“Unforgivable”: The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara
By this point in the #MeToo era, most of us have opened a headline and felt a very particular kind of dawning dread -- like the lights dimming, or like nausea coming on. We see a name of a famous actor, or a prominent politician, or a film director, and we think, Not him, too. In that not him lurks a who else, then? A public figure’s exposure as something other than respectable -- as, even, something monstrous -- rends and tears the social fabric because it reminds us of how much we project onto our celebrities. It reminds us how much their success, their art, seems somehow to elevate us all to a higher plane, such that their fall feels like ours, too. We don’t realize how much trust we’ve implicitly put in the hands of our public figures until they show us they are capable of great, private, harm.
We don’t realize how much trust we’ve implicitly put in the hands of our public figures until they show us they are capable of great, private, harm.
The People in the Trees is a novel about all that: it’s about, among other things, the dread and vertigo that can accompany a revelation of a public figure’s abuse. It’s a book that simulates that dread for the reader in slow motion, for we are told early on about the truth, but we become less and less inclined to let go of the hope that maybe, maybe, it’s all a big mistake.
Hanya Yanahigara is best known for her runaway 2015 bestseller, A Little Life, which is a brutal look at the annihilation that childhood sexual abuse brings upon its victims and their loved ones. It’s a study of pain, of suffering, of shame, of cruelty. But The People in the Trees, the book that debuted her career as a novelist in 2013, is much more subtle. It, too, is interested in abuse, as I said. The reason I found it more compelling than A Little Life, though, is that it spotlights the machinery that makes abuse -- that makes an abuser. Whereas victims and villains in A Little Life are easy to spot, trapped in unthinkable cycles of harm, and painfully without justice, The People in the Trees widens our lens, honing us in on the more subtle brutalities whose cause-effect relationships aren’t as clearly identified.
The book opens with a news clipping: a prominent scientist, Dr. Norton Perina, has been found guilty of sexual abuse. This clipping is swiftly followed by a “preface” by Dr. Ronald Kubodera. Ronald introduces himself as a “proud” colleague and “friend” of Norton’s. He vociferously defends (who knew the adverb “vociferously” would become so useful in the #MeToo era) Norton’s character, rejects the charges against him, and has decided to make it his sole purpose to clear his friend and colleague’s name: “I want nothing less than to restore Norton’s reputation,” Ronald tells us, “to remind the world that what preceded the last two years is immeasurably more important than what may or may not have happened for a few brief months.” He admits that he may seem “naive,” but -- “to do anything less for a man who has given so much to the world of science and medicine would be, in short, unforgivable.”
Kubodera will do this by transcribing (“and lightly editing”) Perina’s auto-biography, penned from prison. The rest of the novel is made up of these transcriptions, in Perina’s voice, with footnotes from Kubodera for clarification and context. Already, Yanagihara has set up a narrative structure that threatens to be unreliable: not only does Perina himself get to tell his own story, but his friend gets to contextualize it. As readers, we are ready to write off both of these men. With our skeptic’s eye, we begin the tale of young Perina’s education as a scientist, as well as his epic first field expedition to Micronesia in 1950, where he will go on to discover something akin to an elixir of immortality.
Perhaps the anti-Ronald-Kubodera of our real, modern times is the courageous journalist, Ronan Farrow, who is best known for reporting on Harvey Weinstein’s serial abuse, as well as for writing the seismic bestseller, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators. During the period of his investigations, Farrow reports being persistently -- vociferously, perhaps -- impeded by various executives at media outlets.
Earlier this month, Farrow publicly broke with the publisher of Catch and Kill after they announced that they’d be publishing a memoir by his father, Woody Allen, whom Farrow has accused of sexually abusing his sister. It seems that his publishing company, like Kubodera, wants to “remind the world” of Allen’s cultural significance, despite “what may or may not have happened,” as Kubodera would put it. According to the publisher, as quoted in the New York Times, “Grand Central publishing believes strongly that there’s a large audience that wants to hear the story of Woody Allen’s life as told by Woody Allen himself.”
Yanagihara seems to know, too, that there’s a large audience for an accused abuser’s story, in their own words. But she sets us up with these layers of narrative structure in order to remind us that no truth is unadulterated; no personal narrative is without selective memory.
As Jennifer Szalai writes in her review of Catch and Kill, there are “hopeful threads” in Farrow’s book in spite of its mostly deeply disturbing accounts of abuse. She claims that Weinstein’s “extreme measures” in attempting to silence journalists and lawyers “indicated that he knew there were institutions with sufficient power to hold him to account.”
For Yanagihara’s purposes, Perina has been held to some account: 24 months in prison, as we learn in the first handful of the novel’s pages. But I’d argue -- and I think Yanagihara would agree -- that there are deeper “accounts” to contend with: that of a person’s legacy, and that of the sociocultural legacy of their accountability. It’s telling that Perina’s major scientific contribution is the discovery of an immortality elixir. Who gets to live forever, and in what form? Is being brought to justice -- for Perina, and for others -- synonymous with social, cultural, historical death? Or, put another way: how do we do justice to someone’s legacy?
