Book 727: We Contain Multitudes – Sarah Henstra

I think I saw this on some bookstagram post and liked the cover and blurb enough to request it from the library. I had no expectations going into it, but I can tell you I was NOT expecting to have the air pulled out of my lungs constantly through the last half of the book.

Seriously though, the only thing I can compare it to is when you’re sobbing so hard and you can’t catch your breath and you just keep gasping trying to breathe but you’re only getting enough oxygen to keep sobbing. Jo and Kurl’s story was brutally beautiful.

The book reminded me a lot of Heartstopper, but with a lot less glow and all the trauma of Jim Grimsley’s Southern Gothic style set in the Midwest. From bullying and drug abuse to physical abuse and (unintended?) revenge sex, Henstra does not pull her punches as Jo and Kurl grow from strangers to friends to more.

I know very little of Walt Whitman, other than what I learned in When Brooklyn Was Queer, but this love letter to his works and his observational anthropology made me think I should probably explore his works. I would definitely need to take a class though because poetry and I are like oil and water. However, Henstra clearly has an appreciation (or thorough knowledge/obsession) and made Jo’s love of Whitman shine through and really center the entire work.

So I asked Bron why you wear all those clothes. Today, it was that shirt with the little red flowers and that greenish-brown blazer. Tweed or something. Like you’re about to go hunting in Wales or someplace. or that bow tie the other day with the swirly blue-and-yellow pattern. I mean I see those outfits on you and I nearly break into a sweat thinking about your safety. A walking target.

She goes, Hasn’t he introduced you to his idol Walt Whitman yet?

I had to laugh. Yeah, me and Walt are already on friendly terms, I said.

Brown goes, It’s cosplay.

I ask her what that is and she explains that you’re a hard-core Whitman fanboy, so you dress like him. Bron’s exact words: hard-core fanboy.

Is that a thing? I ask her. Like, is there a club or something?

Nope, there’s just Jonathan, she says. (35-36)

And Henstra revisited this same outfit a few letters later with an incredibly poignant take on fashion and time. Jo lives in a place of timelessness and infinity, balancing what he thinks he wants and has with what he thinks is coming and he might want in the future.

“But ‘doing it on purpose’—if indeed I can map this accusation at least partially onto my wardrobe—isn’t merely about dressing like my poetic role model. Even more than that, it’s about continually reminding myself how short the present moment is, what a temporary torment I’m suffering at the hands of the butcherboys. These clothes of mine have lived longer than any of us, after all. The blazer you noticed in one of your letters is called Loaghtan tweed from the Isle of Man. It probably came to the US packed in some mill baron’s trunk on a steamer in the 1910s.

I do it on purpose, because I want to be mindful of the decades and centuries behind us of people making beautiful things designed to last. I want to walk down the hallways of Lincoln High with one part of me in the eternal, the timeless, and the other part of me slipping so fast through the here and now that nobody can pin me down, not even the butcherboys.” (103)

The trauma of the book is on the page which is refreshing while simultaneously being daunting. So many of the young adult novels I’ve read recently have kept most (if not all) of the trauma off the page and/or in the distant past. Maybe it’s the books that I have read recently, but waiving it off or including it as a background detail comes across as insincere. I’m not saying it needs to be on the page, but I think how an author writes a traumatic scene and the fall out after tell a lot about the author as a writer. Do they rush it? Do they gloss over it? Do they glorify it? What about the trauma makes the character who they are? I’m realizing this may make me sound like a sadist, but it’s not that. I think it’s because I grew up reading southern Gothic young adult novels and those works could do a serious number on an impressionable teen. I’m looking at you V.C. Andrews!

This is really just a long way of saying that Henstra kept it real. She didn’t gloss over the bad things, she didn’t brush them under the rug. She had the characters face them head on and then had them deal with the consequences. Kurl and Jo have to live with the consequences of their actions and it isn’t easy. Up until the last page of the book the reader still doesn’t know if they’re going to reconcile or if their relationship is just a firework burning bright but ending as quickly as it started or a simmering flame that will carry them forever into the future. I wasn’t sure as the book got closer to the end if the epistolary nature of it would allow for a resolution, but I was okay with how it ended.

I can’t say this enough. Henstra’s writing is haunting. Kurl’s description of seeing Jo sing without his knowledge is achingly beautiful:

You are singing in this new voice of yours. A crazed split-note tenor crawling up the scale like a creature outrunning death. Like a wild creature’s death song. I guess it was something about the contrast. Such a civilized, old-fashioned love song sung in a savage voice like that, and watching your throat make such a sound. I mean it made the hair stand up on my arms and my scalp prickle. I felt Bron shiver beside me.

You sang these words: And still I hope that you and I will be as one. And meanwhile your voice somehow sang the opposite: that there was pretty much no hope of any reunion or happy ending. It must have been the contrast that was so beautiful and creepy. (69-70)

And that’s not even the full description. That’s just the apex of the description. It builds slowly and you think it’s just a normal observation, but Kurl’s feelings bleed in and you really know in this moment how much he’s fallen in love with Jo and at the same time realizes that Jo is this completely unknown soul stirring entity that has wormed his way into his life. He knows at this point that no matter how bad he thinks he is for Jo, Jo will always be a part of him even if it’s from a distance. And you know that in this scene barely 1/3 of the way into the book!

Recommendation: Reading this book was a punch to the gut. The journey Jo and Kurl go on in one year is hauntingly beautiful and Henstra’s dexterity and playfulness with language was incredible. I didn’t think the epistolary form would work, but it became essential to the work and she solved my biggest problem early on explaining why they wrote out everything that happened in their letters (neither could believe it was happening). This is one of those novels like Never Let Me Go that I think will stay with me over the years—I’ll be doing something completely unrelated and then all of a sudden I’ll find myself puzzling over Jo and Kurl’s relationship and the beauty of this work.

Opening Line: “I guess when you read this letter you’ll be sitting right here looking at what I’m looking at.”

Closing Line: “Then, carefully, you signed your name.” (Whited out to avoid spoilers, highlight to read.)