![]() ![]() To give just one of myriad examples, David Bingham, the heir of a mansion in Part I, returns a century later as a paralegal, passionately in love with one Charles Griffith. Yanagihara, who is the editor of T: The New York Times Style Magazine, goes on to rewrite history in other centuries as well, even as she moves the action from New York to Hawaii and back again, negotiates three major and nine minor time shifts and, most strikingly, ushers her characters offstage only to bring them back, in other eras and other guises, multiple times. In this nation-within-the-nation, gay marriage is allowed - although, lending nuance to the picture, arranged marriages are, too. With breathtaking audacity Yanagihara rewrites America, the Civil War having produced, in this account, not a united country but a conglomeration of territories, including one called the Free States. Deftly paced and judiciously detailed, the tale makes hay with the conventions of the 19th-century novel. ![]() We are given a patriarch, wealth, children there is an arranged marriage, an inheritance, a true love, a class divide and a significant twist. At more than 700 pages, with a span of 200 years, “To Paradise” begins in New York in 1893. It is to Hanya Yanagihara’s considerable credit that her new novel raises these questions. ![]() Can an Asian American woman write a great American novel? Ought a great American novel range from New York to Hawaii, skipping the Midwest? Can it cross from realism to dystopia? And - most important of all, perhaps - can it center on gay men? ![]()
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