The warring minds

John Green has written a new young adult novel, his first since The Fault in Our Stars (2012), and in some ways it is very much a John Green production.

It features a small cast of tenderhearted, manically articulate teenagers. They’re irrepressible nerds. As always, one of the girls is a tornado of enthusiasm and high drama, prone to announcements like, “I have a crisis,” when really it’s a fun crisis she’s having. And there’s loss. Death, parting, existential questions about what it all means — they’re never far from Green’s mind. People die and disappear a lot in his books, and his adolescent characters spend a lot of time channelling their inner philosophers, trying to make sense of love and suffering. The Fault in Our Stars, which was simultaneously an implacable tragedy and a screwball comedy about two teenage cancer patients, was of a piece with everything Green has ever done.

There are few subjects more upsetting than young people with cancer. But Green’s latest book, Turtles All the Way Down, is somehow far darker, not so much because of the subject matter — though that’s dark too — but because of how he chooses to write about it. This novel is by far his most difficult to read. It’s also his most astonishing.

At the heart of Turtles All the Way Down is Aza Holmes, age 16, who suffers from terrible anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Her case sits on the icier, distant end of the spectrum. It is not easily managed. People tend to associate OCD with repetitive behaviours, and that’s partly true in Aza’s case: she has a wound on her finger, self-inflicted, that she continually reopens in order to drain and re-sanitise.

But her repetitive, intrusive thoughts are her true torment. She’s obsessed with — and repulsed by — the ecosystem of bacteria that seethes inside her, and the bacteria that live without. She has to fight off the insistent, unignorable urge to put hand sanitiser 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 one that sees a therapist and fitfully takes medication, tries to talk herself down. But her mind is in the throes of a civil war.

The first few chapters of Turtles All the Way Down are a little crude, a little awkward and a little slow to get off the ground — it’s as if Green needed extra time on the runway to overcome the weight of a success like The Fault in Our Stars, which became a touchstone for teenagers everywhere.

The premise: an Indianapolis billionaire has skipped town just before the police come to get 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’s 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 programme for kids who’d lost one or both of their parents. Aza had lost her father; Davis, the billionaire’s son, lost his mother. Now it seems that both his parents are gone. So 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 you can’t pick what you do or think about,” she explains to him, “then maybe you aren’t really real, you know?” A sweet, conventional love story begins. But it hits a bittersweet, unconventional dead end. Aza can’t kiss Davis without panicking. All those microbes. “I’m not gonna un-have this,” she miserably explains of her condition.

Still they bond. And Aza and Daisy try to solve the mystery of Davis’s father’s disappearance. At one point, Daisy gives Aza hell — doesn’t she see how her mental illness has made her self-absorbed? — and it’s awful. Then it isn’t. The friendships in Green’s novels are stirring and powerful. They’re one of the reasons we show up to read them. “You are my favourite person,” Daisy tells Aza after they’ve reconciled. “I want to be buried next to you. We’ll have a shared tombstone.” But the real question is: how does such a story end for Aza? If an author has integrity, it should end plausibly. Green has integrity. He also has OCD.

I still wasn’t prepared for the ending of this novel. It’s so surprising and moving and true that I became completely unstrung, incapable of reading it to my husband without breaking down. One needn’t be suffering like Aza to identify with it. One need only be human.