To Paradise is not Yanagihara’s first venture into power relations among individuals and social groups. The future we are living in is undoubtedly haunted by the past, and it is perfectly reasonable for a novel to set out to explore such issues, and in an inventive form that involves more than marketable glitz. Its promise is to show how such upheavals inform individual lives and how “three different versions of the American experiment … and the elusive promise of utopia,” as the press release puts it, inflect its characters’ search for personal happiness. At over 700 pages, with three sections ranging from the nineteenth century to the 1990s to 2094, To Paradise purports to take in queer culture, the colonization of Hawaii, and a global unraveling caused by the conjunction of pandemics, authoritarian governments, and climate collapse. Just because mainstream publishing favors shallow, airbrushed explorations of serious subjects does not mean that the issues themselves are not of significance. The dominance of this approach in itself is no reason to be suspicious of Hanya Yanagihara’s endeavor to write a maximalist novel of her own.
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