book review: john green, turtles all the way down.

[content note: incoherence, mental illness, minimal spoilers, bad Star Wars shipping opinions]

Not to be all, like, "having fun isn't hard when you've got a library card," about it all, but it does definitely pay to get your hold requests in early, because I've already read John Green's new book, and it's only been out for about five minutes, and I didn't pay a penny for it.

It's his best book to date. It's got a lot of Star Wars in it.

You know how sometimes you can watch something turn into a period piece? I went to see the movie of The Fault in Our Stars back when it was in theatres, and I remember thinking, this is the most 2014 movie ever; this movie will be dated in five minutes. This movie was dated yesterday. It isn't/wasn't a criticism, just a description. Green's new book, Turtles All the Way Down, feels always-already dated in a really similar way, even though I can't put my finger on exactly why. It's not the most 2017 book ever, because it's set in the United States and nobody talks about politics, but it is very 2017. I mean, I say "nobody talks about politics," but it is a book entirely about existential dread, so what do I know. The best friend character, Daisy, writes Rey/Chewbacca fanfiction, which is a very up-to-the-minute sentence. I have consulted a friend who is in Star Wars fandom and she says this isn't a ship people ship, ever, at all, and I think it's quite canny of Green to choose a pairing that won't get him implicated in fandom shipping drama.

I think what I'm trying to react to with all this is that all of his books are of their moments, in a way that's sort of expected of contemporary YA, but this is his first book since 2012, and so the effect is that his novel-world has skipped ahead nearly six years without missing a beat. It's disorienting, especially since in the interim I mostly stopped keeping up with what he was doing. The last time he published a book, the characters in it were older than I was, and now the protagonists of the new book look like kids to me. I don't really read YA anymore. What's big in YA these days? The Raven Cycle was big. Maggie Stiefvater's sentences aren't as pretty as she thinks they are, but talking trees are cool.

I'm also reacting to the fact that none of his earlier books had characters interacting with real popcultural objects quite like this. In The Fault in Our Stars they mostly interacted with fictional cultural objects, and in Looking for Alaska their cultural engagement was mostly with, I don't know, García Márquez. Millay. In Paper Towns everybody talked a whole lot about Walt Whitman. I don't remember about An Abundance of Katherines, because it's not a very memorable book. All I mean to say is that a lengthy argument about the personhood of Chewbacca sounds like a John Green thing to have, but not necessarily a John Green thing to write. It's a thematically resonant argument, though, because what this book is mostly about is what makes a person a person.

So the protagonist, Aza Holmes, has OCD, and a lot of her intrusive thoughts revolve around anxieties about her personhood—she's obsessed with her gut biome, the idea that there's more bacteria in her than there is her in her; she worries about her meds because she hates the idea of having to take a pill to change herself to become herself; she thinks of herself occasionally as possessed and occasionally as a fictional character, which is much less meta than it sounds. And then there's the damage that any mental illness can do to a person's sense of self. Most of us these days tend to think of our thoughtlife as the locus of our identity, but if your thoughts are awful and uncontrollable and other, what do to the youness of you? Is there a self that's more fundamental than what happens in your brain? If you believe in the soul, like I do, you think there is—but not everyone does, and even if you do believe in the soul, what does a soul look like? How do you find it? (It does occur to me that if my friends had that conversation about whether Chewbacca counts as a person it would immediately turn into a conversation about whether Chewbacca has a soul, whether Christ died for Wookiees, and whether the Wookiees are even fallen beings, or are they like the hrossa. Nobody in this book mentions the hrossa, which is normal, but nobody really mentions the soul either, which is interesting.)

The central plot is a semi-detective story, about attempting to find information about a missing billionaire, but that's not where the real interest of the book lies. I don't want to make it seem that the central plot is unimportant, and I don't want to make it seem as though I didn't like it, but if you were to ask me what this book is about I would think of OCD first and billionaires second. It's a book about being a teenager living with a chronic mental illness. Green is really good at describing intrusive thoughts; the scenes where Aza gets caught up in her spirals are incredibly intense and affecting, and while Green is still not an amazing prose stylist there's a few lines from those passages that have stuck with me. What I like about this book, right, is that it's a book about OCD without being a Book About OCD in the sense of being didactic or issue-driven. I like that she's already medicated and in therapy when the book begins, so it's not one of those stories about a character discovering that she's mentally ill but instead a story about a character learning more about what her mental illness means in her life. It's an upsetting book—there's some places near the end where I almost cried—but not bleak or manipulative. It's positively optimistic.

My biggest objection to this book also has to do with Star Wars. I am very consistent. The problem is: everybody in this book has a hobby that carries them throughout the story. Daisy has the Rey/Chewbacca thing, their male best friend/Daisy's love interest is an artist, and Aza's love interest stargazes and writes poetry. It's jarring that Aza has no interests of this kind of her own, and that I still have no idea what she would be doing left to herself. Does she read? Does she watch TV? We really don't know. Possibly it's meant to reflect the fact that her mental illness has taken over her life to the extent that she has little time, energy, or focus to spend on anything else—which makes perfect sense as far as it goes, but which also makes it even stranger that nobody comments on the disparity. If it's a choice on Green's part, it's a choice that for all the world looks like an error. It also makes some conversations late in the book ring a little false. Daisy accuses Aza of focusing on her own problems to the exclusion of listening to what other people want to talk about, but because essentially all their conversations that haven't been about the detective plot have been about Daisy's interests, the idea that their conversations always focus on Aza... is really not borne out by the evidence. They talk about Star Wars a lot, and it's a subject on which Aza seems to move between disinterest and active distaste. (And it's actively bizarre to me that the narrative treats Aza's failure to read Daisy's fanfiction as a genuine failure to be a good friend.)

That complaint being laid out—and it is a major complaint: much of the book rests on that relationship—there's still a lot to like here, and I do still think it's Green's best work. It's a John Green book, so it's a very quick read and and there's some credibly bad teenage poetry and James Joyce is brought up more often than strictly necessary. If you're into YA, or you liked his previous novels, I recommend it. I'm glad he's publishing again. Green, not Joyce. Joyce is dead.