To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara

This author, and therefore this book, are not for everyone, and I struggle to explain exactly why I love her work, but the fact is that I do. The author herself has described her central theme as the duality between dull, enervating safety and flamboyant, enervating danger. I loved her last book, A Little Life, even though there are no likeable characters in it and everyone is damaged and in pain. The major theme is the tension between safety and danger, and this book takes those two elements from the level of the individual to the level of society. It is made up of three sections: one novella, one set of paired short stories, and one final novel. All take place in the same townhouse in New York’s Washington Square at hundred-year intervals, and all concern a cast of characters with the same names, all in various configurations. At the center of each section are David, Edward, and Charles/Charlie. Generally speaking the Charles' represent safety and the Edward's are danger. In 1893, David is a wealthy young man of society in a world where gay marriage is legal, in love with poor and charming Edward but betrothed to rich and respectable Charles. In 1993, there are two Davids: one a young man in New York, living with his wealthy older lover Charles, and that David’s father, living in Hawaii, in an abusive relationship with impoverished Edward. In 2093, the protagonist is a young woman named Charlie who lives in a dystopian New York ravished by pandemics, in a loveless marriage with Edward, fascinated by a mysterious stranger named David. This is a simplification, of course, and there are elements of Margaret Atwood's dystopian view of what the future holds for all of us who are not white straight men in the last and longest section, but it is deeper, wider, and no less glorious and painful to read than both Atwood's work and the author's previous book. Simply the best.