Editors Reads Verdict
Yanagihara's debut is as ambitious and morally uncomfortable as A Little Life — a study in genius and monstrosity structured as a found document, with a narrator whose unreliability accumulates slowly and terrifyingly.
What We Loved
- One of the most complex unreliable narrators in recent literary fiction
- The ethnographic sections are rendered with stunning specificity and imaginative authority
- The moral architecture — genius, exploitation, self-deception — is constructed with precision
Minor Drawbacks
- The narrator's monstrosity can make the novel difficult to spend time with
- The frame narrative (the editor's notes) is less compelling than the main text
Key Takeaways
- → Intelligence and moral depravity are not in opposition — genius can coexist with profound destructiveness
- → The Western scientific gaze extracts from indigenous communities without ever fully seeing them
- → Self-justification is the most sophisticated and least reliable form of autobiography
| Author | Hanya Yanagihara |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Doubleday |
| Pages | 384 |
| Published | August 20, 2013 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Literary Fiction, Science |
| Difficulty | Advanced |
| Best For | Readers of A Little Life ready to encounter Yanagihara's debut, and literary fiction readers comfortable with morally complex narrators. |
A Found Document
The People in the Trees is structured as the memoir of Norton Perina, a Nobel Prize-winning immunologist writing from prison after his conviction for child sexual abuse. The memoir is presented as edited by a former colleague, with footnotes that subtly — and then not so subtly — contest Perina’s account.
Perina’s story centres on a 1950 expedition to a remote island in Micronesia, where his team discovers the Ivu’ivu people: a small tribe among whom the very elderly exist in a degraded state of semi-immortality, preserved in body but not in mind, sustained by the ritual consumption of a specific turtle. His research on this mechanism eventually earns him the Nobel Prize. His exploitation of the children he later adopts from the tribe earns him a prison sentence.
The Unreliable Narrator as Central Argument
The novel’s power comes from watching Perina narrate his own monstrosity. He is intelligent, charming, and genuinely convinced of his own essential innocence. The narrative never tells us explicitly what to think; it trusts readers to track the accumulating evidence of how Perina’s mind has worked, what he has taken from others, and what he has never understood about the difference between observation and violation.
Yanagihara’s debut established the preoccupations she would develop in A Little Life: how suffering is transmitted, how brilliance and damage coexist, how self-deception operates at the highest levels of human functioning.
Our rating: 4.3/5 — A debut of extraordinary ambition that announces one of the most serious literary imaginations of her generation.
Reading Guides
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "The People in the Trees" about?
A Nobel-winning scientist convicted of sexual abuse writes his memoir from prison, describing the 1950 expedition that discovered a remote jungle tribe — and a population of apparently immortal humans.
Who should read "The People in the Trees"?
Readers of A Little Life ready to encounter Yanagihara's debut, and literary fiction readers comfortable with morally complex narrators.
What are the key takeaways from "The People in the Trees"?
Intelligence and moral depravity are not in opposition — genius can coexist with profound destructiveness The Western scientific gaze extracts from indigenous communities without ever fully seeing them Self-justification is the most sophisticated and least reliable form of autobiography
Is "The People in the Trees" worth reading?
Yanagihara's debut is as ambitious and morally uncomfortable as A Little Life — a study in genius and monstrosity structured as a found document, with a narrator whose unreliability accumulates slowly and terrifyingly.
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