This section is in essence a love story, as David, “still almost-young”, falls for the 23-year-old Edward, a music teacher. This is a novel that really forces you to examine your woolly liberal assumptions about the motives behind lockdowns The “Free States” based their independence on the question of gay marriage – it seems that, with all stigma stripped away from homosexuality, around half of the citizens choose same-sex relationships.
He lives with his grandfather, Nathaniel, in a beautiful house in Washington Square. Our hero for this section is David Bingham, the dreamy and foppish scion of a banking empire. History has gone through a delicious skew, so that the north-eastern states have seceded from the rest of the US, part of a more general post-civil war rearrangement. The first, Washington Square, is set in the 1890s in a fictional New York. To Paradise is arranged in three discrete but interrelated parts. Most readers, I think, will concentrate on the book’s longest section, the third, in which Yanagihara writes of a series of pandemics and the way they reshape society in the decades ahead. I could tell you, for instance, that it’s about colonialism and racism in America today or that it’s a queer counterfactual history (and future) that asks what would happen if sexuality were destigmatised (and then restigmatised) or an elegy for the lost kingdom of Hawaii. T o Paradise, Hanya Yanagihara’s vast, complex follow-up to her Booker-shortlisted A Little Life, is a novel of many faces.
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