The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara

Published 2013 · 147,805 words · about 19 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 39 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.

Where The People in the Trees sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (280 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, The People in the Trees scores 89 out of 100. A second mythos, tragedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.25. About the map of stories.

Mode: Ironic
He was a monster, of course, but I had socialized him, I had taught him how to conduct himself, I had given him everything he needed to ruin me.
Symbol: Mythical (archetypal)
To do so is to send a message to the gods, a prayer for the one thing that A’aka withheld—with Ivu’ivu’s approval—from his grandchildren: immortality.
Mythos: Irony and Satire vi (visio malefica) (irony vi)
We are very happy here, the two of us.
Genre: Confession + Anatomy
I considered it my responsibility to add footnotes where I thought such additional information might help the reader’s understanding of Norton’s story.

Where the story of The People in the Trees takes place

  • Ivu'ivu, Micronesia, 1950 (1950 to 1951), the main setting
  • Lindon, Indiana, 1924-1946 (1924 to 1946)
  • Harvard Medical School and Smythe's lab, Boston, 1946-1950 (1946 to 1950)
  • Stanford lab and return trips to Ivu'ivu, 1950-1960 (1950 to 1960)
  • Ruined Ivu'ivu and U'ivu, the NIH and the Bethesda house, 1961-1990 (1961 to 1990)
  • Arrest, trial and Frederick Correctional Facility, 1995-2000 (1995 to 2000)

5 things that are true of The People in the Trees, with the passage for each

  1. The opening wire story reports a sentence of only 24 months for the Nobel laureate.

    Dr. Abraham Norton Perina was sentenced today to 24 months at the Frederick Correctional Facility.

  2. By the text's own arithmetic Ika'ana, one of the dreamers, is about 176 years old in 1950.

    But anyway, the important part: Ka Weha had taken place in 1779. Ika’ana was therefore about 176.

  3. The mouse experiments are built on a stated lab-mouse lifespan of about eighteen months.

    The maximum lifespan for a lab mouse is about a year and a half.

  4. Kubodera's footnotes put Eve's present age at 299.

    Eve is 299 years old

  5. Perina named his adopted children after airline clerks, hotel managers and customs agents he met while collecting them.

    they were named after check-in counter clerks at airports and managers at hotels, customs agents and bellhops

Scenes in The People in the Trees that Frye would name

44 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Pathos, untitled
Before us, in the distance, was a tree, an enormous makava, its branches stretched low and long like an octopus’s tentacles, and from one of them hung Fa’a. The guide's suicide is the sacrificial death scene closing the quest.
Epos, untitled
the story that emerged was delivered less as a speech and more as a recitation, as if he were a wandering storyteller Tallent's oral telling of the Ivu'ivu creation myth is spoken epos.
Anagnorisis, untitled
And then suddenly I realized: this was what being a mo’o kua’au must be. Perina grasps that the dreamers' condition is the end-state of the turtle's gift.
Hamartia, untitled
I had a penknife in my pocket (also stolen from Tallent) The theft and killing of the turtle against Tallent's explicit prohibition is the fatal misstep.
Demonic imagery, untitled
And then I was climbing on top of him and pressing the pillow against his mouth. The sexual assault is rendered as a visio malefica of one human body consuming another.
Confession, untitled
I was born in 1924 near Lindon, Indiana, the sort of small, unremarkable rural town The first-person memoir opens a sustained introverted autobiography.

Books that share these scenes with The People in the Trees

About the author

Hanya Yanagihara