Prior to my interview with Hanya Yanagihara, an email arrives from her publicist. It warns that the blockbuster literary author of A Little Life, and now To Paradise, does not read reviews of her books or pieces about herself. This, explains the publicist, can cause a frustrating frisson during interviews, because journalists will press Yanagihara to respond to critiques of her work she has not seen.
What intrigues here is that Yanagihara, 47, is not some literary recluse in the JD Salinger vein: she defines her novel-writing as her “night job”; her “day job” is editor-in-chief of the New York Times’ style magazine, T. How, I ask Yanagihara, when we speak, does she contrive to ignore herself, given that her job is to predict the zeitgeist and she is such a talked-about novelist?
“It’s quite easy,” she insists. “Like smoking, right? It’s much easier to have never started, than to start then stop. Writers are very self-involved — and they probably need to be, but editors need to turn their gaze outwards.”
We are speaking ahead of her appearance this Sunday at London’s South Bank Centre. Queen Elizabeth Hall is the first stop on a UK then European publicity tour for her monumental third novel, To Paradise. The trip also incorporates 10 days at Paris Fashion Week. Yanagihara travels lightly, but not without apprehension. “I’ve been sick about six times since October. Not with Covid, with everything but Covid.”
To Paradise was published last month to fevered expectation: a New Yorker profile, rave but also perplexed reviews, and a couple of hatchet jobs in the younger, more attitudinal American cultural zines, Vox and Vulture. Despite being a complex, multi-stranded 700-page hardback, it went straight to number one on the Sunday Times bestseller lists. The reason? Yanagihara’s last novel, the 2015 Booker-shortlisted A Little Life, has become a 21st century key text. Type A Little Life into TikTok and videos appear of ardent millennials weeping at the fate of Jude, the novel’s anguished protagonist.
That contemporary New York tale of four male friends, told over the three decades, also divides audiences. Detractors accuse the unwieldy tome of being torture porn, a voyeuristic gothic text luxuriating in operatic misery. They balk at the novel’s disquieting cocktail of self-harm and aspirational lifestyle. Like F Scott Fitzgerald or Jay McInerney before her, Yanagihara sets her story of rich, attractive, unhappy Americans against a sumptuous backcloth of gourmandising and globetrotting. Here is trauma, but with a high thread-count, probably a pillow menu. Making much of Yanagihara’s editorship of T, and before it Condé Nast Traveller, Vulture’s recent takedown by critic Andrea Long Chu deemed A Little Life “an unapologetic lifestyle novel”. Others have accused it of that most contemporary of sins: appropriation. After American author Garth Greenwell hailed A Little Life as the long-awaited great gay American novel, not everyone loved that its author identified as straight and female.
To Paradise is told on a far more expansive, ambitious canvas than A Little Life, but is also predominantly peopled by gay men. Yanagihara is vague about why that might be. “It was never a sort of intention,” she says. “It was just who the characters happened to be.” She is robust, however, about her right to write those characters. “Appropriation suggests that you must write according to your own tribal identities, and I think that is a dangerous thing for any artist to feel compelled to do. I am no more or less an expert on being an Asian woman than any other Asian woman,” says the author, a fourth-generation American, of Japanese and Korean heritage, raised mostly in Hawaii.
There is an expectation of female artists, she feels, “to bare the body, to talk about women’s lives in a way that feels confessional. And that’s not something I’m interested in. There are great examples, but I’m more interested in female artists who resist — by choice or just by inclination — that exposure of the self”.
“Sometimes, more is revealed about the universal by writing in the skin of another,” she adds. “It forces you to be less self-absorbed, more observant and aware of the connections amongst humans, beyond, despite of, and because of their tribal identities.” She cites playwright Tony Kushner, who said of his screenplay for West Side Story: “One of the great pleasures of art, and one of the reasons we have it, is to be able to witness leaps of empathic imagination”.
To Paradise has many leaps of empathic imagination, but is partially inspired by contemporary America’s convulsive recent politics and polarising debates about identity. “After the 2016 election, I started thinking actively about what America was, and what it liked to fancy itself as being,” says Yanagihara. The January 2017 Trump “Muslim ban”, a travel directive that forbade people from certain, predominantly Muslim, countries entering the US, was a catalyst. “Part of America’s central mythology is that it is a paradise for those who cannot stay, for whatever reason, in the country of their origin,” she says. “But that ban got me wondering if that central mythology was correct? The original concept of Paradise is of a walled garden.”
Writers are self-involved — and they probably need to be, but editors need to turn their gaze outwards
The novel imagines three parallel, alternate visions of America (in 1893, 1993 and 2093). The first book, Washington Square (a nod to Henry James’s novel of the same title) has a 19th century hierarchical society setting. Yet in this hall-of-mirrors’ distortion same-sex marriages flourish. “The conceit is not that they’re in a gay utopia,” says Yanagihara. “But a version of America not founded according to Puritan philosophies.” Gay people have equal rights, but black people and Native Americans do not. “This idea that what can be a heaven for one group is not necessarily a heaven for everybody is something I wanted to explore.”
In the second tale of the book, in 1993, Washington Square is the scene of a lavish party, gathering the city’s gay elite; AIDS is the uninvited spectre. The novel’s final part, set in 2093, is dystopian: Manhattan has become a bulwark against waves of pandemics. Yanagihara did not write this reflectively, inspired by Covid, but prophetically: she first interviewed virologists in 2017.
In New York, Yanagihara’s life is compartmentalised between her high-profile public day job, and her private evening existence as an author. She lives in a former bottle factory in Soho, with expansive rooms and high ceilings. A downside, though, is that the loft apartment building’s steel frames block wi-fi. “But it’s a good apartment to be a nighttime writer in,” she says. “It’s very quiet and faces the back of another building; a cocoon-like burrow made for darkness.” Her writing of A Little Life was disciplined: nine to 12 on weeknights, and six hours on a Saturday and Sunday. With To Paradise, she was less regimented. “In a way, being sent home in March 2020 was a boon, because I automatically gained an hour’s commuting time, and wasn’t going to the theatre, or out to dinner. When I had wind in my sails, I would stay at my desk for as long as I physically could.”
Yanagihara seems happier talking about visual culture — ceramicists, experimental land artists, those leading figurative portraiture’s resurgence —than fellow authors. “I don’t follow the contemporary literary scene or who’s on it,” she says. Asked whom she has been reading, she mentions only dead white British men: Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Trollope. Her plans for her visit to London this week are more visual than bookish: to visit the John Soane Museum, the New Craftsmen shop and the studio of floral installation artist Silke Rittson-Thomas.
Critics have found To Paradise, with each of its discrete novella-like books ending on a cliffhanger, depressing. Yanagihara thinks “it quite hopeful. People endure: they learn how to adapt to even very bad circumstances. They push onwards; all these characters possess the idea that they will go someplace better; that they will finally find the person who makes them feel less lonely.” She finished it over a summer in Hawaii, which she still calls home. She is more ambivalent about New York, her base since 1995. “Many people I love are here, but in all honesty, I’d rather be somewhere else.” Hawaii? Europe? “No, I think I’d like to live in Asia. A farmhouse outside Kyoto would be nice.”
Does she believe in this idea of the great American novel? “I think every American novel is a great American novel,” she quips. With To Paradise she may have written one.
