The People In The Trees by Hanya Yanagihara

I'd heard a bit about Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life from someone or other, but when I looked into it via some reviews, the consistent message was that it was a great book (some said the best book they'd ever read), but it was also extremely disturbing. At my age, I don't need a lot of Disturbing, but I'm willing to go there if the writing truly is great. And I have to admit that my interest in the book was piqued when I saw that the 10th anniversary edition of the novel had been released as four illustrated paperbacks in a boxed set:

So I thought I'd sneak up on this by reading Yanagihara's first novel, The People in the Trees. It wasn't immediately available via the library, but Internet Archive had a copy, so off I scampered into the jungle.

I found some striking moments along the way.

 "...our lives are filled with busyness because those thin chinks of time are all we truly can master." (11)

"Travelers heading west to California would stop in Peet for an egg salad sandwich and a celery soda from the general store near the station before reembarking. The townspeople thrived from these impermanent relationships, which were in their own way pure: the exchange of money for goods, a pleasant farewell, the assurance that neither party would see the other again. After all, what are most relationships in life but exactly this, though stretched flabbily over years and generations?" (32-33)

"...his small, inexplicable life alone in that strange house, with no one around to distract him from the meagerness of his own existence." (67)

"One of the attractions of medical school for the unimaginative (or, if I am to be more charitable, to the less dreamily inclined) is certainly the lack of choices it offers." (68) That seems unkind, but I am reminded of the conversation I had with my nephrologist, in which he told me that he'd never heard of Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett, or Jackson Pollack. Hmmm.

"...his voice was not toneless but rather shaded and rich and somehow substantial, something that conjured a dense forest of variegated trees, all lush and stately and grand." (79) I'm wondering if this has something to do with the title. It's a pretty strange description of a voice, after all.

"The next day it was abruptly hot, and the sunlight seemed to drool through the leaftops like honey." (187)

"I did not know a great deal about women then, but even my limited exposure to them had taught me that they were simply not for me. A wife! What would I discuss with her? I imagined days sitting around a plain white table and sawing away at a piece of meat burned crisp as toast, hearing the clop of her shoes as she walked across a shining linoleum floor, her hectoring conversations about money or the children or my job; I saw myself silent, listening to her drone on about her day and the laundry and whom she had seen at the store and what they had said." (280) That's some cold shit, for sure...but not without some hint of truth.

It's hard not to make a connection between Yanagihara's Ivu'ivuian Dreamers (who are "immortal," but who become senile as they age) and Jonathan Swift's struldbruggs of Luggnagg (who live forever but do not stop aging). 

Public Domain

"Shall I tell you how with each new child I acquired, I would irrationally think, This is the one. This is the one who will make me happy. This is the one who will complete my life. This is the one who will be able to repay me for years of looking."anymore..Norton's attempts to save the children of the island seems to be driven in part by sincere compassion, but this bit connects that drive with his own search for meaning and happiness, and makes me think about my own drives and desires. It seems to me that I feel the same way about books and music and movies. "This one will complete my life." Or perhaps the next one. Women used to be that way for me. Not anymore.

"...I felt pity for him, which is often the first step toward liking anyone." (306) Hmmm. Is that true?

And...done. Six days. Not lightning fast, but a pretty good bit of double time HARCH for me. And with good reason: the story was very compelling and the writing was excellent. Yes, there was very disturbing stuff in here. Gang rape of a young boy being the worst. But it was portrayed as a part of a native ritual...and the narrator of this part of the story, who would go on to sexually abuse several of the native children he brought home with him...saw it as such. And saw his abuse of said children as "love." Normally that would be where I stopped reading. (This abuse wasn't revealed to be true until the very end of the book, though.) I couldn't tell you why it didn't work out that way this time. Abuse of any sort is revolting to me, and abuse of a child is unforgivable. Does that invalidate the value of this book? An important question for me, since I know that A Little Life has this same element at its core.

I don't know the answer to that yet. I do know that I won't be buying that beautiful little box, though.