Title: The People in the Trees Author: Hanya Yanagihara
Published: May 6, 2014
Genre(s): Literary Fiction
Page Count: 473
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:It is 1950 when Norton Perina, a young doctor, embarks on an expedition to a remote Micronesian island in search of a rumored lost tribe. There he encounters a strange group of forest dwellers who appear to have attained a form of immortality that preserves the body but not the mind. Perina uncovers their secret and returns with it to America, where he soon finds great success. But his discovery has come at a terrible cost, not only for the islanders, but for Perina himself. Disquieting yet thrilling, The People in the Trees is an anthropological adventure story with a profound and tragic vision of what happens when cultures collide.
I’m a bit hesitant regarding my thoughts toward The People in the Trees. Hanya Yanagihara’s debut is unquestionably well-written and engaging. The pseudo-memoir format is both appropriate and well-done. This story about a doctor’s unprecedented discoveries in a tiny Micronesian community and the decades of fallout is amazing. If the author had thought all this up herself, I would probably have been enthusiastic in my praise. What imagination! What vision! What creativity!
Except…Yanagihara didn’t think this up herself. In fact, almost the entirety of The People in the Trees is a slightly fictionalized account of Dr. Daniel Carleton Gajdusek’s life. Gajdusek was a real-life doctor who studied remote tribes in Papua New Guinea, discovered a strange disease, won a Nobel, adopted dozens of children, and was later imprisoned for pedophilia. And this is exactly what befalls Yanagihara’s fictional Dr. Perina, except his disease comes from people eating turtles, rather than cannibalism. Otherwise, it’s pretty much samey-same.
Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with what the author has done in lifting source material for The People in the Trees, but it does seem to me that if she wanted to write a book about Dr. Gajdusek, she could have just done so without all the smoke and mirrors. Of course, writing under the mantle of fiction allows her to invent certain things (though, as I said, the lives of the real-life doctor and the fictional one are almost identical), and also stays away from the tricky business of libel and whatnot. But still. It’s interesting that nowhere in the book’s content (afterword, etc.) does she acknowledge her inspiration.
So, I’m conflicted. This is a ripped-from-the-headlines text that seems to be masquerading as 100% original fiction. I’m not accusing Yanagihara of anything, but to me, certain aspects of this felt fishy.
Of course, The People in the Trees is well-written, interesting, and compelling. It’s absolutely not a bad book. But I have to attribute the book’s quality, at least in part, to the real-life person who provided Yanagihara with her plot and protagonist. She did a great job translating that person into text, absolutely—authors of historical fiction do this all the time, so the situation is comparable. I think maybe it’s just that the inspiration went unacknowledged that irks me so much.
