Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees ****

The People in the Trees is the faux memoir of a Nobel Prize-winning doctor who discovers a possible secret to immortality among the people on a remote Micronesian island, only to fall into disgrace when he is accused on sexually assaulting some of the dozens of children he adopted from the island.

Our unreliable narrator Dr Norton Perina is a wonderfully prickly literary creation: arrogant and disparaging of others, always with solid reasoning. Once he arrives on Ivu'ivu, his physical descriptions are outstanding but offbeat:

...feeling the floor [of the jungle] beneath me gently buckling and heaving with unseen layers of worms and beetles as I placed my feet upon them; it could feel like treading on the wet innards of a large dozing beast.

The story of the Ivu'ivuans and of Perina's discovery are interesting and well-told, and the ultimate consequences for the island nation are unfortunately realistic. I was surprised that the book was more about cross-cultural contact than it was about the lure of immortality.

For all of its strengths, I have two reservations about The People in the Trees, two lost opportunities, I think. First, Perina's colleague Rob Kubodera, who wrote the preface and edited the memoir, sounds too similar to Perina: he doesn't have a distinctive voice. Second, the chapters relating to Perina's children are comparatively sketchy and don't really add to our understanding of the characters or the themes of the book. They could have been much stronger.