Jay Asher: 13 Reasons Why

This is an odd book structurally because of the dual storylines. It's not so much flashback as paired narrative, as we follow Clay in the present listening to Hannah in the past narrating stories about events in the even further past, all of them about people who hurt her in ways that led to her suicide.

It's also an odd book because Clay makes Hannah's story all about himself in a way that he's not made aware of at all. I was struck by this all throughout the novel, that both halves of the story make everything that happens to Hannah all about Clay, but Clay never wakes up or grows up enough to realize that this story is NOT about him. It's really not. In fact, I would say Hannah's message to Clay is to stop making everything about himself, but he doesn't get that, either, and at the end decides he's going to be the savior for another disaffected girl and save her from herself. That's the message he gets: this other girl's story is also all about him.

Everyone is self-centered, but this takes things to the next level. It's so unselfconscious all throughout that I wonder whether it's a meta-commentary on selfishness, but I don't think so. It's possible the author perfectly replicated teenage self-absorption without commenting on it. Hannah certainly comments on it all throughout, pointing out all of the people who couldn't be bothered stepping outside themselves to treat her as a person, but Clay misses that point every time.

Hannah: Nobody thinks of me as a person.
Clay: Did I do that? Oh God, I did, didn't I. I'm so guilty of that. I feel terrible. If only I had done xyz to save poor Hannah, whom I loved, from those other jerks. I'm such a jerk too. How could I be such a jerk? [beats self up for six more pages]

I would like to see a more evolved Clay think instead: That must have been terrible for Hannah.

He did get there to a certain extent eventually, but made that about himself as well, since he decided to save Skye more or less to prevent ever feeling that guilty again. As a character arc, this was pretty non-existent and covers the distance from 100% self-absorption to 97% self-absorption. I was not impressed with Clay from beginning to end and found him to be a navel-gazer almost entirely without empathy for others to the point where he's almost a sociopath.

Hannah suffers from a lot of awful treatment, as well as severe depression, but her character more than anything is about long term solutions to short term problems. The bullying and slandering she endures would slide off the back of anyone without severe depression. She actually lists things like a boy stealing her poem, and someone spreading a rumor about her. They are very small events, I think deliberately on the part of the author, because the point is that these events do not in any way merit suicide. Hanna would not decide it's the end of the world if she had any support structure or healthy coping mechanisms. So Hannah is also a character without much of an arc. She seems to put all of her self-worth in the hands of a lot of juvenile assholes, a terrible decision, obviously, and then accepts their treatment of her as a fair representation of the world. I'm also not sure what pure sparkling bubble she was living in before where nobody was ever a jerk, such that it's a complete shock to her here.

Hannah's character was written mainly to argue against suicide, so in a lot of ways she makes all these mistakes for the benefit of readers who can then see what not to do. Reach out to others, don't take the short term for the long term, ask for help explicitly, talk to parents, call the hotlines, and so on. Hannah models what not to do. I wish I could feel like Clay also models what not to do, but he's not presented that way, even though his thought processes are absurdly self-involved. Instead, he's presented as normal, even good, innocent, justified, and explicable.

Neither character felt fully realized to me. Neither followed much of an arc. The book itself hung on the tension of Clay finding out who had done what to Hannah, which also felt strange to me since their school was such a hotbed of gossip. How did all of these things stay secret? But for the audience, it was incredibly tense.

I really liked the way that Clay had to use an old-fashioned Walkman to listen, and had to follow the map around town to see all of the different locations. That gave the novel an excellent structure and raised the stakes for Clay as he was on a timetable not of his own making. It also gave us a good reason to explore all of these different locations and gave each one of them intense meaning.

I can't think of a better term than manpain for putting Clay through all of these emotionally wrenching moments. It bothered me a lot that this story about a young woman's extreme emotional and physical suffering was told through transmuting it into a young man's emotional suffering.

This reminded me of a horrible habit I've seen in some shows, notable Battlestar Galactica and its prequel Caprica, of setting up women being raped offscreen but showing us the suffering of the men who love them, prioritizing and literally foreground that suffering. The women's pain is used as a secondary source for the men's pain, which is set up to be much more interesting or important. I truly hate that and so when this whole book followed that same pattern, it was infuriating and felt like a betrayal of Hannah's own story. This book is all about Clay taking Hannah's pain and making it about himself.

The ending especially undercut the value of Hannah herself as it was set up as Clay learning something from Hannah's death and going out to save another girl from herself. That also gives Clay too much credit. Was there anything he could have done to save Hannah? Maybe he could have gone after those assholes who were tormenting her. Maybe he could have stood up for her in public. He thinks his biggest fault was leaving her alone at a party when she asked to be left alone, but that's absurd. Again, he makes it all about his own experience.

In the end I hated Clay for being a self-absorbed clueless dope who hijacked Hannah's suffering for himself and never got the message at all that the secret to life and friends and keeping others from suicide, if possible, is to stop being so goddamn self-absorbed.