The novel opens with Aza eating lunch with her best friend Daisy Ramirez at school when Daisy and classmate Mychal Turner tell her that Davis Pickett's father has disappeared. They are certain Aza knows Davis from attending camp with him a few years ago. In fact, Aza did attend Camp Sphero with Davis after both fifth and sixth grade. It turns out Davis's father disappeared the day before being arrested on bribery charges. Police arrived at his home early in the morning with a warrant but he wasn't home and hasn't been seen since. As a result there is now a hundred-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to his arrest.
From Daisy's research they learn that Russell Pickett CEO and founder of Pickett Engineering, wasn't home when Indianapolis Police arrived with a search warrant. Detective Dwight Allen stated that he was last seen by his sons Davis and Noah the previous night and that there are no surveillance cameras on the property. However Aza who spent some time on the Davis estate when she was younger, remembers that there was a motion capture camera in the woods by the river. Because there is a camera at the front Gate, Daisy believes that Pickett walked through the woods and left via the river so he would not be seen.
Daisy and Aza sneak onto the Davis property from the river using an old canoe that Aza's family has. After wandering through the trees on the grounds, Daisy locates the night-vision camera and Aza connects her phone to the camera. She is able to download a photo from September 9th of "the back of a stocky man wearing a striped night-shirt. Time stamp 1:01:03 a.m." Quickly, Aza and Daisy are picked up by Lyle, a security officer for the estate and they tell him Aza knows Davis but that their canoe took on water and they had to beach it.
Lyle takes the girls to the house and there they meet Davis who is puzzled to see them but realizes that like many others they are after the reward money. He tells them he doesn't know the whereabouts of his father and after treating them to Dr. Pepper's Davis drives them home in his Cadillac Escalade. Daisy and Aza continue to dig up information about the Pickett family, learning that entire Pickett fortune will go to the pet tuatara in the hopes that the fountain of youth can be discovered. They also uncover the reason for Pickett being under investigation: he allegedly bribed "state officials in exchange for contracts to build a better sewer overflow system in Indianapolis." A police report that Daisy manages to obtain tells her and Aza that they know more than the police do at this point.
Davis texts Aza telling her he is reluctant to become friends with anyone because he won't know if they are simply after his money. Aza reveals that they know something about his father and asks if it will make things worse for him if they go to the police. Davis asks her not to go to the police. Daisy who has agreed to go out with Mychal has Aza set up a double date with Davis Pickett. After dinner at Applebee's they go to Davis's mansion. While Mychal and Daisy check out the artwork, Davis shows Aza the movie theatre and then takes her outside to the golf course where they lay in a sand trap and talk. Aza tries to explain her struggles with obsessive compulsive thoughts to Davis but when they begin kissing her compulsive thoughts about germs take over. After pulling herself together they talk about the night vision picture of his father. Davis needs to know whether Aza is there because she genuinely likes him or because she's after the reward. To solve this problem Davis decides to give Aza the one hundred thousand dollar reward in cash.
The next morning Aza tells Daisy about the money which they split equally, depositing it in bank accounts with the help of Davis's lawyer. This leads Daisy to quit her job at Chuck E. Cheese and to buy herself a new laptop and a car. Although Noah sends Aza more information about his father, Daisy and Aza give up their investigation. Daisy has the money and isn't interested while Aza's OCD begins to increasingly take over her life.
As Aza's friendship with Davis begins to develop, her relationship with Daisy begins to fall apart. It isn't until she has a serious accident that Aza is finally forced Aza to confront her illness and work on trying to get better.
Discussion
Green latest novel, Turtles All The Way Down, is a revealing portrayal of mental illness and its debilitating effects, one which the author is intimately familiar with. The story is told by Aza Holmes who is now an adult, reflecting back on this portion of her life. Aza has obsessive compulsive disorder , experiencing compulsive thoughts focused on her contracting serious bacterial infections such as C. difficile. These thoughts force her to stay mostly in her head, meaning she struggles to develop relationships with the people around her. Her thoughts also lead her to have a distorted view of herself: she doubts the reality of her existence, she questions whether she is able to control her own life and she believes that she is merely the sum of her thoughts.
 |
| The image of Pettibon's spiral that Green felt represented a "thought spiral". |
Green uses the imagery of spirals, gyres, whirlpools, galaxies and circles to portray Aza's unwanted, intrusive and obsessive thoughts. These images all describe the never-ending, infinity of OCD thoughts and actions. This is perhaps best exemplified when Aza visits Davis's home she notices the colorful spiral by American artist, Raymond Pettibon and experiences the urge to grab it off the wall and run away with it. "It didn't feel like something I was looking at so much as something I was part of." Green states that he used the Pettibon painting in the story because it "felt for the first time like I had seen a direct expression of my experience with obsessive thoughts. I didn't feel like I was looking at a metaphor for my thought spirals; I felt that I was looking at the thing itself." Turtles All The Way Down is not a reflection of Green's own experiences of OCD, but it is his familiarity with illness that allows him to capture it so effectively.
In trying to explain what she experiences to Davis, Aza struggles to convey the idea that "When my thoughts spiraled, I was in the spiral, and of it." Aza explains to Davis that her spiral is different from the "widening gyre" William Butler Yeats mentions in his poem 'The Second Coming.'"But the really scary thing is not turning and turning in the widening gyre' it's turning and turning in the tightening gyre. It's getting sucked into a whirlpool that shrinks and shrinks and shrinks your world until you're just spinning without moving, stuck inside a prison cell that is exactly the size of you, until eventually you realize that you're not actually in a prison cell. You are the prison cell."
Aza's belief that the "real" her, the "way-down-deep" her is trapped in this prison, leading her to wonder if she is real. This struggle to determine if she is real begins to take center stage in her existence and has many facets. She tells her therapist, Dr. Singh that thinks she might be "fiction". Aza wonders if there is a "way-down-deep me who is an actual, real person" or is she "only a set of circumstances"? She tells Singh, "...I don't control my thoughts, so they're not really mine. I don't decide if I'm sweating or get cancer or C. diff or whatever, so my body isn't really mine. I don't decide any of that -- outside forces do. I'm a story they're telling. I am circumstances." Singh responds by telling Aza that she is giving her thoughts too much power; "Thoughts are only thoughts. They are not you. You do belong to yourself, even when your thoughts don't."
In trying to explain how she sees herself to Daisy Aza states, "...It's like when I look into myself, there's no actual me -- just a bunch of thoughts and behaviours and circumstances. And a lot of them just don't feel like they're mine. They're not things I want to think or do or whatever. and when I look for the, like, Real Me, I never find it. It's like those nesting dolls, you know? The ones that are hollow, and then when you open them up, there's a smaller doll inside, and you keep opening hollow dolls until eventually you get to the smallest one, and it's solid all the way through. But with me, I don't think there is one that's solid. They just keep getting smaller." Aza believes she's not able to find the "real" her but doesn't recognize that this is a product of her obsessive thought spirals.
Aza's image of the nesting dolls reminds Daisy of two stories told about the Earth; a scientist who explained how the Earth formed over millions of years but then was told by an elderly lady that the Earth is actually a flat plane resting upon the back of a turtle which sits on another turtle. When questioned what was underneath the turtle she states that it is "Turtles all the way down." This story is a paraphrasing of a story often told to express the problem of "infinite regress" ( a sequence of reasoning that goes on infinitely, that is forever) in cosmology. For Aza the quest to find the real Aza is like "Turtles all the way down" - a form of obsessive thought spirals that as Daisy points out to her friend is not accurate.
Because Aza believes her thoughts control her, she wonders if she's real and in control. "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?...And if you can't pick what you do or think about, then maybe you aren't really real, you know?..." To convince herself that she's real, Aza continually digs her fingernail into her fingertip, reopening the wound so that it bleeds and must be constantly bandaged. But even this seems in adequate to Aza because she feels doing this "didn't even prove what I wanted it to prove, because what I wanted to know was unknowable, because there was no way to be sure about anything."
Green's characters are delightful yet tragic, eccentric yet normal, multi-dimensional and downright fascinating. Aza has OCD, is intelligent and has a sixteen-year-old Toyota Corolla, with a paint color called Mystic Teal Mica and named Harold by her father. To help the reader understand what Aza experiences, there are page-long descriptions of the thoughts and internal dialogue that Aza has with herself as her thoughts loop infinitely around whether or not her finger wound has become infected or she has C. difficile. She is resilient and courageous, although she doesn't recognize herself as being so.
Daisy is Aza's best friend and is somewhat eccentric herself: she writes fan fiction about Chewbacca's love life with Rey. Daisy wonders how to help her friend, "Like, does it help to be reassuring or is it better to worry with you? Is the anything that makes it better?" But she also finds being Aza's friend draining. "You're so stuck in your head, ...It's like you genuinely can't think about anyone else....It's just frustrating sometimes...But you're slightly tortured, and the way you're tortured is sometimes also painful for, like, everyone around you." To express what she feels, Daisy has created a character Ayala who is representative of Aza in her fan fiction.
Davis Pickett is the caring boy Aza falls for, a poet, but whose circumstances are tragic; abandoned by his father, the fortune he was due to inherit given to a pet lizard. Davis who seems so sweet is desperate for Aza to get well, something she just can't promise him. The cast is further rounded out by Dr. Karen Singh whose genuine concern towards Aza and her positive attitude portray the benefits of having a good therapist.
Green avoids a saccharine ending, where Aza seizes control of her condition, changes how she views herself and gets well. Through Aza, Green explains that happy endings are not really happy or not really endings. Instead the ending of the novel is realistic and authentic. When Aza has a pessimistic view of how her life will be, Daisy tells her, she can be the author of her life; "You pick your endings, and your beginnings. You get to pick the frame, you know? Maybe you don't choose what's in the picture, but you decide on the frame."
Aza breaks off with Davis because she tells him she can't be what he expects and hopes she will be. "I know you're waiting for me to get better...it's incredibly sweet, but, like, this is probably what better looks like for me." Aza knows everyone wants to hear that she's getting better but the reality is something less happy. "Everyone wanted me to feed them that story --darkness to light, weakness to strength, broken to whole. I wanted it, too."
Aza comes to the realization that she will go on, just as Davis will go on after he learns of the death of his father. "I would always be like this, always have this within me. There was no beating it. I would never slay the dragon because the dragon was also me. My self and the disease were knotted together for life." But Green does end the novel on a hopeful note; Aza does go on to have a mostly good life, a family, and perhaps most importantly a deep and true friendship with Daisy.
Turtles All The Way Down is authentic, somewhat intense in that it is a realistic piece of fiction that challenges readers to try to understand mental illness and the challenges involved. There are so many themes to explore in this novel, for example the meaning of friendship, and the literary references Green sprinkles throughout the novel (Sherlock Holmes and The Great Gatsby). Let's hope we don't have to wait another six years for Green's next novel.
Book Details:
Turtles All The Way Down by John Green
New York: Dutton Books 2017
286 pp.
No comments:
Post a Comment