But this one is likely to endure beyond its present. This is not an easy thing to consider in today's circumstances, just as a Yanagihara book is never an easy read. She offers this chilling proposition about power, privilege and survival: "If we have lived, it is because we are worse than we ever believed ourselves to be, not better." Still, it is deeply unnerving to read her portraits of pandemic life, how "the disease clarified everything about who we are it revealed the fictions we'd all constructed about our lives". Yanagihara has stressed that she began writing To Paradise long before Covid-19 struck. That said, it is in the middle section that she truly shines, producing passages of visionary writing so blazingly good, it made the hair on my arms stand on end.
There is much to admire in the way that Yanagihara subtly shifts her language to suit each time period, moving adroitly from the mannered language of the fin- de-siecle novel to numbing Orwellian horror. And yet, in the differences of each incarnation lie the stubborn possibility of change. History in this novel is not a teleological journey towards utopia, but a recursive trap.
One is put in mind of a line in the Bob Dylan song Desolation Row: "I had to rearrange their faces and give them all another name." There is a metafictional quality to the shuffling of the cast across different eras.
Charlie, granddaughter of the scientist behind the state's original pandemic response, is offered the possibility of a better life outside the bleak Zone Eight, but at great risk.ĭespite being set centuries apart, all three sections are connected by recurring tropes and themes - colonial trauma personal illness and public outbreaks of disease relationships with large age gaps devoted if overbearing grandparents and, of course, the repetition of names.
In 2093, a series of pandemics and the climate crisis have left America a dystopia. David is estranged from his troubled father - also called David - who is the dispossessed king of Hawaii, left throneless after the islands were annexed to the US. In 1993, during an unnamed pandemic that recalls the Aids crisis, David, a young paralegal, and his much older lawyer boyfriend Charles host a dinner party for a dying friend.
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