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An unlikely beach read with a gothic riptide,A Little Lifebecame a massive best seller in 2015.
(A rare pan inThe New York Review of Booksprompted an indignantletterfrom Yanagiharas editor.
But Yanagiharas motivations remained mysterious.
She has lived in Manhattan since her 20s, but her heart is in Tokyo and Hawaii.
(She has called the last the closest thing that Asian Americans have to Harlem.)
How to explain this novels success?
(Judes sickest torturer turns out to be a psychiatrist.)
This is Yanagiharas principle: If true misery exists, then so might true love.
That simple idea, childlike in its brutality, informs all her fiction.
This may be surprising.
But it is easy to forget thatA Little Lifeis an unapologetic lifestyle novel.
Perhaps I am being ungenerous.
Surely novelists should describe things!
Better, they should evoke them, like the dead, or the Orient.
Yanagihara has a tourists eye for detail; this can make her a very engaging narrator.
Now it is no crime to put your paid vacation into your novel.
My point is simply that Yanagihara remains at heart a travel writer, if not an unreconstructed one.
To Paradiseis not a novel at all.
The third part ofTo Paradisemay sound topical, but Yanagihara has a lifelong fascination with disease.
Like its predecessor,To Paradiseis a book in which horrible things happen to people for no reason.
A virus makes perfect sense as Yanagiharas final avatar after three novels.
Biologists do not even agree on whether viruses are living organisms.
Free of meaning, it may more perfectly serve the authors higher purpose.
Yet Yanagihara loves him excessively, cloyingly.
This is not sadism; it is closer to Munchausen by proxy.
Yanagihara provides a perfect image for this kind of love.
If disease is Yanagiharas angel of death, gay men are her perfect patients.
We could never be together in the West, Edward.
It is dangerous to be like us out there, pleads one David.
If we couldnt live as who we are, then how could we be free?
And then there is the matter of AIDS.
But this is only because Yanagihara appears to see all diseases as allegories for the human immunodeficiency virus.
This was a curious claim for several reasons.
Second, Yanagihara herself is not gay, though she says she perfunctorily slept with women at Smith College.
God forbid that only gay men should write gay men let a hundred flowers bloom.
I dont know, Yanagihara told one journalist.
To another, she insisted, I dont think theres anything inherent to the gay-male identity that interests me.
That well may be.
Regardless of Yanagiharas private life, her work betrays a touristic kind of love for gay men.
By exaggerating their vulnerability to humiliation and physical attack, she justifies a maternal posture of excessive protectiveness.
This is not an act of dehumanization but the opposite.
This brings us to Charlie, a narrator inTo Paradiseand Yanagiharas only female protagonist to date.
Charlie is a technician who takes care of mouse embryos at an influenza lab in Zone Fifteen.
I knew I would never be loved, Charlie thinks.
I knew I would never love, either.
But this isnt entirely true.
There is no paradise for Charlie.
The odd and tuneless phraseto paradiseprovides a destination but withholds any promise of arrival.
For paradise, insofar as it means heaven, also means death.
Not even love will save Yanagiharas characters.
The twins die, possibly by suicide, and Charles goes on to design death camps.
For that is the meaning of suffering: to make love possible.
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