Here Yanagihara plays with Hawaiian legend and erasures large and small.

David’s fraught past, and the lengths he goes to in order to hide his secrets, propel “Lipo-Wao-Nahele” forward. Here Yanagihara captures the opprobrium visited upon victims of the epidemic, with strong echoes of Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia (also released in 1993). The second section, “Lipo-Wao-Nahele,” set in 1993, is about another David-this one a young Hawaiian man living with his older partner Charles in AIDS-ravaged New York. Cinematic and lyrical, “Washington Square” appeals to the eye as well as the ear.

The language of “Washington Square” is rich and exacting, calling to mind the social novels of Henry James and Edith Wharton, and the lavish textures of Martin Scorsese’s 1993 film adaptation of The Age of Innocence. The frail David receives the coveted prize of the townhouse, but there’s a catch: his grandfather would like him to exchange vows with an older suitor, Charles, to maintain the ruling class family’s power-a proposition David rejects once he meets a handsome, charismatic and impoverished music teacher. As To Paradise opens, the elderly patriarch of the Bingham family meets with his three grown grandchildren in his elegant Greenwich Village townhouse to divvy up his fortune.

In New York, same-sex marriages are accepted (and arranged) just like heterosexual unions, albeit constrained by considerations of wealth, class, and citizenship. The first section, “Washington Square,” set in 1893, depicts an America where the postbellum Northern Free States are governed by rigid hierarchies, the Southern “Colonies” preserve their racist institutions, and the West is an enchanted place of escape. With impeccable control, she examines the rot at the heart of the American experiment, reimagining the nation’s legacy at three different junctures in an alternative history. To Paradise, Yanagihara’s dense, ambitious new novel, is a leap forward: she constructs a wildly speculative story that enthralls even as it challenges readers. A few contrarians shrugged it off as overwrought, but few could deny that a major talent blazed beneath its cloyingly operatic scenes. The novel was a kind of Rorschach test for critics and readers alike: many fans swooned over the cult hit, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and named a finalist for the National Book Award. In 2015 Hanya Yanagihara published A Little Life, which chronicled the troubled psyches and relationships among four friends in Manhattan.

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