The most gleeful takedowns of To Paradise, though, hardly focus on these nuts-and-bolts shortcomings. The 1893 section, in particular, has the ring of bad fan fiction.
It feels, frankly, unedited, with astoundingly messy adverb-choked sentences allowed to sprawl for whole paragraphs, and thudding exposition that regularly stifles any threat of immersion. Part one is a Henry James pastiche, imagining the romantic struggles of a young heir in a 19 th century Manhattan where gay marriage is legal part two overlays another gay affair onto the AIDS crisis and the colonization of Hawaii part three is set in a crumbling union ravaged by regular waves of disease. It’s also a doorstopper-at 720 pages, only slightly more merciful than A Little Life- and is divided into three sections, set in alternate New Yorks of 1893, 1993, and 2093. Yanagihara’s new book, To Paradise, is much less interesting. Reading it can feel like seeking emotional clarity by walking barefoot across hot coals it is the only novel I can remember that has given me nightmares. It's the work of someone obsessed with limits-of good taste, bodily endurance, platonic love-that deliberately blows past the reader’s own in service of that obsession. (After a frothy first act, the novel swerves hard into fevered melodrama and piles on ever-escalating scenes of stomach-turning violence and abuse.) Some dissenters have objected to A Little Life ’s implausibility, or its extremity, or its lack of a firm historical anchor, but all of these seem to me features, not bugs: they help Yanagihara cast a hypnotic, poison-fairy-tale spell, situating us in a world enough like our own that the feelings resonate, but heightened in a way that casts the action in almost allegorical shades. I found A Little Life fascinating, if not “good,” and have still yet to locate a text quite so consuming that also felt like it was actively daring me to turn each page. Its perpetual appearance on reading lists, celebrity Instagram stories, and bookshop displays catapulted Yanagihara to a rarified, out-of-fashion level of celebrity matched only in our day, perhaps, by Sally Rooney. “Writer writes, public takes note” is not much of a story, but Yanagihara is no ordinary writer: her last novel, 2015’s A Little Life, was the unlikeliest literary blockbuster in recent memory, a gothic 800-page tome whose success (millions of copies sold, wide critical acclaim, winner of the Kirkus Prize, finalist for the Man Booker and National Book Award) was rivaled only by its backlash (a scathing corrective in the New York Review of Books, heaps of internet reviewers deeming the novel intolerable torture porn).
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