Hollywood, Ending by John Green: book review

Hollywood, Ending by John Green

I have tried to write this review on three separate occasions. Every time, the draft gets long and unwieldy, a winding string of poorly made points trying to enumerate all the different ways the book didn't work for me, mostly to make sense of how disappointing I found this novel when it's been shrouded in absolutely glowing reviews from the NYT to random people on the Internet.

It's not a strange thing for me to be underwhelmed or disappointed by a book. That happens all the time. But I think I'm confused because I thought I would be one of the people singing Hollywood, Ending's praises. I pre-ordered my copy as I did for Turtles All The Way Down after devouring all of Green's YA novels in the years prior. I'm sure you can dig up all those reviews somewhere in these depths. I also enjoyed The Anthropocene Reviewed and Everything is Tuberculosis despite my reservations that I would be into a book about Tuberculosis. I've always maintained that John Green can really write. Beyond that, I've been obsessed with the work of Andy Warhol since I was a child, and I love books about fame and the internet.  

So it was jarring to pick up Green's adult debut that he apparently spent eight years writing and re-writing and be so underwhelmed. I think the core of it, for me, is the feeling that Green never cracked the story. Sometimes, you have to start from a million different angles to finally get the one that slices to the heart. A lot of this book felt, to me, like he eventually gave up and called it good enough. This feeling runs from the characters into the prose into the repetitive, summarized scenes that make up the plot. He has so many amazing ideas but no commitment to truly going there, leaving us sitting on the surface of the water instead of exploring the more uncharted depths.

The book just felt confused. The text itself had so many awkward sentences and overstuffed adjectives. I'd always been a fan of his prose in the past, so this stood out to me. It was fast paced and easy to read, which kept me going despite my growing reservations. I can see this being huge with the Taylor Jenkins Reid/Emily Henry type crowd. I couldn't tell if there was a genuine deficit here or if I've just become a very different reader in the years since 2017. 

Still, I'd always credited Green with being a deep observer, which is a quality absent in this book. His characters feel made up of stock personalities. Juniper, the young starlet breaking out of her Nickelodeon past, is driven, sure, but she's unwilling to collaborate with others or learn and is incredibly stubborn in a way that the narrative tries to simplify into Juniper "caring" and being dismissed because she's a young woman. I didn't get the vibe that Juniper was really a great person, or she was struggling to be one, but the narrative never really considers this. It feels like we're meant to just accept Juniper's inherent goodness. The more glaring issue is that the other half of her character is built on her abusive stage mother passing away. There's plenty of nuance to find in grieving someone you had a complicated relationship with, but every time the topic came up, it felt like Green was just offering a limp summary of I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy. So many details felt uncomfortably similar. 

Kai falls into a similar trap. It's his first movie gig, so he's captured as the wide-eyed innocent. On the other side, Kai has what for a lot of the book is posited as a secret, even to the reader when in his first person chapters. I don't really love how this was used for a plot point and then almost completely unexplored besides as something to keep out of the media. Kai was molested by a teacher when he was in high school and had to testify about it at the trial. This is, obviously, a major trauma and impacts Kai's future feelings on love, sex, and relationships. When this was first introduced alongside the love story with Juniper—which comes across as very insta-love with little to back it up or sustain the connection over the arc of the story—I was hoping to see Kai work through how his past influences this relationship and maybe see him work through it with Juniper as they became closer. 

This doesn't really happen. Green takes all of the most difficult, emotional, and pivotal scenes and reduces them to summary. Often, a single sentence. In this case "And then they had sex." It would've meant a lot to me to see Kai grapple with this in real time as it is something he seems to be able to reclaim over the course of the book, but we only see him at point A and point B with nothing in between. There aren't enough novels that look at what it means to move forward after sexual assault as they largely focus on the immediate aftermath, and I loved the idea of exploring how it still effects someone at a longer distance.

Similarly, it's revealed at the end of the book that a major mentor figure in their lives betrays their trust in a huge way. Besides surface level anger, this is almost entirely brushed aside in the rushed ending. Given Kai's history, I wish there was more reckoning with being hurt by another mentor figure that he had trusted now as an adult and how that maybe impacted him going forward, as trusting is difficult for him. It felt like anything under the surface of the filming and press junket was off the table, which defeats the point of writing a book in first person. I had to read so many scenes of bad lines from their upcoming fantasy movie and rarely got to see them have a real conversation, making it hard to buy that their love story was really as powerful as the book wants you to believe it is.

It isn't until the very end that there's a genuine emotion, I felt, on the page as Kai finally snaps, but again, this is glossed over and things are fixed in the effortless way of the romance novel. Not much feels earned and very little feels driven by the characters.

Maybe Green felt out of his depth on some of these topics, but the problem continued into discussing fame and the realities of being on social media. Despite being one of the YouTube pioneers, someone who was unfairly run of Tumblr, John Green's portrayal of having to be a public figure online is incredibly flat. He has lived experience with press junkets, movie sets, and being an internet celebrity in a way most writers never will. And yet, the book is full of observations I could surmise from my couch. I never feel the experience, and I never quite believe Kai and Juniper as people. Their interiority never veers away from their two allotted talking points.

I am curious if, going forward, John Green will settle into his adult writing voice. I'm also wondering if we've hit that Taylor Swift level phenomenon where no matter what you do, the world (and sales numbers) will tell you it's amazing. Becoming extraordinarily popular as an artist comes with many amazing benefits, but I also believe it's artistically difficult. There are fewer people to ask you to dig deeper, push further. I'll be curious to see what happens next.