Hollywood, Ending, John Green’s first novel in almost 10 years and his first for adults, has much in common with his young adult novels. It features two incredibly articulate, insightful and self-aware young people trying to figure out their place in the world while also possibly falling in love.
The fact that both of these people are also coping, to varying degrees of success, with severe childhood trauma also tracks with Green’s earlier work. The protagonist of his previous novel, Turtles All the Way Down, has severe obsessive-compulsive disorder; and his blockbuster The Fault in Our Stars is a love story about two young people with cancer. The last book he wrote, the nonfiction bestseller Everything Is Tuberculosis, was a social history of that disease. Green is one of our great writers about illness.
In other ways, though, Hollywood, Ending charts a new path for Green, because it also offers a sharper social critique than his Y.A. work. The sickness he focuses on here is fame.
The main characters in Hollywood, Ending are two actors in their early 20s, Juniper and Kai, who are making a biopic about the last year of Andy Warhol’s life. An A-list Hollywood actor named Matthew Malone plays Warhol, while Kai plays one of Warhol’s assistants and Juniper plays a reporter writing a Warhol profile. Juniper is a former child star who spent six seasons on a children’s TV show and has worked in previous movies, but this is Kai’s first time in a major production. The novel moves back and forth between their points of view, contrasting Juniper’s more experienced perspective with Kai’s innocence.
Hollywood, Ending takes us through the entire process of making and promoting the movie, but the actual filming is described only in the first quarter of the book. The rest focuses on the publicity tour, press junkets and flashy premieres the actors need to go through in order to promote it. Green shows us how, in our media-saturated age, any artistic production is only partially about making the art. Promoting and selling it, and competing for a share of the public’s attention, are at least as important as the artwork itself. Green, who has had three movies and one TV show adapted from his novels, is deeply familiar with the Hollywood machine, and Hollywood, Ending demonstrates how hellacious this whole process can be.
Kai, who has no experience with any of this, narrates the middle two sections of the novel, in which a studio publicist is tasked with preparing him to handle the press and sell the movie. Her main advice is to say nothing of interest and stick to rehearsed talking points. At the same time, all sorts of studio machinations take place behind the scenes, including an attempt to sell the public on Kai and Juniper’s possible romantic relationship in order to create drama and get people talking about what might otherwise be a largely overlooked biopic. Eventually, both Kai and Juniper are asked to share and process their childhood trauma publicly as part of the film’s promotion.
At one point, Kai sits down with a reporter who asks him, off the record, what the junket experience is actually like. He replies:
“It’s like you’re a medieval soldier stabbing at me with a sword, and I’m deflecting the sword with my shield. As long as my shield holds, I’ll be okay. But it does take some concentration to keep the shield up.”
“But if the shield goes down, all you tell me is the truth…. What’s so bad about that?”
“The truth belongs to me. That’s my life you’re talking about. My most personal, intimate feelings. My…whatever. My worst memories. My best memories.”
“Yes, but we’ve made a deal. You exchange pieces of yourself for celebrity. Celebrity keeps you working, keeps you paid. Keeps me paid, too.”
“Except once I’ve traded those little pieces of myself, I can’t get them back. They’re not mine anymore.”
That all of this promotion is taking place for a movie about Andy Warhol is, of course, entirely deliberate. Green is a master of intertextuality. Most of his previous novels include at least one other work of art that plays a significant role in both plot and theme: Raymond Pettibon’s spiral paintings in Turtles All the Way Down; Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” in Paper Towns; and, most significantly, the fictional novel An Imperial Affliction in The Fault in Our Stars, which Green has said was largely inspired by his own youthful obsession with David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.
Having Warhol as an intertextual reference point makes sense. Warhol cared about the things this book is about—fame and what it does to people, film and what it signifies, icons and their meaning—but what he actually believed about any of these things is impossible to pin down.
The novel’s biopic focuses on the last year of his life, when he was making a series of prints based on Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper.” Juniper notes in the novel that “Warhol was a Catholic, like me I guess, even though I don’t go to Mass. The paintings weren’t jokes, but they didn’t feel especially sacred either. Again I found myself wondering whether it was all just skin-deep with him.”
This question—if there is something actually sacred in art itself, whether in a painting or a film or a novel—is a key one in Hollywood, Ending. Equally important, though, is whether the creators of these works of art need to manufacture a flattened, fake version of themselves that they can sell to the public in order to protect something true, authentic and private. Green, like Warhol, is content to raise these questions without feeling the need to provide definitive answers.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the novel ultimately demonstrates that even pretty bad art does matter—a series of schlocky films plays a key role in the final movement of the book—and that making (and selling) good art is hard but worthwhile. It also illustrates how important real relationships are for the actual people making the art.
“Part 4: The Comedown,” narrated by Juniper, reminded me of something that Thomas Merton wrote to the peace activist Jim Forest: “In the end…it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.” The only way that Kai and Juniper make it through their ordeal is by having at their side someone who sees, knows and trusts them. Without that, the machine would eat them alive. On his podcast and YouTube channel, John Green is constantly in conversation with his brother, Hank, and it is clear that having that creative partnership has helped make it possible for him to thrive in the kind of media environment he inhabits.
Hollywood, Ending is both a captivating story about the making and selling of art, and a good reminder to any of us who might want to pursue the creative life that we, too, need to nurture and rely on supportive personal relationships in order to persevere.
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