review of to paradise by hanya yanagihara

I can't help but feel the recycling of names throughout different sections isn't really necessary and is more about a self-conscious statement the author is trying to make.

At one point a character wryly comments: “that is a lot of Davids”. Though this all sounds extremely confusing as an outline one of the wonders of this novel is that it all becomes quite clear during the actual experience of reading the book. Also the characters between sections share little or no connection to each other (though certain links eventually become clear) these different individuals all have the same names: David, Charles and Edward.

Not only do the circumstances and characters radically change between parts, but so does the style of each section as they move from a Jamesian psychological/social drama couched in an alternate history to a dystopian future where the draconian government takes severe measures to contain a multitude of deadly new plagues. The novel centres around one New York City square, but its three different sections straddle three different centuries with three very different stories. However, rather than making a strident declaration about my overall assessment of “To Paradise” my gut response and balanced opinion is that it's an impressive, thought-provoking epic (especially because it remains so wonderfully engaging for hundreds and hundreds of pages), but its structure also presents some uniquely frustrating difficulties. The author's new equally lengthy 700-page novel “To Paradise” is eliciting similarly mixed responses as Alex Preston has already declared it a “masterpiece for our times” in The Guardian while in Harper's Rebecca Panovka criticised the novel's aspiration to be an “epidemiological cautionary tale” and posits that “if the antidote to dangerous ideas is didactic storytelling, I have to wonder (apparently with Yanagihara) whether the cure is worse than the disease.” I'm sure some other readers will similarly overly hail or excessively disparage this new novel in an argumentative fashion.

Though Hanya Yanagihara's “A Little Life” was a million-copy bestseller, it also sharply divided readers with some hailing it a life-changing triumph and others deriding it as manipulative misery porn.

Review of to paradise by hanya yanagihara