What's in a Name?

Will Grayson, Will Grayson is a collaborative novel by two of my favorite authors, John Green (author of Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, and Paper Towns) and David Levithan (Boy Meets Boy, Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist).  I ordered it the second I was made aware of its existence, and I loved every minute I spent with Will Grayson and Will Grayson.

High school junior Will Grayson hasn't cried since he was seven and watched the movie All Dogs Go to Heaven.  He believes that crying is "totally avoidable if you follow two very simple rules:  1.  Don't care too much. 2.  Shut up." He asserts that everything bad that has ever happened to him resulted from his failure to follow those rules. The truth is that his rules also keep him from making meaningful connections with people, which, if you ask Will Grayson is just fine with him.

Will Grayson did have a social group once; for a short time he was legitimately popular, but he is now a social pariah because of Tiny Cooper.  Will and Tiny have a friendship that dates back to fifth grade, and although Tiny is a loving and caring kind of guy, being his friend is social suicide.  Tiny is the catalyst behind Will breaking Rule One AND Rule Two and his "honest-to-God Group of Friends" ending up "Never Talking to Me Again."

As Will describes, "Tiny Cooper is not the world's gayest person, and he is not the world's largest person, but I believe he may be the world's largest person who is really, really gay, and also the world's gayest person who is really, really large." The actions that demoted Will Grayson to Outcast?  After a school-board member complained about gays in the locker room, Will "defended Tiny Cooper's right to be both gigantic...and gay in a letter to the school newspaper that I, stupidly, signed." When Will's friends attack him for his defense of Tiny, he walks away from the Group of Friends and is left with Tiny, openly gay, openly mammoth, openly emotional, and in love with someone new every ten minutes. Tiny his friend "Possibly Gay Jane" (Will and Jane meet when Tiny forces Will to join the Gay Straight Alliance) comprise Will's social life. And he's okay with that. He gets up in the morning, goes to school, interacts with his parents, doesn't care too much, and keeps his mouth shut. It's sort of easy, he thinks, until the GSA receives funding from the Student Council to stage Tiny Cooper's musical Tiny Dancer, a memoir about Tiny that features prominently a character named Gil Wrayson, who is more than loosely based on Will.  For Will, this is the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.

Meet Will Grayson. We'll call him the "Other Will Grayson," or OWG, for simplicity's sake since that's what the Will Graysons do.  OWG lives in another state and has no relation at all to Will Grayson.  OWG has a single Mom, a vaguely labeled "friend" named Maura who wants him to admit he's gay, and not too many other alliances in his own public school. OWG is in love with Isaac, who he met in an online chat room. He spends every waking minute thinking about Isaac or IM'ing him. Finally, OWG and Isaac agree to meet. When OWG shows up at the meeting place, Isaac is nowhere to be found.  What follows is an almost Shakespearean meeting on a curb in Chicago:  Will Grayson is abandoned by Tiny and Jane at a concert when his fake ID only proves him to be 20, and they go in without him; he meets the lovelorn and abandoned OWG who is stood up by the nonexistent Isaac.  What ensues is comical and heartbreaking in turns as we tease apart whether or not "Possibly Gay Jane" is gay (not), whether or not she and Will Grayson love each other, whether a relationship between OWG and Tiny Cooper can survive Tiny's mammoth personality, whether Will Grayson can survive Tiny's putting him in the spotlight, whether Will Grayson will break his rules, and whether Tiny Dancer will be a masterpiece that catapults Tiny Cooper to Broadway fame.

I loved this book from the first page and would have read it from cover to cover if I had had the time. I found the characters completely likable. I was a little in love with both Will Graysons, for different reasons. Although it could seem confusing to have two characters with identical names, the authors' different styles distinguish the characters enough from each other that it never really becomes confusing.  Will Grayson writes in complete sentences, in narrative form; OWG writes only in lower case and primarily in dialogue. At times it is confusing to the characters. When Tiny starts dating OWG, there is a bit of confusion about who is Will Grayson and who is Other, but it adds to the comedy. The authors capture a lot of the trials and tribulations that face adolescents today as they struggle to do what is right when doing the right thing could turn you into the school's biggest loser. Social groups change in an instant; someone always gets hurt. Much like what I have seen of "real life," the characters in Will Grayson, Will Grayson struggle to identify who they really care about and how to keep those people in their lives. We hope they will make the right decisions and come out of it better people in the end.

This is a great book for 9 - 12th graders who will be comfortable enough dealing with Tiny Cooper's gigantic gayness. The language is accessible; reading this novel is not going to catapult anyone's lexicon of SAT vocabulary words to the next level, but it may help them develop their own notions of friendship and love and what can happen when you are willing to take the chance to care and speak up. There are some slightly illicit scenes where underage adolescents use fake ID's to gain entrance to bars for concerts and one scene where a totally heartbroken Tiny Cooper gets drunk and passes out, but the characters are such reasonable people that I felt, even as I parent, I could take their actions in stride. These are good kids, testing their wings, figuring out what love is all about, making mistakes, and learning from them. Will Grayson, Will Grayson gets two thumbs up from me.