*NO* SPOILERS.
Oh Johnny, Let Her Up Out of This: An Incoherent Review
I quote Shannon Orzirny in The Globe & Mail:
"Turtles All the Way Down is a story about Aza, a 16-year-old girl locked in a constant cycle of doubting her own free will and disgust with the natural functions of her body. Many authors have tackled mental illness and what Aza calls "the spiral," an inescapable descent of intrusive thoughts. But Green does more than write about; he endeavours to write inside, making explicit attempts to describe the non-sensorial and inexplicable nature of the spiral. He brings readers on the terrifying slide down with Aza, to a place even scarier than rock bottom because it's both unknowable and undefinable."
I'll start by saying that I was frightened to read this latest YA novel in a way I was not to read "The Fault In Our Stars" which was about dying teenagers. What happens to Hazel & Augustus in TFIOS was terrible & terrifying, but I have never had cancer. I have been mentally ill. At 46 years old & the most recent serious episode 3 years in the rear-view mirror, I can no longer pretend this is something that happened 'when I was young'. It has happened before. It will happen again. This is my life.
I was excited for John Green - he has been pretty frank about his struggle to write this novel on the Youtube Channel he shares with his brother Hank (Vlogbrothers). It's been 5 years since TFIOS. He was writing about mental illness (like Aza, John Green has OCD and anxiety disorder). I wanted him, his novel, to succeed. I bought the book as soon as it was possible to from a local independent (hello, Perfect Books). And then it sat on my desk. I was scared, but as Green writes himself in the novel “True terror isn’t being scared; it’s having no choice in the matter.” Eventually I picked up the book.
I agree with some of the negative feed-back on the novel: some phrasing is so precious, so consciously 'deep' that it brought me back out of the story, as Orzirny notes "language that is so precise, so measured and so eloquent that you struggle to determine if it's actually profound, or just profound enough to be quoted on a notebook in a bookstore that no longer sells books" (ouch); the kind of thing that left me muttering "this kid said that, really, John, wow, I wish I could of been that self-aware". But negative or positive reviews soon didn't matter at all, because like it or not I was soon sucked down into the story - fittingly, as Green often uses spirals as metaphor for Aza's ever-tightening obsession & intrusive thoughts about her microbiota - the bacteria that lives in her & all humans.
Aza's fear & disgust about her microbiota, how it may fatally interact with that of others' (kissing quickly becomes framed as a potentially deadly intrusion, as you can imagine) is bottomless. A true moment of terror is the discovery that gut bacteria communicate chemically with the brain. Is it too late? Is every thought usurped, now theirs? Eventually, among other compulsions & terrors, Aza begins to fear she is fictional; that someone is authoring her. She cannot combat this with any sense of self, of agency: routinely thinking & doing things she is desperate not to, her thoughts & behaviours cannot be her own; how can there be any self? "You're a we. You're a you. You're a she, an it, a they. My kingdom for an I." In a spasm of pure despair, she begs directly "Whoever is authoring me, let me up out of this. Anything to be out of this."
The novel has become a Moebius Strip. Green has spoken about the terror & disgust of being trapped in his own head. I understood him in the sense of: he was speaking English & I could parse it. I understand perhaps a bit better now. Aza's inability to flee her own grinding, heaving, disgusting, pointless thoughts is "the call is coming from inside the house"-level horror. Green traps the reader inside Aza (inside himself) along with it, without being able to free or even comfort her.
Perhaps most frighteningly for me, Aza's tormentor, no matter what or who it may be (I found myself sobbing 'LEAVE HER ALONE' to Green in a way I never did for TFIOS' doomed couple) occasionally sounds...a bit like mine. When it advocated for the ludicrous & self-defeating & finally dangerous because, well, you never know, and you have to check, and and and...this is when I simultaneously wanted to hide under my kitchen table & run deep into Gatineau and hide in a bookless place for ever*. Like mine, Aza's implacable thoughts present themselves as rational analysis; whether prim or screeching they are cruelly indisputable. Driven by them, Aza starts drinking hand sanitizer. Mine needed to tell me in detail (before any act of self-care) how I did not deserve good things and would die alone, probably of diabetes. In such detail that there were times I realized I had been standing motionless in the middle of the room for twenty minutes and sat back down, another attempt at showering completely defeated.
I can tell you this fact, but not how it feels. Metaphor is all we have, and it has hard limits; Aza also confronts the impossibility of truly conveying pain: 'I could tell you what it was like, but not what it was.' I have described depression (*my* depression, the uniqueness of illness is part of this defeat of language) as 'The Tyranny of the Voices', 'the buzzing of a million flies'. I've said "I wasn't sad; I wasn't happy, I was a TV set with a screen of nothing but snow". What it's like, not what it is.
Aza's story does not end without hope, and I am grateful for knowing it. It also has funny bits and fascinating bits (about astronomy, about Tuatara, a curiously successful and long lived creature that despite its looks is not a reptile but rather one of the closest descendants of the dinosaurs still extant). I recommend it. I am better for having read it. Like TFIOS, it will probably join my professional library.
I don't know if I can ever read it again, though.
*FlowerGirl found me at one of these moments and betrayed me by not helping me put my table in a wagon she owns & giving me a paddle so I could *row* under the table all the way to the Gatineau Hills, thereby satisfying my conflicting needs. Instead she suggested I stop reading for awhile.
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