Locked Out of Heaven

In a novel that spans three centuries, Hanya Yanagihara asks if it is ever possible to desire freely

- Amrita Narayanan

The literary moral police disapproved when Hanya Yanagihara’s first novel, A Little Life, became a runaway success. Yanagihara was an emotional pornographer, they tut-tutted; her readers were masochistic beyond the allowable limits of Discriminating Literary Goodtaste.

Like thousands of other readers in the anglophone world, I too, in 2015, set my life to pause mode for a long weekend so that I could surrender to the baroque pleasures of A Little Life. The 800-page bildungsroman of four young men kept me riveted despite—or more likely because of—the sorrow and anguish I experienced while reading.

Readers who cried encore to A Little Life are forewarned that To Paradise will demand more of them. As with A Little Life, relationships between men, familial and erotic, are the connective tissue of this novel, but To Paradise dislocates, it departs from the reliable form of the bildungsroman, that gave A Little Life its Pain-on-Tap mouthfeel.