ARTS
6
Wednesday, July 3, 2019
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
“You can never publish my love,”
Rogue Wave chants, in the song that
the title of this series riffs on. Maybe
that’s true, and we can never quite
account for our love on paper or in
print, but we sure can try. That’s what
this series is devoted to: publishing our
love. Us, the Arts section of The Michi-
gan Daily, talking about artists, some
of the people we love the most. Perhaps
these are futile approximations of love
for the poet who told us we deserve to
be heard, the director who changed the
way we see the world, the singer we
see as an old friend. But who ever said
futile can’t still be beautiful?
In John Green’s 2012 novel “The
Fault in Our Stars,” protagonist
Hazel Grace Lancaster thinks to her-
self: “Sometimes, you read a book and
it fills you with this weird evangeli-
cal zeal, and you become convinced
that the shattered world will never
be put back together unless and until
all living humans read the book. And
then there are books like ‘An Imperial
Affliction,’ which you can’t tell people
about, books so special and rare and
yours that advertising your affection
feels like betrayal.”
Like Hazel Grace with “An Impe-
rial Affliction,” John Green’s work
feels intensely personal to me. It’s
evangelical-zeal-inducing and for-
mative in every sense of the word,
not only emotionally or intellectually,
but also in terms of real relationships
Green’s work has impacted my life.
I’m pretty sure I can credit his You-
Tube channel, “Vlogbrothers,” as the
catalyst for one of my very closest
friendships from high school. He’s
inspired, frustrated and taught me
endlessly. I think I would have turned
out a lot differently if his books had
never been in my life, for better or for
worse.
Let’s go back to the start. John
Green, for the three people still unini-
tiated, is the massively famous author
of young adult books like “Looking
for Alaska,” “The Fault in Our Stars,”
“Paper Towns” and many more. He’s
also one of the original YouTube
stars, beginning with “Vlogbroth-
ers” in 2007, which he shares with
his brother Hank. His online success
has since expanded to developing and
hosting the educational series “Crash
Course,” as well as several popular
podcasts.
John Green has been a public fig-
ure for almost two decades now, but
I found him about 7 years ago. My big
sister Eden pressed a library copy of
“Looking for Alaska” into my hands
and told me, “This book is really
important, you should read it.” Eden
had just graduated high school and I
was a few weeks away from starting
my freshman year, so it felt less like
a recommendation and more like an
induction. Welcome to adolescence,
the book seemed to tell me. Good luck.
It caught hold almost immediately.
There’s something raw and exposed
about “Looking for Alaska”, nearly
intrusive in how intimate reading it
feels. It tells the story of 15-year-old
Miles Halter as he attends boarding
school in Alabama and encounters his
first friendships, first teenage hijinks,
first love, first tragedy. “Looking For
Alaska” centers on the relationship
between Miles and the mysterious
Alaska, a troubled teenage girl who
seems equally interested in soaking
in as much joy and excitement as she
can as she is in destroying herself.
The book is split into two parts,
simply titled “Before” and “After,”
but throughout both sections, Alas-
ka as a character never quite makes
sense. One minute, she’s warm and
thrilling, the next she’s withdrawn
and acerbic. We see her in fragments,
never learn her full backstory and
very rarely hear what she actually
wants and needs from her life. As a
result, she never feels quite like a real
person, which is a point on which a
lot of critics have taken issue with
the novel. But to me, that’s always
felt exactly right, because the way
we see her is decidedly a product
of Miles’ perceptions and imagina-
tions. From their very first moments
together, Miles is too busy marveling
at the shape of her lips to listen to the
words she’s actually saying. Alaska
dies horrifically midway through
the book, leaving Miles and the rest
of the friends around her to muddle
through trying to understand why.
(Spoiler: They never do. Prediction:
They never will.)
No matter how many times I read
it, the book leaves me with a sort of
hollow feeling in my stomach. Not
only because of the precision with
which love, obsession, grief and trau-
ma are rendered by Green’s prose, but
because “Looking For Alaska,” and
really all his work, always immedi-
ately rips me back to who I was when
I first read it. Each character in his
novels is unique and specific, and yet
I can’t help but think of my group of
friends in high school and see each of
them in the Colonel, Takumi, Miles
and Alaska. I start remembering
some of the awful things that hap-
pened when we were 15, our version
of the “Before” and “After,” and the
hollow feeling in my gut expands,
twists into hurt.
When I’m thinking about why this
is, why Green’s work hits me so hard,
I like to imagine he treats memory
as if it’s a coin. Flip it to one face and
you get nostalgia; flip it to the other
and you get a darker, mournful side.
Green’s writing registers emotion-
ally like a series of those coin tosses,
equal parts regretful and wistful.
Sometimes he writes stories like a
rosy memory of a better time, and
it’s only because of how sharply and
precisely he renders those memories
that he can use them like a weapon.
In Green’s hands, something joyful
like a first love, or a happy road trip
between friends, can take a sharp
turn into tragedy and heartbreak
as quickly as it does in real life. The
sweet side of the coin has flipped
without the reader even realizing,
and it leaves you breathless.
If “Looking for Alaska” were the
only book Green had ever written, I’d
probably still count him as one of the
most important authors in my life,
but Green has written six books. Even
though I don’t think he’s ever been
quite as raw as “Alaska,” that sense of
longing permeates through all of his
books. Even the cringier parts of his
books resonate — I find that actually,
their imperfection is exactly what
makes them feel so real to me.
Green has gained a bit of a reputa-
tion in recent years for tending toward
the overwrought. He uses a lot of
extended metaphors and often gives
his characters long soliloquies about
the meaning of life. He (like many
other YA authors) also likes picking
a classic piece of literature to weave
admittedly pretty heavy-handedly
throughout his novels as a motif. But
none of that has ever bothered me,
mostly because none of it ever regis-
ters as false or insincere, but rather an
earnest expression of the story he’s
trying to tell and the way his teenage
characters feel. Teenagers tend to get
a little overwrought sometimes. They
mix their metaphors. They latch real-
ly hard onto classic literature they at
times don’t fully understand. Some-
times I read the emails my friends
and I would send each other in high
school and I cringe so hard I actually
feel my soul exit my body for a minute
because it’s so eager to distance itself
from the kind of pretentious buffoon
who would write that shit.
But John Green never attempts
any kind of distance between
16-year-old buffoonery and the nar-
rative writ large — instead, he leans
into it. He captures so accurately the
way everything feels epic and cin-
ematic, almost embarrassingly so,
when you’re that age. When I was in
high school, a fight with a friend was
absolutely apocalyptic, while a drive
with the windows down meant we
had just been crowned queens of our
hometown streets. It didn’t just feel
that way; it was that way in my eyes.
Green knows that, he gets it and most
importantly, he respects it.
Green also crucially understands
that a lot of the things that happen to
teenagers aren’t small and overblown.
Teenagers deal with heartbreak,
death, grief, betrayal and awful pain
the same exact way everyone else
does. I went through some really real
shit in high school. My friends did too,
often way worse. Sometimes we were
there for each other and sometimes
we weren’t. Sometimes we hurt each
other. Sometimes we fundamentally
misimagined each other. Through
every moment, though, I had a ref-
erence to understand what was hap-
pening to me, because I had John
Green’s books. I knew I was never
alone. It’s like Miles says in “Looking
for Alaska”: “It always shocked me
when I realized that I wasn’t the only
person in the world who thought and
felt such strange and awful things.”
Green’s books often finish on an
open-ended note, with his protago-
nists pondering all the life they have
left to live and accepting the ambigu-
ity of whatever conflict they’ve been
struggling with. As a teenager, that
was always the one part I wasn’t fully
able to relate to. I didn’t know how to
zoom out, so to speak, to see anything
beyond my very singular experience
and think about possibility as some-
thing more than an abstract concept.
I think I’m a little better at that
now. Maybe it’s time, maybe it’s
growing up, maybe it’s years of train-
ing kicking in after so much time
spent reading John Green books
about kids exploring all the possibili-
ties in their futures. But either way,
I can contemplate that a little better
now. Not fully or perfectly, mind you,
but I’m at least starting to wrap my
head around how young I actually
am and how many choices I have.
A once-teen’s ode to Green
BOOKS NOTEBOOK
DESIGN BY KATHRYN HALVERSON
ASIF BECHER
Daily Arts Writer
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