Hanya yanagihara1/17/2024 ![]() ![]() A Little Life, despite its operatic scope, was conventionally put together: a communal bildungsroman that owed something to Mary McCarthy’s The Group, written in straightforward prose enlivened by a sprinkling of portentous foreshadowing (“they would never be as happy again as they were that night” might be the archetypal Yanagihara sentence). Other than in subject matter, Yanagihara is not a particularly flamboyant writer. ![]() But whereas A Little Life’s commitment to its own extremism, both good and bad, felt at times like manipulative wish-fulfilment, Yanagihara’s new novel is a far more ambivalent-and therefore interesting-proposition. And it’s there most directly in To Paradise, in which the question of whether it’s possible-let alone desirable-to invent new ways of living is a central element of the plot. It’s there in A Little Life, where the horrors, recounted in gratuitous detail, were accompanied by equally overblown depictions of luxury and excess (lavish meals, exquisitely designed apartments, grand and significant works of art) and acts of life-changing generosity. It’s there in her first novel, The People in the Trees (2013), a Nabokovian confection in which an unreliable narrator tries to justify child sexual abuse and neocolonial exploitation by appealing to the liberatory potential of scientific discovery. The tension between conservatism and utopianism-between representing the world as it is and imagining it as you want it to be-is one of Yanagihara’s recurring themes. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.” If this really was a new kind of love, it was one that sounded a lot like the old kind. “Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. “Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship?” Jude’s friend Willem asked himself at one point. Writing in the Atlantic, the novelist Garth Greenwell argued that in prioritising friendship over romantic love, and in playing with “aesthetic modes long coded as queer: melodrama, sentimental fiction, grand opera,” Yanagihara had written the first “great gay novel.” But when drawn out over 700 pages, A Little Life’s representation of friendship not only felt too good to be true, it also didn’t feel all that revolutionary. Some critics saw in Yanagihara’s celebration of friendship a radical reclamation of a kind of relationship that has historically been neglected by the realist novel. ![]()
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