![]() ![]() In many ways – not least the questions of political and social responsibility it poses, especially in the face of global catastrophe – it is a darker work, and yet a more fruitfully puzzling, multifaceted one. Where the suffering and hopelessness of A Little Life created an overwhelming experience that left readers divided around the issue of how much they could take, this is a far subtler delineation of those who feel hamstrung, beleaguered, inadequate to the task ahead. The novel’s title invokes a feeling of expectant adventuring, of happiness waiting somewhere what, perhaps, nation-builders might feel just as strongly as individuals at the beginning of their lives. In some ways, this is a work whose fascination with entropy – the breakdown of societies, of property, of the body – makes its job almost impossibly hard we feel as though we are standing in the centre of ever-decreasing circles. each section conjures a vivid, often startlingly reconfigured America. There are few surface resemblances between A Little Life, Yanagihara’s Booker-shortlisted second novel, and To Paradise, but in both she is deeply, compulsively interested in characters for whom the world seems unattainable, whose histories and temperaments coalesce to render them marginal, held back. intricately assembled themes and intensely anxious preoccupations. ![]()
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