When I get the sharp stab of envy I know I am off course, either on the wrong track entirely or not working for the life I want.
I read The Nature of Jade, which felt burdened by too many elements— working with elephants, parents getting a divorce, runaway boy with a baby, anxiety disorder. She stitches the chapters together with epigraphs about animal behavior, making them appear connected, but they never add up to one thing, thematically. Like, Fault in Our Stars: mortality. Right at the center, all the time. How can we live, how can we love, why should we love, knowing our days are numbered?
Yesterday Ellie reminded me that the genius of The Fault in Our Stars is the size of its thematic question, and the grace with which John Green answers it. Thematic question: what’s the point of living if you’re just going to die? Every character in the book grapples with that question in some way, not just the dying girl and the dying boy. The writer they went looking for, shattered by his inability to answer the question. The blind kid’s girlfriend, who left him because she couldn’t stand to think about the question, preferring the illusory comfort of her current health. And of course Anne Frank, fighting for whatever scraps of life were left, believing until the end that her life mattered. That’s what gave the story its power— not boy meets girl, girl loses boy to cancer, but how do we make sense of a world where death will happen?
That seems to be part of why I read: lessons to live by. Help figuring out what it means to be human.
Something I did learn from We Were Liars (which, like Gone Girl, is beautifully written): character really matters. These characters are real to me— the tiny scar Gat works in his eyebrow, the fact that he cares about class, and knows the names of the servants who make their box lunches; the fact that Cady has retreated into a dark, punishing thinness. This is how close we need to get, to make stories live, and once they come alive, they have authority, whether people like them or not.