FOLLOWING SEVERAL MAJOR SUCCESSES,
including his 2012 novel The Fault in Our Stars and its 2014 film
adaptation, as well as the 2015 adaptation of his 2008 novel Paper Towns,
John Green seemed to be taking a bit of a break. But after a nearly three-year
hiatus, he has now offered us a new YA novel, Turtles All the Way Down —
one that has frankly befuddled me, prompting me to question Green’s motivation
for writing his books.
Green has justly made a name for
himself with poignant tales of adolescents worrying over their place in the
world. His prose is clean, and his characters are often compelling. Paper
Towns, one of my favorites, depicts a young man whose attraction to an
enigmatic (and recently vanished) young woman leads him to undertake a physical
and psychological journey of self-discovery. While this novel, along with other
Green titles, has been criticized for deploying “manic pixie dream girl” stereotypes (female
characters whose primary purpose is to further the self-exploration of their
male partners), I have admired how Green generally takes young people
seriously, representing their (admittedly often white and middle-class
suburban) concerns with decency and care. He doesn’t shy away from big
questions either, as The Fault in Our Stars and its
teens-dying-of-cancer-but-still-in-love narrative suggests.
More importantly, perhaps, Green has
tried to foster young people’s own content creation through the now seemingly
defunct Nerdfighters project, and he actively advocates for civic-mindedness
and charitable giving through organizations such as the Foundation
to Decrease World Suck, which is
“100% volunteer operated and exists solely for the purpose of raising funds to
be donated to other non-profit organizations.” There’s much to like here. And
Green seems to be a fun kind of guy, someone whose YouTube channel, the Vlogbrothers,
on which he and his brother Hank exchange glimpses into their daily lives, is
filled with humor and occasional sociopolitical commentary. Or, as the brothers
put it, they’re attempting to raise “nerdy to the power of awesome.”
Despite this generally optimistic
focus, Turtles All the Way Down strikes a startlingly somber note. The
epigraph is from Schopenhauer: “Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will
what he wills.” At first blush, such heady philosophizing seems appropriate to
the thematic concerns of the novel, whose plot revolves around two intersecting
— and emotionally difficult — stories. The novel’s narrator is Aza, a
lower-middle-class high schooler who suffers from profound anxiety — in
particular, an obsession with intestinal germs. Periodically, she even drinks hand
sanitizer. And while she’s receiving psychiatric help, she believes that she’ll
never really get better. Aza, victimized by obsessive thinking, seems a prime
example of someone who “cannot will what she wills.”
Aza’s potential love interest is
Davis, a sensitive rich kid whose businessman father has gone missing after
being accused of fraud. Though unsure of what the future holds, Davis and his
kid brother Noah at least have material comforts to help them through — for the
time being. Completing the trio is Daisy, Aza’s best friend, an up-and-coming Star
Wars fan-fiction author (thus checking the box on YA characters with
significant ties to the internet and social media). A bit loud and overbearing,
Daisy nonetheless does her best to be supportive: for example, she hatches a
crazy plan to track down the whereabouts of Davis’s missing dad in order to
share the reward money with Aza.
Green’s narrative sensitively
explores the suffering caused by both obsessive-compulsive disorder and fiscal
malfeasance. Despite the comic nerdiness of Vlogbrothers, Green’s work isn’t
all fun and games. He has a serious side too. The Fault in Our Stars
revolved around two young cancer patients who forge a relationship and find
romantic love before one of them passes. A painful ending, but the book
nonetheless comes across as hopeful, showing that love can see us through
difficult situations.
Turtles All the Way Down (spoiler alert) doesn’t
promise or offer much of a happy ending. Our heroes won’t find love, and
there’s no suggestion that Aza will ever escape her anxiety disorder. Green is
to be commended for keeping our eyes on the tough stuff.
What bothers me about the story,
however, is less what we are asked to focus on and more the distance Green
maintains between his key themes.
In a complicated twist, Daisy and
Aza — while boating down the White River that runs through Indianapolis (the
story’s setting and also Green’s home) — stumble upon a clue that could lead
them to the location of Davis’s father. Daisy opines, “We are about to live the
American Dream, which is, of course, to benefit from someone else’s
misfortune.” This statement is played for laughs, yet it’s one that seems too
true to be thrown away — and too poignant given not only these characters’
circumstances but also the situation of many likely readers of the book, whose
lives have also been damaged by the corporate greed that comprises its
background plot.
We learn that Davis’s dad, Pickett,
has been keeping a tuatara, a lizard with a long lifespan, and has hired
scientists to research how its longevity might be extended to humans,
specifically himself. So obsessed is he that he’s arranged to have all his
money, upon his death, go to maintain the life of his tuatara. As Aza marvels,
“[I]t turns out you don’t have to leave your kids anything when you die.
No matter how rich you are — not a house, not college money, nothing.” We then
read about how Pickett’s company had bribed its way into a contract to clean up
the polluted White River, despite having botched the same job on an earlier
attempt.
The developing romance between Aza
and Davis, complicated by her unwillingness to kiss him due to fear of germs,
is often touching and sensitively rendered. The economic disparities between
Davis’s and Aza’s families only momentarily complicate matters. When Davis
visits Aza’s house, she “felt embarrassed of our dusty old books and the walls
decorated with family photos instead of art. I knew I shouldn’t be ashamed —
but I was anyway.” A conversation about the value of wealth versus the value of
family ensues, with Davis recognizing his relative privilege. Yet he doesn’t
really care about his wealth: he just wants his dad back, something
approximating a functional family. The scene is made more touching when we
realize that Aza would like to go to college, perhaps away from Indiana, but
that she and her otherwise supportive mother have trouble paying even for the
applications. Disparities persist.
Despite raising such complex social
issues, the narrative’s focus seems more on Aza’s psychological circumstances,
her anxiety disorder, and her intense fear of germs. That said, any attention
at all to socioeconomic context is relatively new in Green’s work. But issues
of class and corporate corruption remain elements of the story’s background,
since Green’s main focus, heartfelt and sympathetic, is on Aza’s personal
anxiety. As someone who also suffers from anxiety, I could empathize with this
young woman. Her thoughts circle and circle in a widening gyre (the Yeats’s
references spin only slightly out of control), and Green offers page-long
streams of consciousness that render the feeling of being trapped in obsessive
thoughts. In one tortured metafictional moment, Aza pleads, “Whoever is
authoring me, let me up out of this. Anything to be out of this.”
But the specter of the economic
lingers, haunting the book. At one point, talking to her psychiatrist,
Aza
questions her sense of reality, wondering if she actually exists as a person:
But what I want to know is, is there
a you independent of circumstances? Is there a way-down-deep me who is an
actual, real person, the same person if she has money or not, the same person
if she has a boyfriend or not, the same if she goes to this school or that
school? Or am I only a set of circumstances?
These are poignant questions,
surely, but the reality is that, despite whatever existentially independent
existence we might be able to theorize, we are never separate from our
“circumstances.” Our “way-down-deep” is always connected to our particular socioeconomic
and political situations, and it’s telling that Aza wonders who she is in
relation to money.
Again, though, this is a throwaway
line — the right question, but one that doesn’t receive much sustained
attention. Indeed, what is ultimately missing in Turtles All the Way Down is
a clearer recognition of the proximity of the novel’s themes,
particularly Aza’s phantasmal anxieties and the very real economic
circumstances that at times peek around the corners. I’m not suggesting that
the economy is the root cause of her anxieties, but the connections between the
anxiety-disorder narrative and the fiscal-malfeasance narrative beg for
critical attention from the author that they never really receive.
To be fair, Green comes close at
times. Late in the story, after a traumatic car accident, Aza struggles to keep
her thoughts under control, worrying over the germs she is exposed to while in
the hospital. She reads on Wikipedia about the “gut-brain axis” and how our
intestinal biome involves a complicated set of inputs and feedback. Aza freaks
out, realizing that bacteria in her intestines are actually providing some of
those inputs — or, as she puts it, “I realize that […] my bacteria were
affecting my thinking — maybe not directly, but through the information they
told my gut to send to my brain.” She isn’t separate after all: her
way-down-deep is part of a “set of circumstances,” a cycle, an
interconnected system.
But Green doesn’t fix our attention
on the presence of this system — of any system really, economic or otherwise.
Instead, Turtles All the Way Down moves toward a mystified acceptance of
things as they are — a move made all too clear in Green’s explanation of the
book’s title. Aza’s core problem, it turns out, is that she’s trying to find
the last turtle — or at least that’s what Daisy thinks. Daisy tells her (and
us) a story about a scientist, lecturing on the history of the Earth, who is
interrupted by a woman in the audience who claims that the Earth is really a
flat plane on the back of a turtle. What’s holding up that turtle? Another
turtle. And beneath that, another. Turtles all the way down. Or, to put it
another way, the system is unfathomable, so why bother trying to find root
causes? Why bother trying to understand the system, however provisional or
tentative your theory might be? You just need to accept what is.
So, instead of overtly connecting
anxiety and economics, the novel falls back on platitudes such as “the world is
also the stories we tell about it” or “[y]ou never really find answers, just
new and deeper questions.” In the last pages of the novel, Aza’s mother
expresses shock that Pickett left all his money to the tuatara: “The madness of
wealth […] Sometimes you think you’re spending money, but all along the money’s
spending you.” Yes, indeed. But her proffered solution seems less than
satisfying: “But only if you worship it. You serve whatever you worship.” She
marks out the system that collectively constrains us, but then returns us to a
personal choice. And Aza picks up this rationalization, asserting that “I could
still be anybody.” The problem, of course, is that economics plays a huge (if
ultimately unreckoned) role in the construction of her circumstances, and thus
in the range of her life options.
I can’t speak to what anxieties may
motivate or complicate John Green’s life. The acknowledgments at the back of
the volume mention, in gratitude, the work of some mental health professionals,
so perhaps the novel emerged out of struggles with anxiety close to home. To be
sure, we need books for young people that smartly and sympathetically represent
the spectrum of mental health and illness, and this book does that. But
whatever its origin, a book goes into the world to do the work that it will do.
I wanted — and still want — this book to be more than it is, to risk the
connections it only hints at. Ultimately, the tensions enacted in the story
between personal anxieties and socioeconomic realities deserve a better
accounting than it’s only turtles all the way down.
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