I love Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, so I was pretty excited when I first heard about her follow up novel, To Paradise, until I started reading the reviews on Goodreads, which criticize the novel’s lack of cohesion and even suggest that it is boring. This put me off reading it until the paperback version came out. To Paradise consists of three very loosely connected stories about love, loss and finding one’s own version of paradise, and a Washington Square townhouse. I found the first two stories to be both interesting and boring at the same time, but the third and final story is what makes To Paradise worth reading.

The first story, “Washington Square”, is set in 1893 in an alternate version of the US where after the civil war the country broke up into different unions and colonies. It is about a young man named David Bingham who lives in a Washington Square townhouse with his grandfather in New York, one of the Free States where gay marriage is accepted and normalized. David’s grandfather has arranged for David to meet with a potential husband, the much older Charles Griffith, but David, an ineffectual man who appears to be suffering from a bad case of ennui, finds himself falling in love with a poor piano player named Edward, whose motivations for pursuing a relationship with Charles are suspect. I found Charles to be an annoying character that I did not have much empathy for, and therefore I did not care about what happened to him. It is too bad such an intriguing premise about a different US history is squandered on such a useless character.

The second story, “Lipo-Wao-Nahele”, is set in 1993 during the AIDS epidemic. It is about a young man named David Bingham, who has moved from his home in Hawaii to New York and started a relationship with a much older man named Charles Griffith, who owns a townhouse in Washington Square. David and Charles have nothing to do with the David and Charles of “Washington Square”, Yanagihara has just recycled the names. David has led Charles to believe that his father is dead, but the truth is revealed when David unexpectedly receives a letter from his father (also named David): David is a descendent of the Hawaiian royal family, when Hawaii was a kingdom and before it was annexed by the US. David (the father) is another ineffectual man who allows himself to be manipulated by his friend, Edward, who wants to restore the Kingdom of Hawaii. I found it difficult to get invested in this story about the rights of indigenous Hawaiian people because of yet another annoying useless character.

The third story, “Zone Eight”, is primarily set in 2093 in a dystopian future where a series of pandemics has decimated the human population and led to New York being governed by totalitarianism. It is about a young woman named Charlie who is learning to navigate life without her grandfather, an influential scientist named Charles Griffith who played a role in the establishment of the totalitarian government, but who cared very much for his granddaughter and who went to great lengths to secure her future after the death of her dissident father, David. “Zone Eight” is the longest and the most interesting of the three stories, and it is also the most fully formed. Charlie narrowly survived one of the pandemics as a child but was left mentally damaged, and it is fascinating to see the world from her perspective as she tries to puzzle out the mysteries of things that are going on around her. Her grandfather, Charles, is a complex character whose decisions make me question my own morality and the lengths I would go to in order to protect the people that I love. Thankfully David only has a small role in this story and does not ruin it.

If you have read A Little Life and enjoyed it, then I think it is worth reading To Paradise and tempering your expectations as it is a bit of a slog to get through. I think Hanya Yanagihara is an immensely talented writer, I just wish To Paradise had only been about the characters and events of “Zone Eight”.