To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara
At the cusp of winter, I attended a dinner party where I regaled the guests with my recent read: To Paradise (2022) comprised of a novella, two paired short stories and a final novel. Anticipating flushed debate about colonialism, disease, Otherness and heartbreak, I dusted my fingers of pineapple candy and set my pinot gris on the table and waited, but nothing came. Truthfully, I couldn’t blame them: To Paradise is rich, a little weird and absolutely takes some digesting.
The book follows Yanagihara’s debut novel The People in the Trees (2013) and A Little Life (2015), her contentious and profoundly moving second release. Her third novel, less shattering but weightier in size and theme, is layered with repurposed characters, synchronistic themes and historical rewrites, all served up on one tantalisingly ambitious platter.
The first story is set in the ‘Free States’ of the 1890s, an alternate history in which gay marriage is destigmatised. We follow David Bingham, the grandson of banking mogul Nathaniel, as he anxiously contemplates love and identity while battling an unnamed illness. Despite being betrothed to an older suitor, he becomes captivated by the mysterious and charming Edward and must decide between the safety of his townhouse and forging his own path ‘to paradise.’
The second story is divided into two sections with the first narrated by another David, or ‘Kawika’ Bingham – a paralegal who is dating his older, wealthy boss Charles Griffiths – and the second by David’s ill father, Wika. As David reflects on his life from the comforts of Charles’ lavish townhouse, his memories oscillating between his upbringing in Hawaii and his Westernised existence, we get a sense of his aimlessness; the way he slotted into Charles’ world, waving goodbye to his name, his family and culture. In his new world, “he never chanted the songs he had been taught to chant, he never danced the stories he had been taught to dance, he never recited the history he had been taught to revere.” Wika’s section is essentially an apology letter to David. Here Wika listlessly recounts how he became subsumed and eventually overpowered by the radical visions and life of his friend Edward. Both recounts are melancholic and intimate, told as if relaying a fever dream and mirrored in their depictions of colonialism, legacy, unnamed disease, of fighting and eventually of submitting.
The final and most lengthy of the stories is set in a futuristic city that has been subject to relentless pandemics and the effects of climate change. The city has all the markers of a totalitarian society: state-controlled press, banned books and secret police. This story is narrated by Charlie, an oddly affectless character who suffers from the lingering effects of a previous pandemic, and spliced with letters from another Charles Griffiths, Charlie’s grandfather. Again, we are faced with themes of disease, who wins and who loses in times disaster, and of who we are when everything is stripped away and there is only the animal need to survive. In one letter, Charles describes a story told to him by his grandmother in Hawaii about a lizard who, plagued by hunger, eats the moon, and explodes. The moon lives on and the lizard, who is reincarnated as a man, eats the moon again. The fable viscerally illustrates the message that, "some of us will die, but others of us will keep doing what we always have, continuing on our own oblivious way, doing what our nature compels us to, silent and unknowable and unstoppable in our rhythms.” The intimate perspective we get of Charlie’s blank dystopian world – which remarkably Yanagihara wrote pre-pandemic – is chilling and the section I predict will cling to me for years to come.
I recently watched Yanagihara in conversation with Bri Lee at the Capitol Theatre in Melbourne where she eloquently contemplated the philosophical idea of paradise. These notions of paradise course through all three narratives, posing powerful questions about utopia and advancement, and who tends to be excluded or ‘othered’ in these versions of paradise. This creates a cohesiveness to the novel that isn’t initially apparent but becomes clearer with each mention of the townhouse and every iteration of ‘David’, both of which serve distinct purposes. The centrality of the townhouse which appears altered but present in each novel ties the settings together, whilst the character reincarnations symbolise distinct personalities that foreshadow the events of the novel. David, for example, is the romantic dreamer and the ‘outsider’, while Charles represents someone who is accepted; the embodiment of safety and pragmatism. And Edward, well… stay away from Edward.
Like its predecessor, A Little Life, the novel received polarised reviews from critics for its depiction of human suffering which admittedly did feel grotesque at times. To me, however, this was balanced by minor moments of stillness and of kindness. The poignant rawness of these depictions can maybe be attributed to Yanagihara’s upbringing as an Asian woman in Hawaii, and yet another reason her nostalgic portrayals of Hawaii adds to the cosy and often feverish quality of the novel. Perhaps it’s because I identified strongly with the author’s experience of growing up as an Asian woman in a Polynesian island, of being othered but simultaneously complicit in the continuous effects of colonisation, that I cried in parts, and held my breath in others. And why I will sing its praises at dinner parties and continue to contemplate complicated ideas of ‘paradise’ until Yanagihara’s next novel.
Nina Culley is a writer and educator based in Naarm. She manages Melbourne Young Writers' Studio in Fitzroy North where she also teaches creative writing and story. Her works have appeared in Kill Your Darlings and Eureka Street. She is currently working on a novella inspired by the Thai kitchens of her childhood.