

However, rather than making a strident declaration about my overall assessment of “To Paradise” my gut response and balanced opinion is that it's an impressive, thought-provoking epic (especially because it remains so wonderfully engaging for hundreds and hundreds of pages), but its structure also presents some uniquely frustrating difficulties.

The author's new equally lengthy 700-page novel “To Paradise” is eliciting similarly mixed responses as Alex Preston has already declared it a “masterpiece for our times” in The Guardian while in Harper's Rebecca Panovka criticised the novel's aspiration to be an “epidemiological cautionary tale” and posits that “if the antidote to dangerous ideas is didactic storytelling, I have to wonder (apparently with Yanagihara) whether the cure is worse than the disease.” I'm sure some other readers will similarly overly hail or excessively disparage this new novel in an argumentative fashion.

Though Hanya Yanagihara's “A Little Life” was a million-copy bestseller, it also sharply divided readers with some hailing it a life-changing triumph and others deriding it as manipulative misery porn.
