Its central character, David Bingham, is the nervous, slightly depressed, 28-year-old scion of the most powerful banking family in the city. A slim, 170-page section titled “Washington Square” introduces us to an alternative, late-nineteenth-century New York. The book progresses, instead, through increasingly pedestrian writing shoehorned into a chaotic structure that suggests indifference to form, raising some troubling questions along the way: Why has Yanagihara written a novel that announces such large questions and over such enormous length while showing little interest or ability to deliver on them? And why has the book been published in this state? Yet Yanagihara brings to her broad themes a narrow social lens, which never widens sufficiently or with enough depth to make the vast scale of the novel convincing.

The framing of the new novel is far more expansive than those earlier works, combining something of the societal sweep of the first book with the pronounced length of her second. An account of the friendship between four young men in New York, it was widely acclaimed as the great gay novel of our times and was a finalist for the Booker Prize and the National Book Award. A Little Life (2015), her second novel, was a hit both critically and commercially. Her first novel, The People in the Trees (2013), is set on a Pacific island where an American researcher appears to have discovered a forest dweller group that has achieved immortality. Yanagihara, who grew up mostly in Hawaii of Asian American parents and is currently the editor in chief of the New York Times style magazine T, has drawn on aspects of her childhood as well as her metropolitan adult life in her earlier fiction. To Paradise is not Yanagihara’s first venture into power relations among individuals and social groups. The future we are living in is undoubtedly haunted by the past, and it is perfectly reasonable for a novel to set out to explore such issues, and in an inventive form that involves more than marketable glitz. Its promise is to show how such upheavals inform individual lives and how “three different versions of the American experiment … and the elusive promise of utopia,” as the press release puts it, inflect its characters’ search for personal happiness. At over 700 pages, with three sections ranging from the nineteenth century to the 1990s to 2094, To Paradise purports to take in queer culture, the colonization of Hawaii, and a global unraveling caused by the conjunction of pandemics, authoritarian governments, and climate collapse. Just because mainstream publishing favors shallow, airbrushed explorations of serious subjects does not mean that the issues themselves are not of significance.

The dominance of this approach in itself is no reason to be suspicious of Hanya Yanagihara’s endeavor to write a maximalist novel of her own.

Hanya to paradise