I Crawl Through It by A.S. King: A Rather Personal Review

There are so many reviews whose writers didn't "get" this book, so let me tell you: I got it. In context, I didn't find it all that strange, and it just made sense to me. (I'm not sure what that says about me.) Some of the reasons why I connected are maybe too personal to divulge. Some of my delightful reading experience is just A.S. King's knack for pulling me into a book so it is the only thing I can think about for a while...but this one I think I'm going to be thinking about for a long, long time.

A plot summary is somewhat pointless, but I'll try: this is a surrealist YA novel about buried internal trauma and external pressures and how not facing these problems never work. Two academically gifted teens fly away in an invisible helicopter to try to escape. A victim of date rape swallows herself. A victim of physical abuse tells lies that make her hair grow longer to try to fit in when she is really being abused at home. Everyone is worried about what others think and how they fit in. And someone keeps making repeated bomb threats to the standardized test-addled school, but the students also feel like they're ticking time bombs.

Of course, I Crawl Through It isn't for everyone. It is certainly weird, but I also didn't find it TOO weird, although I am partial to experimental . There is quite a bit of semblance of the real world and plot and character arcs are present as outlined above; none of it felt random to me in context. (Again, I'm not sure what it says about me that I was not at all concerned about, say, independently talking scars.) Most of all, the novel swallowed me up. I didn't feel distanced from it, like I felt distanced from the Vonnegut I read. I read it over a period of less than 30 hours because it wouldn't let me go.

Because I've felt like exploding, too. I've wanted to build an invisible helicopter and fly away. I've had that panic when the letters (aka multiple choice answers to a standardized test) are not correct. I've been concerned about how others perceive me and where I fit in, or if I fit in at all. Maybe sometimes I've even wanted to swallow myself, for different reasons. And so when I got to the part when the individuals on the island (that the helicopter takes the two characters to) rattle off their universities and majors (which were thankfully not all STEM; a stereotype I hate), I almost started crying, because it rang so true.

Plus, there's this quote:

"Because nothing is perfect. Perfect is a myth. I want you to remember this. Perfect is a boldfaced lie. It's a ham sandwich without ham. It's a blue sky on Mondays when it rains on Wednesdays."

And also in the acknowledgments (which also includes the amusing sentence: "Andrea Spooner, please edit this sentence so it somehow conveys the full appreciation I have for your trust."):

"Students readers, thank you for reading. Thank you for writing to me. Thank you for being you. You are not ovals. You are not letters. You are human beings, and every time someone rolls their eyes at you because they think your opinion doesn't count, picture me giving them the finger."

It's a quick read. It may be only a glimpse, but it's powerful. It isn't for everyone, and I'm not even sure I would recommend it to others. But I think it's an experience I think I should share, in the spirit of sharing personal relationships with stories that are in themselves a very personal exploration for the author. That's where the real power and influence of literature resides. Not in a Goodreads consensus, but in reaching the needs of readers, even if it isn't everyone who picks it up.

On the Universal and Adult Appeal of The Fault in Our Stars

I've got a laundry list of media I like, but the ones that stand out are the ones that mean something personal to me. In my last post I discussed why The Great Gatsby resonated with me, and now I'm heading to the present to the newest craze: John Green's teen hit The Fault in Our Stars. (By the way, THERE WILL BE SPOILERS.)

I'm not that big of a romance, teen fiction, or even John Green. (By that I mean I definitely appreciate what he does for the educational and writing community, and while this is the only book of his I've really loved, I just find it off-putting that someone who is always talking about others' writing and how you should think of people as people has gained a cult following believing he can do no wrong and not venturing to read many other books.) But I loved this book, and it's no surprise to me why this has reached readers beyond its target audience (aka me, a teenage girl), and specifically adults. I'm not going to get into technicality, like that this book is just really good and the teen talk is genuinely funny rather than a bit uncomfortable (part of the reason why I'm not into his other books is that I find "teen talk" a bit off-putting, especially where boys are the ones talking, and probably about girls). No, I want to talk about the universal themes present in the novel that I myself could relate too, but that most certainly are not teen-specific.

The fundamental key to this is that Hazel and Gus are, functionally, adults. On Green's website
 there is the following FAQ:

Q. Are Hazel and Augustus in love like adults can be? How do you view their relationship?
A. I find it really offensive when people say that the emotional experiences of teenagers are less real or less important than those of adults.
I am an adult, and I used to be a teenager, and so I can tell you with some authority that my feelings then were as real as my feelings are now.

Which, aside from generating three cheers for me (I'm of the belief that it's possible if based on mutual feelings and both persons are mature and can communicate), adds to the point. Green's other books tend to focus on teenagers being awkward and learning lessons for the first time, and in that respect The Fault in Our Stars is almost in another genre entirely. It's more universal, and that probably is the reason I enjoyed it more than Looking for Alaska and Paper Towns. I like what those books said about viewing other people and never getting the full story of an event, but I had already learned all of that (so the reveal of Margo and Alaska's troubles has much less of an impact on me as I knew it was coming), and moreover I could not quite relate to the stories in a way that personally resonated with me.

But back to Hazel and Gus being adults. They have much more in common with adults than kids, and in a natural way, rather than teen experimentation. Aside from the often-noted use of heightened speech, both teens are independent (can take care of themselves, drive, and their parents do not pry into their personal affairs). Hazel takes college courses. They watch R-rated movies. In Amsterdam they share champagne and have sex. There's also a telling scene in which they sell Hazel's old broken childhood swing set: a sign of transitioning into adulthood.

The Fault in Our Stars is not a cautionary first-time tale of teenage relationships, nor is it about experimentation, or even about a perfect fairy-tale love. Sure, it's rather poetic and was intended to be an inversion of a romantic epic, but it may be one of the most realistic love stories I've ever read. I mean the meet-cute at the beginning and instant fascination with each others' looks I personally do not find realistic, based on my own experiences, but such is a necessity of a love story that has to get its feet off the ground and take place over a relatively short span--and if anything, that works toward my point No, I mean that Hazel and Gus essentially represent an abbreviated and accelerated relationship: from meeting to death.

They may not go through all the typical stages of a couple's life (marriage, kids, etc), but they still fundamentally represent the whole experience. And there is one particular line I want to talk about, in which Hazel describes the reaction of her parents when they know that Gus has died:

"My parents came in then, looking expectant, and I just nodded and they fell into each other, feeling, I'm sure, the harmonic terror that would in time come for them directly."

There you have it: adults relating to the tale of the two teenagers. Because they know they are going to die, sometime, and one of them will probably go first. It could strike at any moment, sooner than expected--but they always knew that. Every committed couple does, but they've agreed to take that risk. Just as Hazel and Gus did, with Hazel wanting to pull away to hurt as few people as possible when she died (the grenade analogy), and Gus choosing to stay with her because he is willing to take that risk. (And staying by choice is another hallmark of a healthy relationship.)

Reading about Gus's deterioration is so hard, particularly if you are in a relationship, because with those things you are just absolutely powerless. You can't do anything to stop it. If the illness is contagious you can't even hold your partner. You just have to accept it. And that is something everyone in a committed relationship will have to confront eventually, and it's a theme that I believe adults can especially relate to because they are more aware of that reality in their own lives. (Not to say that kids can't, because they are also certainly aware that they could have to deal with the death of their grandparents and/or parents sooner than they would want.)

I also want to make clear that I don't believe that the cancer in The Fault in Our Stars is irrelevant to its overall meaning. The way it deals with cancer is admirable, and Gus's line about how people are always immortalized for dying for things rather than from things is one of my favorite points in the book. Rather, I believe my points here have only enhanced the meaning of the book, which is that someone with a short, doomed life can still live it to the fullest. And because of that, it reminds us of the fundamentals and inevitability of life, and leaves the rest for us to think about.

Why The Great Gatsby is great, to me

The Great Gatsby may be the greatest American novel for its depiction of the American dream, and it's beloved by many for all sorts of other reasons, and famously by those who can overlook how most of the characters are "unlikeable". I read the novel like everyone else in high school (specifically, freshman year) and like all the novels I read that year, I connected with it. But I'm not sure it's in the same way most other people do. See, I like The Great Gatsby because Gatsby is a hopeless failure.

In my class, there was as discussion of whether Gatsby was a good person at all--in the sense that he wanted Daisy to go outside of her marriage--and I didn't have the heart to argue with them. Because I sort of related to Gatsby, and I knew sadly what Nick meant when he said, "You can't repeat the past."

Oh, I didn't have a crazy and immoral plan, really. I just wanted to have a platonic friend (and oh I was aware how ambiguous and fragile that sounded) to trust based on incorrect assumptions of how compatible we seemed (more to others than to ourselves, really), and I was also going through a very stressful part of my life. This isn't the place to talk about it, really. But the past--and childhood innocence--was very key to me, something I wanted to return to, and he was the ultimate symbol of that. I didn't know him as a person, really, just various symbols for stages of my life.

I wanted to return to that past, but at the time of reading it I did begin to feel that it just wasn't possible, that I was only clinging to it in vain hope. And The Great Gatsby knows this too. His vision collapses, and it's delightfully cynical to me. I'm not the one to believe that there is a big plan to the universe, and I do believe we have some agency, but there is a point at which things are way too far past fixing, when it's hopeless. It's not often a message you see either, with the improbably successful "get the girl" (or boy) trope in stories.

Maybe Gatsby is selfish, and Daisy and Tom are definitely, as Nick remarks, careless people. But there's a reason Nick says at the beginning that Gatsby is the only person he finds worth redemption. He had not known Daisy for years; he was only acquainted with the symbol of her in his mind, and he fails to realize it. He was disillusioned. He was wrong, of course, and we all are at some point in our lives. But unlike the rest of us, Gatsby never got the chance to learn from it.

But we can learn from it. We have the book to read.