John Green Turtles All the Way Down Review
Books of The Times
In John Dark-green's 'Turtles All the Mode Downwardly,' a Teenager'due south Listen Is at State of war With Itself
John Greenish has written a new young adult novel, his first since "The Error in Our Stars" (2012), and in some ways it is very much a John Green production.
It features a small bandage of tenderhearted, manically clear teenagers. (Green does Aaron Sorkin meliorate than Aaron Sorkin does Aaron Sorkin.) They're irrepressible nerds. (Among the festive topics they discuss: geography, astronomy, the hermeneutics of Star Wars.) Equally e'er, ane of the girls is a tornado of enthusiasm and loftier drama, decumbent to announcements like, "I have a crunch," when actually it's a fun crunch she'south having.
And in that location'south loss. Death, parting, existential questions about what it all means — they're never far from Light-green's mind. People dice and disappear a lot in his books, and his boyish characters spend a lot of time channeling their inner philosophers, trying to make sense of love and suffering. "The Mistake in Our Stars," which was simultaneously an implacable tragedy and a screwball one-act well-nigh two teenage cancer patients, was of a piece with everything Light-green has ever done.
There are few subjects more upsetting than young people with cancer. But Green's latest book, "Turtles All the Manner Downwardly," is somehow far darker, not so much because of the subject matter — though that's dark too — merely because of how he chooses to write nigh information technology. This novel is by far his almost hard to read. It's also his virtually astonishing.
At the heart of "Turtles All the Way Downward" is Aza Holmes, age 16, who suffers from terrible anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Her case sits on the icier, distant cease of the spectrum. Information technology is not easily managed.
People tend to associate O.C.D. with repetitive behaviors, and that's partly true in Aza's example: She has a wound on her finger, self-inflicted, that she continually reopens in guild to drain and re-sanitize.
Simply her repetitive, intrusive thoughts are her true torment. She's obsessed with — and repulsed by — the ecosystem of leaner that seethes inside her, and the bacteria that live without. She tin't stop worrying about the rumble in her gut, or the breeding microbes therein, or the possibility of contracting an infection involving clostridium difficile, or the prospect of sweating, or not being able to stop sweating, or touching someone who is sweating. She has to fight off the insistent, unignorable urge to put hand sanitizer in her mouth. Sometimes the urge wins.
We spend long stretches inside Aza's head, listening to these swift and unsteady thoughts. The rational part of her, the i that sees a therapist and fitfully takes medication, tries to talk herself down. Merely her mind is in the throes of a civil war.
Prototype
"Please let me go," Aza tells her unwanted thoughts at a particularly helpless moment. "I'll do anything. I'll stand down."
If Green were writing in his usual annals, he'd interrupt Aza'due south descents into these cerebral spirals — or "low-cal-swallowing wormholes," equally she in one case calls them — with a bit of humor. But he seems to have made a decision: If Aza can't find relief, neither can we.
The first few chapters of "Turtles All the Fashion Downwards" are a fiddling crude, a little awkward and a footling ho-hum to go off the basis — information technology's as if Green needed extra time on the runway to overcome the weight of a success like "The Error in Our Stars," which became a touchstone for teenagers everywhere. (Information technology has been rated 2,529,550 times on Goodreads, a number that continues to spin forward even as I blazon, similar the odometer of a spaceship.) The premise: An Indianapolis billionaire has skipped town merely before the police come to become him for bribery and fraud. A $100,000 reward is on offer to anyone who's got the skinny on his whereabouts. Aza's best friend, Daisy (the tornado), remembers that Aza knows this guy'south son. Wouldn't he know something? And wouldn't a hundred grand be grand?
Aza does know his son. She'd met him years ago at "Sad Camp," a summer program for kids who'd lost one or both of their parents. Aza had lost her father; Davis, the billionaire'south son, lost his female parent. Now information technology seems that both of his parents are gone.
Then Aza reluctantly agrees to pay Davis a visit, and the novel — boom — begins in earnest. The two feel an ancient kinship, a bonding of broken souls. He's terrified that his identity is inseparable from his money; she's terrified that her identity is inseparable from her thoughts — aren't people the sum of their thoughts? If they aren't, what are they? "If y'all can't pick what you practise or think nearly," she explains to him, "then peradventure you aren't actually real, you know?"
A sweet, conventional beloved story begins. Just it hits a bittersweet, unconventional dead cease. Aza tin't kiss Davis without panicking. All those microbes. "I'yard not gonna un-have this," she miserably explains of her condition.
Yet they bond. And Aza and Daisy try to solve the mystery of Davis's father's disappearance. At i betoken, Daisy gives Aza hell — doesn't she see how her mental illness has fabricated her self-absorbed? — and it's awful. Then it isn't. The friendships in Greenish's novels are stirring and powerful. They're one of the reasons we show up to read them.
"Y'all are my favorite person," Daisy tells Aza after they've reconciled. "I want to exist buried side by side to you. We'll have a shared tombstone."
But the existent question is: How does such a story terminate for Aza?
If an author has integrity, it should end plausibly. Green has integrity. He also has O.C.D. He'south tweeted about it; he'south discussed it on his famous video weblog with his brother, Hank. Watch his entry from July 25 sometime.
I nevertheless wasn't prepared for the ending of this novel. It's then surprising and moving and true that I became completely unstrung, incapable of reading information technology to my husband without breaking down. One needn't be suffering like Aza to identify with it. 1 need only be human. Everyone, at some point, knows what it'southward like when the listen develops a mind of its own.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/10/books/review-john-green-turtles-all-the-way-down.html
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