I started thinking about turtles all the way down. I was thinking that maybe the old lady and the scientist were both right. Like, the world is billions of years old, and life is a product of nucleotide mutation and everything. But the world is also the stories we tell about it.This is only my second John Green book: I surprised myself by being so moved by The Fault in Our Stars, so I didn't really want to spoil that experience by risking a blind journey into his backlist. Yet, I couldn't resist Turtles All the Way Down: Green worked on it for something like six years (and my mind assumes a positive link between duration of effort and merit), and besides, my daughter asked me to buy it for her and the book was just laying there when I needed my next read. And I kind of wish I didn't pick it up – this book is pretty much more of the same (precocious teenagers who face down intractable problems with humour and philosophical musings), but without the touching bits; and in hindsight, this negatively reframes what I had thought of as a unique experience with TFiOS. I will allow this, however: As the main character, sixteen-year-old Aza, struggles with mental illness (what presents as some combination of OCD and Hypochondria), I absolutely see value in a book like this reaching the wide audience that Green has amassed; this can't help but create empathy and destigmatise mental health issues. Bottom line: I'm happy this book exists, and especially for YA readers, but it didn't do much for me.
The essentially spoiler-free plot setup: Aza, at the mercy of uncontrollable “thought spirals”, is being raised by her single mother after the tragic death, years earlier, of her loving father. Her best friend Daisy – a popular online writer of Star Wars-based fanfic – learns that there's a hundred thousand dollar reward for information leading to the whereabouts of a missing local billionaire, and when the girls realise that Aza had once been friendly with the billionaire's son Davis (they met at “Sad Camp” as children after the death of Davis' mother), the friends decide to embark on a discreet investigation; after all, neither of these cash-strapped girls is going to be able to afford college without a miracle...or a hundred grand reward. As Aza and Davis renew their friendship, Aza's brain throws up barriers to a deeper relationship, and as Daisy embarks on a romance of her own, the girls' relationship with each other is pushed to its limits.
This is the crux of Aza's mental illness:
I guess I just don't like having to live inside a body? If that makes sense. And I think maybe deep down I am just an instrument that exists to turn oxygen into carbon dioxide, just like merely an organism in this...vastness. And it's kind of terrifying to me that what I think of as, like, my quote unquote self isn't really under my control? Like, as I'm sure you've noticed, my hand is sweating right now, even though it's too cold for sweating, and I really hate that once I start sweating I can't stop, and then I can't think about anything else except for how I'm sweating. And if you can't pick what you do or think about, then maybe you aren't really real, you know? Maybe I'm just a lie that I'm whispering to myself.I thought that everything about Aza's mental health was well handled – her struggles, the effects it has on everyone around her, her reluctance to take medication, the interactions with her psychiatrist – and the sciencey bits that Green puts into Aza's dialogue made for interesting reading (with her OCD, Aza is a constant Googler, often looking for obscure links between bacteria and consciousness). It's easy to identify with Aza's plight and she has the added pressure of not wanting to add to her harried mother's burden:
I wanted to tell her that I was getting better, because that was supposed to be the narrative of illness: It was a hurdle you jumped over, or a battle you won. Illness is a story told in the past tense.But while I thought that this part of the book was well done, and even valuable, much else was crammed in to fill out the plot. The will-they/won't-they love story between two half-orphans:
Our hearts were broken in the same places. That's something like love, but maybe not quite the thing itself.The odd investigation into the missing billionaire, which seems only to have been added to allow for a commentary on the excesses of wealth:
• We are about to live the American Dream, which is, of course, to benefit from someone else’s misfortune.
• Most adults are just hollowed out. You watch them try to fill themselves up with booze or money or God or fame or whatever they worship, and it all rots them from the inside until nothing is left but the money or the booze or God they though would save them. Adults think they are wielding power, but really power is wielding them.
• The madness of wealth. Sometimes you think you're spending the money, but all along the money's spending you. But only if you worship it. You serve whatever you worship.While interesting in itself, I didn't ultimately see the relevance of the Tuatara; I could see no deeper meaning to Aza's (and her dead father's) obsession with looking at up the sky through bare tree branches; but my biggest complaint would be that Green didn't make full use of the metaphorical value of the idea of “turtles all the way down”. I was a particularly solipsistic teenager, so I enjoyed every thread here on the nature of reality and self-determination: the parasite that grows in a fish's eye but must reproduce in a bird's stomach (and the control that this organism takes of its hosts to force this cycle); the way that Aza anthropomorphises her father's car “Harold”; the online characters that Daisy has created that have taken on lives of their own; Davis' obsession with astronomy (and especially with stars whose light reaches him from a time when his mother was still alive) – all of this was particularly interesting to me. But none of it has to do with the “unmoved mover paradox” that the “turtles all the way down” phrase is meant to represent – even Aza's mental illness is repeatedly described as a “tightening gyre”, a spiral that's growing infinitely smaller as she follows it inward, so the stack of turtles isn't even a literal representation of what she's experiencing. The last time I heard this phrase used was when Neil DeGrasse Tyson mused that the odds are 50-50 that our universe is a simulation on some entity's hard drive. When one online commentator asked, “But what's running the simulation that that entity takes for its reality?”, someone snarked, “It's turtles all the way down, baby.” That's such a cool idea, and one that Green is no doubt completely familiar with, so I was watching for it in this book and then disappointed that Green never mentions it: Aza is obsessed with biological, not technological, threats to her self-determination, just like the missing billionaire was interested in biological, not technological, pathways to immortality, and for a techy guy like Green, the omission feels deliberate. Ah well, the plot moves on.
The problem with happy endings is that they're either not really happy, or not really endings, you know? In real life, some things get better and some things get worse. And then eventually you die.Turtles is a fine book, and while I do find value in its portrayal and normalisation of mental health issues, it's really just okay.
