Words&Dirt

After being blown away last year by Hanya Yangihara’s second novel, A Little Life, I resolved to read her debut as well. In many ways, it’s hard to imagine two stories that have less in common. But both books are clearly the product of an intellect sharpened with the language of disgust and brutality. Yanagihara’s ability to elicit a visceral response from me is unique among modern writers.

The People in the Trees is a scientific fairy tale suffused with horror, a fountain of youth narrative turned brackish by a harsh confluence of fate and human error. It is the fictional memoir of Norton Perina, a young doctor who makes a miraculous and ruinous discovery while studying the inhabitants of a remote Micronesian island during the 1950s. As we travel deeper into the jungles of Perina’s experience (both internal and external) we unveil not only a disquieting parable about the dark side of science, but also an intimate portrait of a man whose unchecked ambitions and misguided affections lead to disaster.

Yanagihara employs two strategies that capture the reader’s attention. The first is a clever mixture of metafiction and unreliable narration. The novel’s opening takes place during the mid-1990s, with news articles informing us that Perina has been accused and convicted of a terrible crime. Then we are treated to a preface narrated by Ronald Kubodera––one of Perina’s academic acolytes––in which he assures us that Perina is nothing more than a renowned septuagenarian who has been wrongly accused. Kubodera claims to be in possession of Perina’s memoirs, which Perina has written during his two-year prison sentence. Kubodera adds footnotes to augment Perina’s text, and agrees to share the manuscript with the reader, but with an ominous caveat:

I have cut––judiciously––passages that I felt did not enrich the narrative or were not otherwise of any particular relevance; such deletions will not detract from the overall portrait Norton has painted of himself here. (19)

Next, Perina’s narration begins. He takes us back in time to his earliest memories, advancing linearly thereafter. But there seems to be no discernible difference between Kubodera’s writing style and Perina’s, so we’re left with an insecure sense of authorship. Who to trust? Kubodera, Perina, both, or neither? Will any of this information be reliable? What criteria will we use to sort (fictional) fact from (fictional) fiction? This is a damned useful device for generating suspense.

Yanagihara’s second mode of seduction is her startling and insightful prose. From the outset, Perina proves himself a decidedly distasteful man. Even as a young boy, he exhibits signs of cruelty and apathy toward others. As these qualities crystallize into scientific ambition, it is only Yanagihara’s haunting language that keeps us in Perina’s corner. Here she describes the first time Perina ever felt love for his brother, Owen:

I can still recall, with a sort of odd, unpleasant clarity, that unfamiliar and inarticulable sensation I began experiencing, about halfway through the journey, whenever I gazed at Owen. I remember feeling something pressing against my chest at those times, substantial and insistent and yet not uncomfortable, not painful. After a few episodes, I deduced it was, for lack of a better word, love. Naturally, I never said anything to him (we did not have those sorts of conversations), but I remember quite clearly looking at him one evening as we stood at the prow of the ship, at his sharp nose that ended in a blobbish wodge of putty (my nose), listening to the dark water slap against the side of the boat, and feeling almost overwhelmed. When Owen spoke to me, I was unable to answer, and had to pretend I felt ill, so I could go to bed and lie awake by myself and think about my new discovery.

The feeling did not last, of course. It came and went throughout our trip, and then over the years. And although it was never as intense as it was that day on the water, I grew to first accept and then long for that familiar ache, even though I knew that while experiencing it I was unable to accomplish, much less contemplate, anything else. (54-5, emphasis hers)

Through observing Perina’s elusive capacity for affection, we keep hoping he will learn to translate the beauty of his inner monologue into praiseworthy behavior, despite mounting evidence of his inherent inability to do so.

Yanagihara beguiles us not only with the weird labyrinth of Perina’s mind, but also with lush descriptions of the jungles traversed by Perina and his fellow scientists on the U’ivu Islands:

I felt as if the jungle were constantly showing off to itself––every rock, every tree, every surface that would stay still was trimmed, bedecked, baroque with greenery: there were fistulas of bushes wrapped with creeping vines spotted with moss and lichen and trees draped with great valances of hairy, hanging roots from some other unseen plant that lived, I imagined, high above the canopy. Things flew up from the floor and trickled down from the treetops. It was an exhausting performance that never ended, and for what? To prove the imperturbability of nature, I suppose––its unknowability, its fundamental lack of interest in humanity. Or at least that’s what it seemed like at the time: a mockery. It was absurd, I knew, to wake each day and resent the jungle and my own insignificance in it. But I couldn’t help it. I began to think I might be going a little––well, not crazy, I suppose, but that I might be losing touch, as they say now. And then I felt childish, and ashamed. (125-6, emphasis hers)

Although The People in the Trees is a different narrative in many ways, passages such as these reveal a clear debt to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Among the two books’ common themes is a depiction of science and capitalism as modes of institutional plunder. As Perina observes, this process requires a special combination of unscrupulous determination and wily self-justification:

It is astonishing and a little sad to realize how many discoveries, how many advancements, have been delayed for years, for decades, not because the information was unavailable but because of sheer cowardice, fear of being laughed at, of being ostracized by one’s colleagues.

Luckily, I was never limited by such worries or constrained by such fears (being ostracized by my colleagues seemed something to covet, not avoid). (305-6)

This perspective may be correct in a very general sense, but Perina’s “bravery” in bringing his discovery to the developed world results less from a benevolent desire to aid humanity and more from his lack of fellow feeling and desire for personal gain. Additionally, Perina’s self-proclaimed moral relativism amplifies his ability to ignore the unethical nature of his own behavior (219).

Although Perina is willing to compromise U’ivu’s native life and culture, his feelings about doing so are not unambiguous. Long after it’s too late to reverse the tide of civilization washing over U’ivu, he laments:

Shall I tell you how there are really no new stories in cases like these: how the men turned to alcohol, how the women neglected their handiwork, how they all grew fatter and coarser and lazier, how the missionaries plucked them from their houses as easily as one would pick an overripe apple from a branch? Shall I tell you of the venereal diseases that seemed to come from nowhere but, once introduced, never left? Shall I tell you how I witnessed these things myself, how I kept returning and returning, long after the grant money had disappeared, long after people had lost interest, long after the island had gone from being an Eden to becoming what it was, what it is: just another Micronesian ruin. (371)

Even worse than Perina’s callous treatment of the U’ivu Islands is his perverse attempt at redemption. Now a world-famous scientist, Perina begins adopting U’ivuan children––forty-three altogether––ostensibly as a way of assuaging his guilt about U’ivu’s fate. He raises the children in a large home in Maryland, providing them with an education and a stable (if chaotic) home. It would seem a noble gesture if Perina’s affection for the children were genuine and his rate of adoption less profligate. But instead, they amount to nothing more than symbols of Perina’s regret and disaffection:

How fervently I had hoped and tried to recapture that sensation, to make that joy part of my daily life––that was why I had brought them here. That was what I had wanted from them. And yet with each one, the feeling of pleasure I craved was ever-briefer, more elusive, more difficult to conjure, and I was lonelier and lonelier, and finally they were evidence only of my losses, of my unanswerable sorrows. (423, emphasis hers)

Ultimately, Perina reveals himself as a pathetic and violent enigma, a demon dressed in the robes of progress. Faithful Kubodera will not abandon him, but the reader is left with no other choice.

The People in the Trees is an engrossing and deeply disturbing novel, one that will crawl inside you and settle down. It marks the exciting arrival of a singular talent in modern literature.

Rating: 8/10