I blame Tiny Cooper.Ī lovably infuriating mountain of baby queer, Tiny Cooper is introduced early on as the best friend of Levithan’s Grayson. At this critical moment, both authors seem to forget what they are writing about, and the novel loses its footing and stumbles to an unfocused, unsatisfying, and almost unrelated conclusion. And what a beautiful thing it would have been if that had never happened. Under circumstances painful, humiliating, and funny as hell, the two Will Graysons meet. This Will is gay, untried and untested, and madly in love with Isaac, a boy he knows only as an online profile. He lives in an entirely different version of Chicago the one where single moms struggle to pay the rent, and kids with depression don’t have weekly sessions with a shrink. John Green’s Will Grayson, on the other hand, is a blend of knife-edged defensiveness and gloomy feelings so stark his dialog seems to be written in eye-liner and black nail polish. In reality he cares a lot, which is why we like him, particularly as he laboriously and almost unwillingly begins his pursuit of Jane, who is just enough like him to attract his desire, and just enough cooler than him to scare him to death. Unfortunately, what promised to be an absorbing depiction of two disparate teenage lives, collapsed under the weight of a secondary plot thread and lost its way completely.ĭavid Levithan kicks off the story with his Will Grayson, a cool, affluent, music-obsessed, insecure high school junior in Chicago who lives by two simple rules: Shut up, and don’t care too much. Both authors remember with icicle clarity what it was like to be a boy confused by a larger world that increasingly insists on crashing the party, utterly befuddled by the future, and to make matters worse: falling in love for the first time. If there has ever been a better expression of the sense of futility and dashed hopes experienced by every teenage boy since Cain and Abel, I haven’t read it.Īnd that’s precisely what makes will grayson, will grayson by David Levithan and John Green, work. speak of one half of this novel, I ran headlong into the speech above and forgave almost everything. Somewhat turned off by the incessant all lower case letters and too-adorable-for-words i.m. all i wanted was one fucking break, one idiotic good thing, and that was clearly too much to ask for, too much to want.” it’s not fair because i didn’t ask for dad to leave, and i didn’t ask to be depressed, and i didn’t ask for us to have no money, and i didn’t ask to want to fuck boys, and i didn’t ask to be so stupid, and i didn’t ask to have no real friends, and i didn’t ask to have half the shit that comes out of my mouth come out of my mouth.

“if i wasn’t such a lame excuse for a person something right might happen to me. ‘will grayson, will grayson’ by David Levithan and John Green

Tiny cooper will grayson