Book excerpt: “To Paradise” by Hanya Yanagihara

Hanya Yanagihara, the author of 2015’s “A Little Life,” returns with the New York Times bestseller “To Paradise” (Doubleday) – a trilogy of novellas, set in one New York City townhouse across three different centuries, in which characters search for an idea of utopia.

Read an excerpt below.

He had come into the habit, before dinner, of taking a walk around the park: ten laps, as slow as he pleased on some evenings, briskly on others, and then back up the stairs of the house and to his room to wash his hands and straighten his tie before descending again to the table. Today, though, as he was leaving, the little maid handing him his gloves said, “Mister Bingham says to remind you that your brother and sister are coming tonight for supper,” and he said, “Yes, thank you, Jane, for reminding me,” as if he’d in fact forgotten, and she made a little curtsy and closed the door behind him.

He would have to go more quickly than he would were his time his own, but he found himself being deliberately contrary, walking instead at his slower pace, listening to the clicks of his boot-heels on the pavestones ringing purposefully in the cold air. The day was over, almost, and the sky was the particular rich ink-purple that he couldn’t see without remembering, achily, being away at school and watching everything shade itself black and the outline of the trees dissolve before him. 

Winter would be upon them soon, and he had worn only his light coat, but nevertheless, he kept going, crossing his arms snug against his chest and turning up his lapels. Even after the bells rang six, he put his head down and continued moving forward, and it wasn’t until he had finished his fifth circumnavigation that he turned, sighing, to walk north on one of the paths to the house, and up its neat stone steps, the door opening for him before he reached the top, the butler reaching already for his hat.

“In the parlor, Master David.”

“Thank you, Adams.”

Outside the parlor doors he stood, passing his hands repeatedly over his hair—a nervous habit of his, much as the repeated smoothing of his forelock as he read or drew, or the light drawing of his forefinger beneath his nose as he thought or waited for his turn at the chessboard, or any number of other displays to which he was given—before sighing again and opening both doors at once in a gesture of confidence and conviction that he of course did not possess. They looked over at him as a group, but passively, neither pleased nor dismayed to see him. He was a chair, a clock, a scarf draped over the back of the settee; something the eye had registered so many times that it now glided over it, its presence so familiar that it had already been drawn and pasted into the scene before the curtain rose.

“Late again,” said John, before he’d had a chance to say anything, but his voice was mild and he seemed not to be in a scolding mood, though one never quite knew with John.

“John,” he said, ignoring his brother’s comment but shaking his hand and the hand of his husband, Peter; “Eden”—kissing first his sister and then her wife, Eliza, on their right cheeks. “Where’s Grandfather?”

“Cellar.”

“Ah.”

They all stood there for a moment in a silence, and for a second David felt the old embarrassment he often sensed for the three of them, the Bingham siblings, that they should have nothing to say to one another—or rather, that they should not know how to say anything—were it not for the presence of their grandfather, as if the only thing that made them real to one another were not the fact of their blood or history, but him.

Excerpted from “To Paradise: A Novel” by Hanya Yanagihara Copyright © 2022 by Hanya Yanagihara. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

       
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