Hanya Yanagihara, THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES

Hanya Yanagihara's accomplished debut is that rarity of rarities: a novel that balances weighty political and ethical themes and powerful character study, and does so without making either element unbearably overt. The plot is loosely inspired by the life of Nobel-winning scientist Daniel Carleton Gajdusek. Gajdusek's analogue is Norton Perina, who became famous for discovering an isolated Micronesian tribe whose diet allowed them to live greatly extended lives, but at a terrible price in mental acuity. He later adopted dozens of children from the island nation where that tribe lived, and was eventually arrested and convicted for molesting one of them. While in prison, he begins an autobiography at the request of a sympathetic (not to say sycophantic) colleague; that autobiography, with explanatory footnotes by the colleague, makes up the main text of The People in the Trees.

As you might expect, unreliable narration is an issue, but less in terms of outright dishonesty than of Perina's failure to understand the extent of his own pathology, to recognize the irony of describing his life as "a story with disease at its heart." Some might see the central question of the novel as how a man so brilliant could do something so awful, but to my mind that's a red herring: genius and morality have no easily quantified relationship. The true subject here is the mutually destructive connection between Perina and the country of U'ivu. Perina, already isolated and emotionally vulnerable after an unusual childhood and an education in the lonely, awkward world of biological research, is further unmoored by the strangeness of U'ivu's jungle landscape and the different social norms he finds there. And later, as Perina's shocking discovery becomes known, U'ivu itself is changed forever by the arrival of Americans, whose clothing, diet, and culture soon threaten to wipe out traditional ways.

Yanagihara knows to approach these issues of colonialism and cultural evolution with a light touch, evoking the inherent tragedy quickly but deftly, and filtering it through Perina's own peculiar perceptions, which mix guilt at what he has brought on with a rather racist sense of his own superiority to the pitiable U'ivuians. A similar ambivalence is present in Perina's commentary on medical ethics, which on the surface is a chillingly indifferent justification of cruelty to animals and humans but which reflects clear guilt about some of the things he's done. That Perina is a nuanced, regretful figure rather than a strawman of scientific and imperial arrogance, is part of the subtlety that keeps The People in the Trees from collapsing under the weight of its own ambitions. It helps also that the world of the novel is richly realized. Yanagihara's prose isn't very elaborate-- more stylish than one would expect from a pure scientist, but not much more-- but that very simplicity, and the work she has clearly done making the settings, cultures, and characters credible, creates a sense of the lifelike more meaningful than what simple vividness of language could achieve.

It's difficult to capture without extensive quotation the intelligence and humanity that Yanagihara demonstrates in her deployment of Perina's perspective, which like most unreliable narration undermines itself for the attentive reader. It's also difficult to say whether the book's finest section is the middle-- Perina's journey into U'ivu, which without becoming overly stylized reflects the emotional dislocation of entering an unfamiliar landscape and meeting people radically different from oneself-- or the ending-- Perina's adoption of dozens of native children and the home life he builds for them, in which his ignorance of the sheer strangeness and sadness of his existence generates a kind of sympathy even as he behaves as monstrously as a man can behave. The former is more stylistically intense, but the latter sharpens the novel's thematic potency by bringing into focus the links between personal and socio-political self-delusion. In any case, the greatness of The People in the Trees is not in an individual section, but in its scope as a whole, the unstated connections that invite rereading, if one can bear to endure its tragedies anew. This smart, heartbreaking novel is one of the best I've read this year.