A Review of Turtles All The Way Down By John Green

Turtles All The Way Down
Alison Flood‘s interview with John Green for The Guardian

There is a scene late in US author John Green’s new novel, Turtles All the Way Down, where his protagonist, Aza Holmes – a bright, troubled teenager, as Green’s heroines generally are – goes through an ordeal so distressing it is difficult to read. Aza has obsessive compulsive disorder, and the “tightening gyre” of her thoughts has taken over. Green catapults his reader right into the middle of Aza’s desperate mental state as she becomes increasingly panicky over the possibility of being infected with the bacterium C. diff – “do you want to die of this do you want to die of this because you will you will you will you will” – eventually scooping handfuls of hand sanitizer into her mouth, gagging and vomiting as her mother tries to stop her.

Green, who has OCD himself, says it was “very hard to write”. “I wrote it right at the last, in the last revision. That’s as close to my experience as I could get.”

Turtles All the Way Down, Green’s seventh novel and one that is long awaited by his massed armies of fans – he has more than 5 million followers on Twitter – is his “most personal”, says the young adult writer, “in the sense that it’s not entirely confined to the past for me. Having OCD is something that is an ongoing part of my life and I assume will probably be a part of my life for the rest of it.”

Turtles All the Way Down by John Green review – a new modern classic

Green has “had this obsessive thinking problem” since childhood. For a long time it was hard “to talk directly about it, and I felt a lot of embarrassment”; part of writing it into his fiction was a desire “to find some kind of form or expression that would shake it out from within me and allow me to look at it”.

Aza – or Holmesy, as she is known to her best friend, Daisy – is Green’s narrator. The novel opens as the girls hear on the radio about the $100,000 reward which has been offered for a fugitive billionaire, Russell Pickett. Aza, it turns out, used to know his son Davis because they’d “gone to Sad Camp together … this place down in Brown County for kids with dead parents”. Daisy convinces Aza that they’ll be able to find Pickett and claim the reward, and the wannabe detectives hop into Aza’s old canoe and paddle down the river to the Pickett mansion.

While the novel is filtered through Aza’s perspective, OCD is only one theme. There’s also Daisy’s burgeoning fame as a Star Wars fan fiction writer, Pickett’s decision to leave his fortune to his pet tuatara (a kind of large reptile) and, of course, romance, friendship and high school.

It has been nearly six years since Green topped the charts with his sharp, funny, moving story of the romance between two teenagers with cancer, The Fault in Our Stars. That novel was inspired by the time Green spent working as a chaplain in a children’s hospital after university; it has now sold more than 23m copies, been adapted into a hugely successful film, and seen Green named one of the 100 most influential people by Time magazine.

When writing my second book, I was like, ‘I have no idea how to write a book.’ I have to figure it out anew each time

No pressure, then, for the follow-up. “In one way it gave me the luxury of time, the ability to take as long as I wanted,” says Green. There were “a few abandoned novels along the way that got kind of scrapped for parts”. But “it’s also true that I felt very scared of writing, because I was in the shadow of this success”, he says, admitting to being “super nervous” about the next novel’s reception. “I remember thinking when I was writing my first book, ‘The great thing if I get the opportunity to do this again will be that I will then know how to write a book.’ Then when it came time to write my second book, I was like, ‘I have no idea how to write a book,’ and each time that was the case. I think that’s part of the reason my books have come out relatively slowly. I seem to have to figure it out anew each time…”

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