The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara
Published 2013 · 137,016 words · about 13 hours at an average pace · Fiction, Literary Fiction, Science Fiction
How hard is The People in the Trees to read?
The People in the Trees scores 77 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 72 out of 100
- Yanagihara deploys formal academic prose saturated with invented indigenous vocabulary (opa'ivu'eke, mo'o kua'au, vaka'ina, vuaka, manama) alongside scientific terminology (telomerase, telomeres, spirometer, carapace) and the elevated register of a mid-century scientific memoir. Readers encounter unfamiliar coinages on nearly every page, though the narrative context often provides enough grounding to continue. This places it near Moby-Dick (72) in its blend of specialized jargon and invented language.
- Sentence structure: 76 out of 100
- Perina's sentences are long and subordination-heavy, building complex analytic structures with multiple embedded clauses and parenthetical insertions—'But although all of these things were awful, unbearable, the worst moments were not when I learned of my rapidly diminishing rights.' The reflective, self-justifying narrator voice generates sustained syntactic demands without reaching Proustian extremity, placing it between The Great Gatsby (52) and In Search of Lost Time (78).
- Abstraction: 70 out of 100
- The novel operates through a concrete narrative of scientific fieldwork, trials, and prison but pushes constantly toward abstraction: the nature of scientific ethics, colonialism's epistemic violence, and the philosophic cost of immortality. Perina's extensive rationalizations elevate what might be straightforward memoir into an exercise in self-deception theory. This parallels The Brothers Karamazov (75) in grounding philosophical content within dramatic character, though here it never escapes the story.
- Information density: 72 out of 100
- The novel layers multiple demands simultaneously: a non-linear fictional memoir spanning decades, Kubodera's footnotes that constitute a parallel anti-biography, invented anthropology of U'ivu and Ivu'ivu, virology and immunology content, and the trial narrative. These layers require sustained tracking across significant chronological distances, landing near 2666 (75) but with more narrative coherence pulling against the density.
- Narrative indirection: 82 out of 100
- Perina's memoir is built on systematic self-deception: he presents his exploitation of Pacific Islanders, the theft of the opa'ivu'eke, his adopted children's abuse, and his scientific appropriation as acts of heroism and generosity. Kubodera's footnotes periodically puncture this account, but the reader must perform constant interpretive labor to separate Perina's version from events as they occurred. This places it close to Pedro Paramo (85) in its demand for reading-against, though with more structural scaffolding.
- Symbolic density: 75 out of 100
- The opa'ivu'eke turtle carries the full symbolic weight of the novel—immortality as a curse, forbidden knowledge, the scientist's theft from nature—while the dreamers represent the horror of consciousness outlasting itself, and the island's transformation from Eden to ruin serves as an allegory for Western science's colonial consumption. The parallel between Perina's treatment of the dreamers in his lab and his treatment of his adopted children operates as a sustained structural symbol. This places it near The Great Gatsby (75) in symbolic richness.
- Ironic distance: 82 out of 100
- A profound gap separates what Perina says and what the novel shows. He celebrates his Nobel Prize while imprisoned for child sexual abuse; he mourns the loss of his 'children' with no recognition of the harm he inflicted; he identifies with Tallent while systematically betraying him. Kubodera's footnotes function as an ironic apparatus, repeatedly undercutting Perina's account with documented fact. This is irony as structural architecture rather than tone, placing it near Lolita (75) in its sustained seduction-by-unreliable-narrator.
- Resolution withholding: 78 out of 100
- Tallent's fate is explicitly left open—Perina offers multiple theories but commits to none, and Tallent's disappearance is never resolved. The moral verdict on Perina's life and crimes is never rendered; the novel refuses to condemn him in its own voice, leaving that work to the reader. The dreamers' ultimate fates remain largely offstage. This ambiguity is deliberate but more contained than 2666 (92), as the trial narrative provides conventional closure of a kind.
- Structural complexity: 80 out of 100
- The novel frames Perina's fictional memoir within an editorial apparatus—Kubodera's preface, extensive numbered footnotes, and appended newspaper articles about Perina's arrest and sentencing—creating a multi-voice narrative where the footnotes contradict the main text. The memoir itself is non-linear, jumping between imprisonment (1999), 1950s Stanford research, the 1950 Ivu'ivu expedition, and later NIH years, requiring the reader to hold multiple temporal strands simultaneously. This falls between Infinite Jest (85) and Midnight's Children (68) in formal ambition.
How The People in the Trees is regarded
The People in the Trees holds a literary regard score of 48 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.