In Search of Hope: A Review of To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara
It was better not to want at all: Wanting just made you unhappy.
This quote from Hanya Yanagihara’s third novel To Paradise serves as evidence of why the writer has many passionate admirers all around the world. The author of the bestselling novel A Little Life, which catapulted her to international fame and the adoration of many avid readers, as well as sparking much debate, has once again presented her audience with another captivating story — or, to be precise, three stories. Hanya Yanagihara captures simple human emotions that resonate with many. It’s not about manipulating readers’ emotions, as she is often accused of in her novels. In her stories, sometimes far from reality, Yanagihara touches on themes that hit the heart of practically everyone who reads her texts. And To Paradise is no exception.
Throughout our lives, we are told that we should go for it and follow our dreams, not give up on our aspirations, and not surrender. But can dreams truly make people happy? This is a question that Yanagihara invites readers of To Paradise to ponder.
The author’s latest novel is divided into three parts, with a hundred-year span between them: three different stories from 1893, 1993, and 2093. Times change, characters change, goals and dreams change, but a few elements remain the same throughout all the parts: the house on Washington Square in New York, the butler known as Adams, and, of course, hope. But I’ll elaborate on that later.
In different parts of the novel, a reader will meet several Davids Bingham, Edwards Bishops, Charleses, and Nathaniels. It’s extremely difficult not to give in to the temptation to trace the connections between characters from different eras. Throughout many pages, I had this itching feeling that any minute now the very thin thread connecting all these characters with the same names would become visible. However, To Paradise is not One Hundred Years of Solitude with its Buendía family, where character names passed from generation to generation. It’s up to the reader whether to somehow connect characters of To Paradise or not.
While the framework of the novel might seem a bit complex, each of the three stories are rather simple. And this is one of the unique features of the work. The language Yanagihara uses changes along with the epochs described in the book and along with the characters living out their destinies in different time periods.
In the first part, based on an alternative version of America in the 19th to early 20th centuries, the narrative presents a world where historical events unfold differently in terms of society’s sentiment towards race, gender, and sexuality. In this world, women and men can love anyone, and same-sex marriages are encouraged as much as heterosexual ones. The young heir of a wealthy family, David Bingham, lives in a beautiful house on Washington Square. David’s grandfather finds his beloved grandson a match — the not-so-young widower Charles Griffith. However, David falls in love with a poor yet incredibly charming Edward Bishop, who might be interested only in David’s wealth. The end of the story ends abruptly; we can only speculate what choice David will make and how his life will unfold.
At the center of the second story of the novel is a same-sex couple in the midst of an epidemic, the name of which is not mentioned in the novel, but everything hints that it is AIDS. A young assistant lawyer of Hawaiian descent, again David Bingham, hides his noble origins. Most of the narrative consists of retrospectives, from which we learn about David’s complicated relationship with his father. Flashbacks also feature a domineering grandmother, who, as in the first part, is David’s primary caregiver instead of his parents.
Finally, the third, longest, and perhaps most vivid narrative about the world of the future, enslaved by never-ending pandemics. The main character, Charlie, and her grandfather try to find their place in the dystopian society and New York that only slightly resembles the city we all know.
Each of these three seemingly unrelated stories ends at the “most interesting point.” And this is where the elusive thread lies uniting all three parts of the novel. Each of the main characters repeats, in part, the fates of the other two. The reader doesn’t know the endings of the stories, but sees that all the characters strive for one thing — an elusive paradise. Each of the characters is weak in some way, heavily dependent on their caregiver, but each creates their own image of paradise and tries to move towards it.
While each of these characters has their own destiny, they find themselves again and again in the same circumstances, faced with the challenge to choose between difficult decisions, step into the unknown, and strive for the paradise they’ve envisioned.
And if Yanagihara’s A Little Life elicited a widest spectrum of emotions, including pain, despair, joy, and compassion, then in the case of To Paradise, it seems that many readers have noticed a call to hope in this novel.
In the darkest and most despairing times, when one’s soul is plummeting to depths from which it seems impossible to rise, a person still retains something that no one can take from them — hope. This is a very simple truth that delicately transitions from one story of the novel to another. Endlessly chasing a dream can drain one’s strength, like water being pumped out of a reservoir. But hope is something else altogether. Though it may be thin, withered, and shriveled, it still flickers in the soul of everyone. The main thing is not to let it fade away once and for all.
