The word that comes to mind when I think To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara is ‘ambitious’. And I felt somewhat ambitious when I opened the first of its 708 pages (it was during the 20 Books of Summer reading challenge – what was I thinking?!). Anyway, I am a little unfair on big books – I expect a lot for my reading-time-investment – To Paradise delivered in parts.

Yanagihara has essentially created three books in one – re-imagining the past and describing an eerily possible future. The stories are lightly interlinked through names, families, a house in Manhattan; physical and mental illness; and the colonisation of Hawaii.

In the first book, set in 1893 in New York, social and sexual norms are challenged by creating a society where the people are able to live and love with whomever they choose. When the central character, David, the ‘fragile’ heir in a distinguished family, chooses an impoverished but charming music teacher over a more socially suitable match, Yangihara neatly demonstrates how expectations and duty bind us, regardless of what those expectations might be.

The second book is set in 1993 Manhattan, in the midst of the AIDS epidemic. A young Hawaiian man, David, lives with his much older, wealthier partner, Charles. While Charles is witnessing the death of friends in his community, David is grappling with his troubled childhood, and particularly the fate of his father, who renounced his family legacy for a homosexual relationship. David tells his own story and his father’s story in parallel, which exposes interesting themes around power in relationships; being ‘indebted’; and colonisation (this is done particularly well, as Charles has a (white) friend who is a collector of Hawaiian artifacts, and the wealth required to ‘own’ some of David’s history is blatant).

The third book, an immersive and suspenseful dystopian story, is set in 2093, when the city is governed by totalitarian rule, and the world is held prisoner to constant pandemics. The main character, a woman named Charlie, is trying to solve the mystery of her husband’s disappearances.

I became a little distracted by looking for the links between the stories, hoping that they would provide clues, or a means of tying the three parts together. It was a waste of reading energy and instead, I should have maintained a broader perspective, one that focused on what Yangihara posits in her title – how are the characters getting ‘to paradise’? For it is in consideration of ‘paradise’ that she examines how we experience freedom as both individuals and as a society, and demonstrates how changing expectations make ‘paradise’ ultimately unattainable.

The problem, though, with trying to be the ideal anything is that eventually the definition changes, and you realize that what you’d been pursuing all along was not a single truth but a set of expectations determined by context. You leave that context, and you leave behind those expectations, too, and then you’re nothing once again.

I find Yangihara’s writing interesting for its straight-forwardness and plainness. I rarely highlight passages in her books, or find myself re-reading beautiful sentences. Equally, I rarely feel challenged while reading. And yet, afterwards, I reflect on her capacity for tackling big, thorny issues by stealth, and embedding them in a narrative that is memorable in its totality rather than its detail. In To Paradise, she has addressed all the big issues – class, race, sexuality, and ability – in three stories that held my attention for 708 pages.

3.5/5

…it was difficult, ever more so, not to allow the outside to intrude, and over dessert, a ginger-wine syllabub whipped as light as milk froth, David wondered whether the others were thinking, as he was, of that precious gingerroot that had been found and dug in the Colonies and brought to them here in the Free States and brought by Cook at great expense: Who had been forced to dig and harvest the roots? From whose hands had it been taken?