The rational part of her, the one that sees a therapist and fitfully takes medication, tries to talk herself down. We spend long stretches inside Aza’s head, listening to these swift and unsteady thoughts. She has to fight off the insistent, unignorable urge to put hand sanitizer in her mouth. She can’t stop worrying about the rumble in her gut, or the breeding microbes therein, or the possibility of contracting an infection involving clostridium difficile, or the prospect of sweating, or not being able to stop sweating, or touching someone who is sweating. She’s obsessed with - and repulsed by - the ecosystem of bacteria that seethes inside her, and the bacteria that live without. with repetitive behaviors, 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-sanitize.īut her repetitive, intrusive thoughts are her true torment. Her case sits on the icier, distant end of the spectrum. It’s also his most astonishing.Īt the heart of “Turtles All the Way Down” is Aza Holmes, age 16, who suffers from terrible anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder. This novel is by far his most difficult to read. 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.
There are few subjects more upsetting than young people with cancer. “ 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. People die and disappear a lot in his books, and his adolescent characters spend a lot of time channeling their inner philosophers, trying to make sense of love and suffering. Death, parting, existential questions about what it all means - they’re never far from Green’s mind. (Among the festive topics they discuss: geography, astronomy, the hermeneutics of Star Wars.) 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.Īnd there’s loss. (Green does Aaron Sorkin better than Aaron Sorkin does Aaron Sorkin.) They’re irrepressible nerds. It features a small cast of tenderhearted, manically articulate teenagers. 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.
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