To Paradise, a novel novel GET IT?! (I’m tired after 704 pages!)

I read this honker/hunker of a book by Hanya Yanagihara for my online book club. It was good and I know I’ll think about it for a while, mainly because I am in awe of writers who can tell such expansive stories!

In book three of this novel (yes, the book is divided in to books!), there is a passage kinda towards the end that I’ve re-read a few times and I have subsequently placed a tiny post-it for easy revisitation.

This passage speaks to me as “junior year” of the pandemic approaches. Yanagihara wrote most of this novel before COVID-19 hit, which makes this all the more eerie, and powerful.

More and more frequentyly these days, I think about how, of all the horros the illnesses wreaked, one of the least-discussed is the brisk brutality with which it sorted us in to categories. The first, most obvious one was the living and the dead. Then there was the sick and the well, the bereaved and the relieved, the cured and the incurable, the insured and the uninsured. We kept track of these statistics; we wrote them all down. But then there were the other divisions, the kind that didn’t appear to warrant recording: The people who lived with other peple, and the people who lived alone. The people who had money, and the people who didn’t. The people who had connections, and the people who didn’t. The people who had somewhere else to go, and the people who didn’t.

In the end, it hadn’t made as much of a difference as we thought it would. The rich died anyway, maybe more slowly than they should have; some of the poor survived. After the first round of the virus had whipped through the city, scooping up all the easiest prety - the indigent and the infirm and the young - it had returned for seconds, and thirds, and fourths, until it was only the luckiest who remained. And yet no one was truly lucky: Is Charlie’s life lucky? Perhaps it is - she is here, after all, she can talk and walk and learn, she is able-bodied and lucid, she is loved and, I know, capable of loving. But she is not who she might have been, because none of us are - the illness took something from all of us, and so our definition of luck is a matter of relativity, as luck always is, its parameters designated by others. The disease clarified everything about who we are; it revealed the fictions we’d all constructed about our lives. It revealed that progress, that tolerance, does not necessarily beget more kindness. It revealed how brittle the poetry of our lives truly is - it exposed freindship as something flimsy and conditional; partnership as contextual and circumstantial. No law, no arrangement, no amount of love was stronger than our own need to survive, or, for the more generous among us, our need for our people, whoever they were, to survive. I sometimes sense a faint mutual embarrassment among those of us who lived - who had sought to deprive someone else, maybe even some else we knew, or a relative of someone we knew, of medication or hospitalization or food if it meant we could save ourselves? Who had reported someone they knew, perhaps even liked - a neighbor, an acquaintance, a colleague - to the Health Ministry, and who had turned up the volume on their headphones to muffle the sounds of them begging for help as they were led away to the waiting van, shouting all the while that someone had been misinformed, that the rash that had spread across their daughter’s arm was only eczema, that the sore on their son’s forehead was only a pimple?

And now the illness is under control, and we are back to considering the incidentals of life once more: whether we might be able to find chicken rather than tofu at the grocery; or whether our children might be admitted into this college versus that one; or whether we might be lucky in this year’s housing lottery, and move from Zone Seventeen to Zone Eight, or Zone Eight to Zone Fourteen.

But behind all these concerns and minor anxieties is something deeper: the truth of who we are, our essential selves, the thing that emerges when everything else has been burned away. We have learned to accommodate that person as much as we can, to ignore who we know ourselves to be. Most of the time, we’re successful. We must be: Pretending is the cost of sanity. But we all know who we really are. If we had lived, it is because we are worse than we ever believed ourselves to be, not better. Indeed, it feels at times as if all who remain are those who were wily or tenacious or scheming enough to survive. I know that this belief is its own kind of romance, but in my more fanciful moments, it makes perfect sense - we are the left-behind, the dregs, the rats fighting for bits of rotten food, the people who chose to stay on earth, while those better and smarter than we are have left for some other realm we can only dream of, the door to which we’re too frightened to open, even to peek inside.

Unreal, right?! I have asked myself these same things, granted not nearly as eloquently, and usually summed up as, “What the ACTUAL FUCK?!”

I am perusing Yanagihara’s wikipedia now and reading some of the articles linked in it. I’m glad I did that after reading the novel as to have some “fresh eyes” on the book and using the book jacket’s description as a guide. Why yes, I am a snobby English major, thanks!

Anyway, in The Sydney Morning Herald, the whole article is well worth the read, and Yanagihara says this:

“After the 2016 election [of Donald Trump], like a lot of Americans I felt a sense of unknowingness; the country we thought we understood was not it. It was an exciting time to write. The US is such a young country, so changeable, and because of who populates it and the principles on which it was founded, it could quickly become anything. That was the foundation of the book. Each of the strands has this idea of freedom for some, not for all. The rights we give people are not givens; progress is not linear.”

“I felt a sense of unknowingness; the country we thought we understood was not it.”

Whewwww, ain’t that a slap on the ass, and not the fun kind!

Recently, I have realized I expect the world to operate as it ought to, instead of how it is. It’s a tough pill to swallow, especially because it’s so fkn easy to be negative in the first place. Buttt acknowledging the truth is real. Perhaps that is why that book excerpt is remaining on my conscious. We can comprehend the things, but accepting those things is a different stage, and I’d say, a harder stage to pass.

Happy Reading!!