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How to explain this novel’s success? The critic Parul Sehgal recently suggested A Little Life as a prominent example of the “trauma plot” — fiction that uses a traumatic backstory as a shortcut to narrative. Indeed, it’s easy to see Jude as a “vivified DSM entry” perfectly crafted to appeal to “a world infatuated with victimhood.
Indeed, Yanagihara’s onslaught of horrors could allow readers to block out, like a childhood trauma, the fact that they were reading luxury copy. Her first book was quite literally a travelogue written by a pedophile; in To Paradise, Yanagihara has not lost the familiar voice of a professional chronicler of wealth. Here are rose-hued Oriental carpets, dark-green douppioni-silk drapes, wood floors polished with macadamia oil; here are wok-fried snow peas, ginger-wine syllabub, a pine-nut tart .
To Paradise is not a novel at all. It is three books bound into a single volume: a novella, a brace of short stories, and a full-length novel. The conceit is that its three tales are set in 1893, 1993, and 2093 in alternate versions of a Washington Square townhouse. The first is a Henry James–esque period romance: David, a wealthy scion with a secret history of nervous breakdowns, rejects a proposal from the boring Charles to flee west with roguish pauper Edward.
Yanagihara provides a perfect image for this kind of love. Jude’s lover, Willem, trying to prevent him from cutting himself, hugs Jude so tightly he can barely breathe. “Pretend we’re falling and we’re clinging together from fear,” Willem tells him; for a brief moment, the fiction of imminent death cuts through Jude’s self-loathing and allows him to crumple helplessly into his lover’s suffocating embrace.
Why, then? “I don’t know,” Yanagihara told one journalist. To another, she insisted, “I don’t think there’s anything inherent to the gay-male identity that interests me.” These are baffling, even offensive responses given that she has had almost a decade to come up with better ones. But I do not think Yanagihara, an author who believes in fiction as a conscious act of avoidance, is being dishonest.
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