Anchor Books
Review by Gabriel Tanguay Ortega
I can only begin this review by presenting my issues.
I’m not sure what this book is about. Colonialism, white saviorism, the rape of nature, sure—but I don’t think any fresh perspectives are offered here, at least nothing new, nothing remarkable, nothing beyond that these are bad. I don’t think this book ultimately serves any purpose other than to provoke and to upset.
I am baffled by Hanya Yanagihara’s weird obsession with gay men/male homosexuality and the way she portrays these in her novels. (I did not finish A Little Life because of this and separately I found it overrated). She provides few female characters ever, and so much of her writing is a sexually ambiguous sausage party fraught with gay overtones. I get the sense that Yanagihara doesn’t quite know how to write female characters, and that she doesn’t even want to. Two of the three primary female characters in The People in the Trees are portrayed critically; Norton’s mother is depicted as pretty but simple and stupid, and Esme, female anthropologist, is depicted as physically ugly, a nuisance, and unreasonable. With the latter, we are constantly reminded by Norton of how ugly Esme is, and the way her character exits the narrative doesn’t help with the overt misogyny contained in this novel.
Yanagihara also seems to be fascinated sexual abuse involving men and boys. I’m not saying this doesn’t have a place in literature or that I wouldn’t read about it, but it just makes me wonder in Yanagihara’s case.
On to the narrators. The People in the Trees is presented as the memoir of Dr. Norton Perina, esteemed scientist, Nobel Prize winner, credited with the discovery of “immortality adjacent.” We are guided through the narrative by Norton, but also by Dr. Ronald Kubodera, Norton’s alleged colleague and friend, who provides context, additional insights, and his own perspectives via an introduction, extensive footnotes, and an afterword. Norton is the absolute worst. Still, I think I hated Kubodera even more for his subservience to and idolatry of Norton. Norton never even mentions Kubodera in his memoirs (?) and we are given nothing about their weird, ambiguous relationship to go off of, and yet that relationship is the entire framework of the story. Yanagihara gives us not one but two unreliable narrators here and both of them are extremely unlikeable. And I usually like unlikeable characters in a work! But these men are just irredeemable and that irredeemability serves no apparent purpose.
Aside from all that, there’s a ton of upsetting content in this novel. I know it’s inspired by the true events of scientist and convicted child molester Dr. Daniel Carleton Gajdusek and his research of the kuru virus, so it isn’t like the horrors Yanagihara portrays here are unprecedented, but she’s taken an already unpleasant subject and put it on steroids. What’s upsetting here? To start, the treatment of animals, the treatment of children, treatment of women, mid-20th century medical experimentation, brutally violent hunting practices, various kinds of sexual abuse involving children, and countless incidents where Norton displays (and does so with self-awareness) sociopathic and predatory tendencies.
What is Yanagihara trying to say when she portrays a Micronesian society as having bizarre sexual rituals in which young boys (and only the boys?) are violated by all the village males while the rest of the villagers and the victim’s family watches? Are we to gather that because this is an isolated population and “lost” tribe that they don’t view such practices as abuse and so then it’s fine? What is she trying to say about homosexuality, about gay men? Is she exploring the unfortunate, age-old argument that gay men are inherently predatory? While gray areas and moral ambiguities might be interesting considerations in a novel, I’m just not sure here. I’m not really sure what Yanagihara is trying to say with this novel at all.
If you survey reader reviews on Goodreads, you will see that many claim the final pages of The People in the Trees is the most upsetting part of the novel, and this is indeed accurate. But again, I have to say that Kubodera’s reaction to these pages is even worse. Come to the end, and you’ll find that he just doesn’t care, and further commits himself to Norton for it.
All of that said, and surprisingly, I must commend Yanagihara for her imagination. She can write, and she can write well, easily flexing her ability to invent and describe. Her descriptions of the tropical island where much of this novel takes place are haunting and fascinating; exhausting in the presentation of nature, Yanagihara successfully transports one to an exotic and strange world where the grotesque—of the natural world and of human nature—is illuminated. The tone of this work is well suited to the subject matter: detached, didactic, believably the tone of scientific inquiry. At times things are overwritten and overly intellectual, something I have found in her other novels, and something I would suggest is her biggest weakness as a writer. For all of my issues with this work and the upsetting content, I still found myself turning the pages. That in and of itself is noteworthy, I think.
This is the hardest book I’ve ever tried to review. Deeply upsetting, annoying, seemingly without a point, but fascinating still. I’m probably most annoyed that Yanagihara was so successful in provoking me and pissing me off for no other reason than to do just that. I suppose that is art though, right?
