Everything Is…!
John Green; Hank Green. Screenshot from Vlogbrothers YouTube video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Hkw1S0b6nI.
When my kids were teenagers, the voices of John and Hank Green, the Vlogbrothers, often drifted out of their rooms and into the hallway.
Sometimes the kids invited me to watch John and Hank’s energetic, nerdy, passionate, silly, smart, fun video letters to each other on an impossibly wide range of subjects: Mars colonization, their sibling dynamic when they were kids, the different waves of feminism, and of course The Great Gatsby. It seemed they could make anything interesting.
Back then, in 2012, John Green was a moderately successful writer of wonderful novels for young adults. Then, as we watched, he propelled himself to super-stardom by publishing his sixth novel, The Fault in Our Stars, about a girl with cancer trying to track down the writer of a book about a girl with cancer. Green’s novel was inspired by a real girl John got to know.
A huge community grew up around first the friendship and then the novel.
A Familiar Voice, a New Kind of Story
When I started listening to the audiobook of Green’s new megahit, the nonfiction book Everything Is Tuberculosis, I loved hearing his voice again after so many years. It was familiar–almost familial–and comforting, which was kind of weird since what he was writing about was…tuberculosis, its history, its symptoms, its role in the culture, the way it kills you, and specifically how it afflicted the life of a boy named Henry Reider who Green met on a trip to Sierra Leone.
Green’s own son is also named Henry, which doubtless made it that much more emotional for John to grow close to the Henry who was suffering with TB. In a novel, that name coincidence would be over the top. But Everything Is Tuberculosis is not a novel. It’s all true.
Tuberculosis is certainly the primary subject of Green’s book, but he has other subjects too. He’s deeply interested in the way injustice and inequality fuel the spread of TB, a disease for which a cure exists but that still kills 1.5 million people a year, mostly in the Global South. He uses TB as a lens to talk about injustice, to try to make the reader see how that injustice is everywhere and touches everything. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Reading Everything Is Tuberculosis, I felt I could see Green doing everything he could think of to make the reader care about his subject. In addition to telling the story of Henry Reider and his family, Green is personal about his own life and struggles. He narrates the history of tuberculosis with an emphasis on personalities and oddities—including what TB has to do with the invention of the cowboy hat and how New Mexico became a state.
Can a Book Change the World?
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe turned a lot of white people into abolitionists and is often credited with paving the way for the Civil War. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) galvanized a movement to clean up slaughterhouses and the food industry generally. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) was instrumental in launching the environmental movement.
I’m not saying John Green thinks he’s a Stowe or a Sinclair or Carson–I’m quite sure he doesn’t. I don’t think he thinks Everything Is Tuberculosis will bring an end to tuberculosis. But I admire that he’s using his prodigious skills and immense platform to try.
Recommendations
Here are two other wonderful books that engage with another enormous and important issue–climate change–though not as directly as Green’s book engages with tuberculosis. As usual, I’ll take a look at each book’s first lines and ask what that opening might tell us about the pages to come.
Stone Yard Devotional
By Charlotte Wood
Arrive finally at about three. The place has the feel of a 1970s health resort or eco-commune, but is not welcoming. Signs on fences, or stuck on little posts by driveways: NO ENTRY. A place of industry, not recreation.
I park in a nondescript spot near a fence, and sit in the quiet car.
On the way here I stopped in the town and visited my parents’ graves for the first time in over thirty years.
What to make of the not-quite-sentence this novel opens with? Not “I arrive finally at about three,” just “Arrive finally at about three.” Indeed, most of the sentences in this first paragraph are not complete, giving the sense of someone jotting down notes informally. Talking to themselves.
The narrator of Charlotte Wood’s new novel is indeed talking to herself, keeping a journal of her time at the rural convent in New South Wales where she has come for some reflection as her marriage falls apart and COVID-19 malforms the world. Despite this subject matter, this is not a depressing novel so much as a probing one. The narrator has worked as an environmental activist all her life, but now she worries that she would have been better off doing nothing–staying very still so as to avoid adding to the world’s ruin. Is that a crazy idea, or not? She can’t decide.
The mention of the 1970s in the opening lines, along with the parents’ graves and the passage of thirty years, hint that the past will be important here, and it is. An old schoolmate, now a famous activist nun, shows up, bringing with her the remains of a former member of the convent who was killed long ago in Thailand. How will their arrival change this quiet place? Why can’t the narrator stop mourning her mother even after so many years? What does it mean to live in a community, whether a convent or a town or the world? Wood and her narrator may not have all the answers, but the way they present the questions will make you think more deeply and freshly about them.
Orbital
By Samantha Harvey
Rotating about the earth in their spacecraft they are so together, and so alone, that even their thoughts, their internal mythologies, at times convene. Sometimes they dream the same dreams–of fractals and blue spheres and familiar faces engulfed in dark, and of the bright energetic black of space that slams their senses. Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it stalking through their quarters.
Raw space is a panther! What if Samantha Harvey had launched this slim, meditative, Booker Prize-winning novel about daily life on the international space station with that line instead of the more abstract and metaphysical sentence she chose? Would it grab you faster? Put you off with its violence? Confuse you? (What even is raw space?) For me, the dream panther primally stalking makes a tingle rise up my spine. But I respect (of course) the writer’s choice to start more quietly, to set up the themes of rotation, the earth, the spacecraft, and perhaps most importantly the paradox of profound aloneness interwoven with intense togetherness that her six very different characters are experiencing.
In its own elegiac and delicate way, Orbital is also a climate change/global catastrophe book, as being in space offers a measureless perspective on the fragility of earth and its aspirant humans. Yet in its exploration of how these very different people from different cultures become a kind of family, it’s also (in its own way) a hopeful story.
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