to an impactful whole. All characters, some of whom share similar names, perhaps suggesting a figurative, if not literal, reincarnation, are in their own way seeking solace, a place where they can thrive and be accepted. A narrator in Book II confesses a deep yearning for “a place where I would feel invincible, where I for once would feel like I belonged, where I would never feel shame or apology for who I was.” Combined, these stories chronicle the human plight: the endless struggles, complexities, and precarities of how to be who we are and love whom we love.
“Different storytellers told different kinds of stories,” observes Charlie, the narrator in Book III, recalling her childhood pastime of attending public storytelling performances in the city square by so-called “gray vendors,” referring to their liminal legal status. These vendors catered to audiences of varying taste: “You went to one person if you liked romances, and another if you liked fables, and another if you liked stories about animals, and another if you liked history.” In Yanagihara’s case, she is virtually an all-in-one storyteller: her range of style, like the novel’s narratives, is expansive, brilliantly surprising, and always gesturing toward a radical reimagination of our world.
Good fiction, regardless of how outrageous or fantastical its premise, speaks to certain core truths. In conjuring fictional worlds that both resemble and depart from ours, Yanagihara offers a wide-ranging, interpretatively-open lens to examine our own societies. What binds the characters is indeed what binds all of us across time: the constant reckoning with our individual and collective suffering and a yearning for salvation. It is an eternal, bittersweet tale shared by all, though perhaps experienced most pronouncedly by queer rebels, outsiders, radicals, the marginalized, and the underprivileged. It is the story of our desire to break free from worldly confinements, our wish to escape to a promised land, often far, far away from the native and the familial, a place where happiness can be freely pursued, where we can exist on our own terms without apology or shame—a semblance of paradise.
About the author:
Wally Suphap is a writer, lawyer, editor, and advocate. Originally from Bangkok, Thailand, and raised in San Fernando Valley, California, he holds a BA in economics and political science from Columbia College and a JD from Columbia Law School. He is currently an MFA candidate in nonfiction writing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where he is a Lenfest Fellow.
