Why I love to hate John Green

I'll admit it, and I don't really mean it -- I'm sure he's a great guy. And he's doing great things in this world and making lots of readers really happy. Or devastatingly sad, as the case may be with the cancer book.

But I kinda love to hate John Green.

Here's the thing:

A lot of the time, his male protagonists are kind of like mini-John Greens.

But as far as I can tell, the vast majority of John Green's readers are teenage girls.
You see where this could begin to get weird. For example, Augustus, in The Fault in Our Stars, who says things like this:

“Oh, I wouldn't mind, Hazel Grace. It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you.”

And, regarding cigarettes,

“its a metephor, see: you put the killing thing right between your teeth but you don't give it the power to do its killing.”

Things that, as my venerable and sassy colleague Mary would say, "no teenage boy would ever say."

Augustus is hip-as-in-hipster, and he cares about style, and he's verbal and sensitive and emotionally communicative. And he makes up ridiculous metaphors about cigarettes and mortality that I'm not sure if I don't fully understand or if they actually just don't make any sense.

See? Mini-John Green.

Now, writing a mini-me is all well and good. But Green is putting up this mini-me in front of a massive audience of teenage girls who are longing and aching for Augustus Waters/mini-John Green. And so they close their chapter books, and dry their eyes, and open their laptops because they want more.

And what do they find? Not more Augustus Waters. But more John Green. Who is just similar enough, and who understands their longings for those elusive verbal boys just enough to stand in their place for hour upon hour of obsessive internet trolling.

And so it seems, in some ways, his entire Nerdfighting empire is just in the right place to fulfill those desires. Not in any weird, gross way. Just...just enough for it to feel a tiny bit manipulative.

So this is why I really love to hate John Green. I admit it might be because I'm jealous of what he's been able to accomplish when I am certain that I am just as nerdy and love books just as much as he does.

It might be because those damn "Crash Course" videos are so annoyingly reductive-yet-right all the time, Spark Notes-style.

But I think the real reason is that his writing doesn't feel entirely emotionally honest to me. Because John Green is a grown-up. So he knows exactly what kinds of things sensitive, verbal, emotionally communicative young women want to hear. And readers love to hear these things in the mouth of one Augustus Waters.

Mini-John Green.

There's no real harm being done here. As I said, I even support Stephenie Meyer if she gets the people reading. But why is John Green's biggest hit a novel that has a primarily female readership? John Green is a guy. Why isn't he writing books for guys like him? The ones who really need to see that sensitivity-is-strength is not only a viable, but an admirable way to live in this world as a man?

The more narratives of this particular kind of masculinity reach an audience of only females, the more this kind of masculinity will continue to be marginalized. The girls reading Green's books already value this kind of guy. Green should use his considerable power to help this kind of guy value himself.

So that is what I want. I want to see a novel from Green that my male students are raving about. Or, better yet, that all of my students are raving about. The Fault in Our Stars is too easy. It is tucked safely into a particular genre of teenage romance that really isn't all that different from Twilight. It just uses bigger words.

So this is all very high-and-mighty of me, and I'll admit, I've not read all his books, and the Nerdfighter website features guys and girls, and like I said in the beginning, he's doing his part to make the world a better place, and he does have a good vocabulary.

But I still kinda love to hate him.

Eleanor & Park, by Rainbow Rowell (Also, The Fault in Our Who?)

In Tim O'Brien's novel The Things They Carried, there is an idea called storytruth. Storytruth is different from happening-truth in that it reflects not of the facts of the story, but the truth of the storyteller. Storytruth lets the reader feel what is real -- more real than facts, more real than dates and names -- Feelings. Consequences. Fears and desires.

Rainbow Rowell's novel Eleanor & Park is storytruth.

And storytruth, my friends, is the point of literature.

Rowell's voice, her characters, her descriptions are so deeply authentic. So perfectly crafted. Park's eventually-black-kohled eyes above his "Kiss Me I'm Irish" t-shirt and Eleanor's at times luscious at times unmanageable red curls are drawn in the most precise detail.

And, Dear Reader, you will love them.

Now, when I heard about this book, I thought -- haven't we had enough of this star-crossed lovers nonsense? Is the young adult market so limited that we must spend the rest of our days reading John Green knock-offs?

Well, like The Hunger Games and the lesser known Divergent (see my review here), Rowell in not only not a knock-off of her better-known fellow author. In my opinion, her work is vastly superior.

And a ton more fun to read.

And her characters way cuter and more loveable and more real all at the same time.

And aside from the (inevitable?) over-enthusiastic English teacher/R&J allusion (We have to be over enthusiastic. It's our job to make the kids a little uncomfortable), Eleanor and Park seem mercifully independent of the stars. And, indeed, of everyone and everything else. Theirs is a complete world, a world at once tender and sexy and every bit as difficult as being -- not just a real teenager -- but a real human.

There is a down-to-earth quality in Rowell's voice that leaves me convinced that she is every bit as much herself, and has always been, as her formidable heroine Eleanor.

Also, in an interview with Publisher's Weekly, Rowell said this:

My junior high and high school existence was depressing, and this [music] made me think there was something else, that someday I’d be an adult and I’d be able to get to it. I wanted Eleanor to have something more than her difficult home life, and I wanted Park to have something to give her, and music did both those things.

An almost gritty edge to the story gives it terrific complexity, yet it is also as bright and pretty and hopeful as we wish all of our love stories to be.

Eleanor and Park find the other world in this one for one another and for the reader.

Reader, you're gonna love it.