Poured Over: Hanya Yanagihara on To Paradise

“And when you are lucky enough as a writer to have your book be found, and then have it be a source of someone’s passion, someone who is not normally spoken to by the book publishing industry, who then with generosity and real passion, finds a way to tell other people about it, you cannot get luckier than that.” Hanya Yanagihara’s second novel, A Little Life was already a word-of-mouth must read, a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award and winner of the Kirkus Prize when #Booktok introduced Jude & Co. to a new set of readers and kicked the book’s sales into the stratosphere. Hanya’s following up her massive hit with To Paradise, a story of love and ambition, loneliness and freedom, that cuts across time and reimagined Americas. Hanya joins us on the show to talk about Hawaii and New York, her admiration for the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro, what paradise means for her characters, the helix of history, and more. Featured Books: To Paradise and A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, The Hours by Michael Cunningham, and Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and engineered by Harry Liang. New Episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus eps on Saturdays) on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and wherever you listen to podcasts.

One of Our Best Books of the Year (So Far) for 2022.

From this Episode:

B&N: Which brings me to 2093, New York, the Washington Square townhouse has been broken up into apartments. It’s a New York that has not yet happened. But frankly, could. Tt has a David Mitchell Cloud Atlas feel to it, in some ways, it has some Ishiguro feel to it as well. And I don’t mean just Never Let Me Go and Kathy H’s voice there, or Klara, in Klara in the Sun. But there was a little bit of Christopher banks, our intrepid detective from When We Were Orphans, and a dash of Stevens, the butler from Remains of the Day. And I say that because Charlie, who’s a young woman who has survived being sick, but there are serious repercussions for her as a result of that, and her grandfather, who, Wow, he really meant to do the right thing. And wow, he really did not, I think is the best way to explain that without giving away lots of stuff. But the way that grandfather, Charles, really is telling himself stories, and telling his granddaughter stories as a result. And she, I mean, poor thing, really, poor thing, Charlie, she really wants to be loved. She’s married to a man who’s perfectly nice, but it is not a marriage in a traditional sense. It’s more straight up for protection, because Charlie really can’t navigate the world. Where did Charlie come from?

Hanya Yanigahara: I don’t know. But I’ve been thinking about her for a while. And I mean, I have a great deal of fondness for all the characters in the book and you have to, you’re spending a lot of time with them. And I think the worst thing a writer can do is treat any of her characters with disdain. It always means that the characters are thin and unconvincing and, and that the reader doesn’t want to spend time with him either. But I really did spend the most time in the sense with Charlie because hers is the most straightforward first-person narrative. And she really is the culmination of all these books in a lot of ways, that the end of this particular America is Charlie and her grandfather. I mean, I am a huge Ishiguro admirer. I think what he does in his books is so extraordinary and he has two themes, you know, history and memory. And in each book, he creates a completely different edifice to tell the story to explore the ideas of history, memory, and sometimes it is an invented medieval fairy tale like The Buried Giant, sometimes it’s a morality story as in The Remains of the Day, sometimes it’s a futuristic allegory as in Never Let Me Go. Sometimes it is an abstract conceptual book as in The Unconsoled. I mean, it is very, very hard to do that kind of work. And the the sentences are very simple, the writing’s very simple, there’s nothing self indulgent. And yet he is able to convey with very simple language, a true sense of singular melancholy. I love Never Let Me Go. And I love The Remains of the Day, I mean, and I really love The Buried Giant as well. And in Charles, as you mentioned, in the third part of the book, the doctor, there is, I think, a sense of Stevens, the butler, this person who has had to justify certain decisions himself, but also I think this is somewhat different from Stevens really does make decisions he feels are the best. And we throw around this term, often that you don’t want to be on the wrong side of history. And one of the things this book suggests is we don’t really know what history is going to say; some things seem pretty obvious that whether you’re making the wrong wrong or right decision, but most decisions I think that people make (if we’re going to give them the benefit of the doubt) are one bad thing over another. And certainly the decisions that Charles makes in this third part of the book, he makes them with good intentions. And then he also has to suffer as well as everyone else, the consequences of decisions. And so there’s a lot of regret in that book. And then that narrative, he in a sense, is a personal symbol of a country’s regret, of looking back on recent actions and thinking, God, if I hadn’t done that, then life would be this way. If I chosen the opposite way, then life would be better. And it is his torment and his punishment. And I don’t mean that I thought of him in a punitive sense, but it is his self-imposed punishment in the way that he has to live in the world that he helped create.

B&N: The jacket on this book is a much more classic piece of art than your previous jackets, and I’m wondering how it came about.

Hanya Yanagihara: I knew we needed a figurative cover, and I’m really sick of graphic and all-type covers. Cover design, like all sorts of design, whether it’s fashion or magazine design, goes through trends, and we’re in a moment in which everyone’s doing sort of a neon, very poppy, very cut out looking cover. And I wanted this to feel deliberately old fashioned, but also a little timeless. And so I knew we needed a person on the cover. There’s a work of art by an artist named Hubert Vos that hangs in the Honolulu Museum of Art and it’s of a paniolo. So it’s of a Hawaiian cowboy. And I looked him up on a whim to see if he had any other paintings of Hawaiian people. And he did and it’s this painting called Iokepa, Hawaiian Fisher Boy, that he made in 1898. And this painter was not famous or well known. He was Dutch. As I mentioned, he was married to a woman, his second wife, I believe, who was part American, part Hawaiian, because that was, you know, a nationality at the time. And I also think she was part Chinese. It was because of her that he came to Hawaii and spent the brief intense period painting and he later on went to become one of the last Westerners to paint the Empress Dowager Xici, the last empress of China. And so he mostly specialized in portraiture, and in still lifes, but what I loved about this painting in particular, I think he’s a very beautiful, boy, this young man, I just love the expression on his face, he looks so weary, and it’s almost as if he’s looking into the future, or maybe the past to capture where he’s looking, and he sees something coming towards them. And he can’t tell whether they’re friend or foe, and that kind of expression, and that kind of weariness, and watchfulness felt right for this book as well.