It’s a big novel—a big novel on so many levels. It doesn’t meet all the expectations I’ve had about it, but it doesn’t have to. It is, just like “People in the Trees” and “A Little Life”, complicated, bold, and original. And I think that we need such stories.
“To Paradise”, though having three very loosely-connected stories, is everything “Cloud Atlas” should have been. Each story is long enough to make you feel connected to the characters. Each story builds its setting with subtle, unobvious references rather than shoving tropes at us. Each story shares a kind of leitmotif: seeking paradise. What is a paradise? Is it a place of freedom, of love, of both, or of something else? The question remains open, along with many other questions in the novel, which I like too. The last aspect I like about “To Paradise”, in contrast with “Cloud Atlas”, is its genuine representation of queerness and ethnicity. Let me write about this last aspect for a while.
I think I’m not the only reader of Hanya Yanagihara who’s waited for her writing about Hawaii. She stated that the events in “People in the Trees” were a metaphor for how colonialism had affected Hawaii. In “A Little Life”, she described Jude, who was, in a way, the most important character, as a person of unspecified ethnicity. But there were no direct references to her homeland. In “To Paradise”, we begin with the story of two white New Yorkers in an alternative 1890s America. In the second and third parts of the novel, though, three of the four protagonists are Hawaii-born. Identity, race, and nation become important, and they do so in a subtler way than you may think. It’s clear, especially in the second part, where father and son, both named Kawika (David), recall their lives and wonder what identity and belonging are. The son worries that he isn’t Hawaiian enough in New York. The father worries that he didn’t know how to be Hawaiian. Any simple answers, any references to royalty and reconstructed tradition, seem futile in the end, just as are the efforts of Edward, the older Kawika’s friend and a Hawaiian nationalist. Still, it doesn’t mean that Yanagihara mocks anticolonial movements and depicts their members as nuts. She just shows that sometimes it’s difficult to draw the line. And it’s difficult to reclaim what one considers the fixed, glorious tradition of their people.
As I’ve read: It’s a complicated novel. It doesn’t offer easy solutions, and you can see that in each part of the book. In the first part, we are presented with an alternative society in several eastern states, where same-sex marriages became accepted in the 1790s, which enabled a faster emancipation of women, too. However, racism and classism didn’t vanish. Class divisions are important in the story; we are also informed that African-Americans are still second-class citizens. While some people complained about racism in that part of the novel, I’d say that whatever Yanagihara put there, she put it there on purpose. She created a society in which one liberation hadn’t been followed by another. This isn’t a call to ignore social problems, but rather a reminder that we need intersectional solutions.
I know that one may have doubts about other aspects of this parallel universe too. How is it connected to the following narrations in which the course of history seems to be like ours, the hippie movement and the Vietnam War included? Why didn’t so many things change, such as Lincoln becoming president? It’s hard to explain these aspects, but guess what? It’s still a better parallel universe than many steampunk and alternate history settings I’ve read about. Maybe it not full of new concepts and amazing inventions, but it’s well-thought out and probable on a social level.
The strength and originality of Yanagihara’s writing don’t lie in neat, predictable, ready-made stories, people, or locations. Her plots don’t have to look like a fancy queer retelling of the 1890s or a YA dystopia. Usually, I don’t like diminishing an entire genre. But when you read “To Paradise”, it’s so clear that it’s a novel for adults, with no spoon-feeding, and many thought-provoking ideas. There are so many complicated aspects there, and I am glad they are. For example, the axis of the third book is a tragic conflict: a scientist helped build a dystopian state, believing that harsh regulations would be only temporary, but, in the end, he is given away by the same dictatorship as a convenient scapegoat… And now his granddaughter, Charlie, has to live with the consequences. Was her grandfather a Nazi doctor-like figure? What is really going on in the bleak, disease-ravaged New York of her time? Is a different life possible? There are many questions in this part, and no answer is easy. What I can tell you, though, is that it’s heartbreaking. The future depicted by Yanagihara is all too possible. There are no kids with superpowers and love triangles there. But there are all the elements which may or already have come true in so many places: food shortages, epidemics, the police state, xenophobia, eugenics, and concentration camps.
I know many readers wish the stories were more connected to each other, but I’m left with the feeling that I’ve been given so much in this book that I shouldn’t ask for more. A plausible past and future? Varying styles encompassing diverse personalities and experiences? Important issues introduced in a subtle way? Stylistically, I haven’t read such a good novel in months. If not for other aspects of “To Paradise”, I’m going to be grateful for this.
Left Hand of Fiction 