To Paradise and A Little Life both seem to me to be so self-indulgent that reading them feels like a day spent gorging on candy and so dishonest that the candy might as well come from a box labeled “salad.”īut I want to deal with these books in good faith. The big questions that review after review and think piece after think piece has been asking are: Is To Paradise a good book? And is Hanya Yanagihara a good writer?Ĭards on the table: My answer to both of those questions is no. But now To Paradise has arrived with a ready-made debate waiting to encircle it. Why, these readers ask, are we being invited to linger so voluptuously through passage after passage of unrelenting misery? And in our #OwnVoices era, a persistent discomfort lingers around Yanagihara’s choice to consistently write about gay men as a straight woman, and specifically about male-male child sex abuse.Ī Little Life was a big word-of-mouth hit, but it was a sleeper hit: The critical debate over whether the novel was great or whether it was exploitative developed slowly, in the months and years since its release. For others, Yanagihara novels can feel unsettlingly voyeuristic. Fans describe sobbing through A Little Life, emerging days later feeling tear-stained and fundamentally changed. It is never so alive as a book as when its characters are in deep pain.įor some readers, Yanagihara novels make for a profoundly moving and emotional reading experience. Likewise, To Paradise luxuriates in long descriptions of abusive relationships and profound depressions and dystopian deprivations. A Little Life is filled with exquisite, loving descriptions of the tormented life of her protagonist, including the violent abuse he experiences as a small child. So, too, is her evocation of her favorite subject: human suffering. The current fashion is for sentences so dry they rasp, but Yanagihara’s prose is rich and sumptuous. Yanagihara is an unusual figure in America’s literary scene. And like its predecessor, To Paradise has arrived to both rapturous praise and furious debate.
Hanya Yanagihara, the author of the much-beloved and much-debated 2015 novel A Little Life, has now released her third novel, To Paradise. One of the most talked-about new books of this January is also one of the oddest.
0 kommentar(er)
