Personal story time, and it’s not about when I spent the summer hanging out in a nature reserve in the deluded hope it would endear myself to my absentee father. All I saw was sky for forever …
No. The story is about how, several years ago, I decided to almost completely cut YA fiction out of my diet. I wouldn’t say my life improved immeasurably, but my general well-being did. I still read all sorts of things, but not that many of them are about the minutia of teenagers’ lives.
Dear Evan Hansen, a hit Broadway show and a failed movie starring Kyle Derin from Marge vs the Monorail, was also a New York Times bestselling novel. And it embodies all of the worst excesses of the genre: Evan Hansen is a solipsistic goober and the depiction of his various mental illnesses is not exactly empathetic.
Evan Hansen is very anxious, and one of his coping exercises is to write a letter to himself about why he’s going to have a good day. On the first day of the new school year, Connor Murphy swipes Evan’s letter, and Evan worries about what is to be done with it. Until Connor is found dead by apparent suicide, with the letter – and Connor’s parents think that Evan was Connor’s friend, the one to unlock their mystery of a son.
Without the tones of Pasek and Paul to send Evan soaring to the top of a tree (don’t ask him what happened next), Dear Evan Hansen stays grounded, trapped inside the confines of Evan’s claustrophobic head. Without the songs, Evan doesn’t make sense. Connor’s parents see something in him that we can’t, because he doesn’t get to spin out the desperate fantasy of “For Forever”; when Connor goes viral and finally feels like he matters, it’s impossible to say why, because he merely stumbles through a speech instead of delivering “You Will Be Found”. We know that he’s not really singing, but that he has found a way to communicate with people that reaches them. In the book, Evan never finds his feet and it’s impossible to understand why he is considered magnetic: we’re on the outside, always looking in.
The only escape is Val Emmich’s poetic licence, which is potentially the most immoral part of the book: periodically there are sub-chapters narrated by the ghost of Connor Murphy.
People far smarter than me know all of the ins and outs of how to talk about and report suicide but, despite the various support services listed at the end, I’m pretty sure that Dear Evan Hansen goes completely wide of them. The Connor ghost scenes attempt to rationalise Connor’s actions, which is not helpful at all.
The younger characters themselves can’t be expected to know all of this, but at some point an adult really needs to step in. They let a trio of seventeen year olds single handedly manage a charity organisation, with absolutely no oversight of the grossly inappropriate methods that they use to garner attention. Alana, power-mad co-president of “The Connor Project” is painted as a striver desperate to pad her college application resume but really just wants eyes on her; on the page she’s deracinated, but she’s very unfortunately African-American in both live-action versions, which give incredibly bad connotations to her actions that are a cynical kneecapping of legitimate student activism.
For her part Evan’s mother practically has to work herself to death to make Evan’s life liveable and to keep his mental-health even vaguely approaching sustainable, but when he’s finally had a breakthrough with her we may never know if he understands her. Again, she doesn’t get a song to tell Evan precisely how much he means to her – but in this case you do get the gist from the dialogue. However, she is a nurse and she just kind of sniffs when she hears Evan’s taken himself off his antidepressants without supervision, so … take that as you will. She can’t be as neglectful as Evan’s narration wants us to see her.
It’s not clear if Emmich doesn’t understand what’s happening or if Evan himself doesn’t, because some characters don’t grow or change and yet Evan thinks they have. Jared, Evan’s one “real” friend, is a real piece of work. Sexist and homophobic – an odd choice for a work that was workshopped, championed, and starred in by an avowed homosexual – we’re supposed to believe he’s helping Evan when he’s both giving incredibly bad advice and enabling him to act upon it. Despite Evan’s sins, Alana commits the worst trespass in the book, and is rewarded for it when ideally she should burn. By comparison, Evan gets next to nothing out of his Faustian pact, almost as if Alana is his Dark Half because Evan must be protected from potentially judgmental audiences.
Of course, there are no repercussions for anyone for any of this, except the one big one that can’t be taken back that instigates the larger story.
But if you never once think that Evan is enjoying the accidentally ill-gotten fruits of his labour, then you have to think he’s being a desperate people pleaser, that trying to assuage his anxiety is actually doubling down on it and making it worse. However, none of the psychology that Emmich applies here goes deep enough, so we’ll never really know.
Dear Evan Hansen is a bizarre cultural relic, the story of a boy who means too well who gets sucked into the whorl of unnamed social media in the era of Upworthy and Buzzfeed clickbait. There are many ways to tell this story – and it’s actually fairly well trodden ground, where people leverage an apparent suicide for either their own gains or for something else – but it’s not clear that Dear Evan Hansen gets any of them down correctly.
This is written from the perspective of someone who has read the book and seen the movie, in anticipation of seeing the stage musical next week (in Australia, starring the son of an Olympic Medalist who is also a game show host). Maybe the stage will make it work, or maybe the songs are just good enough (although in 2024, Pasek and Paul’s anonymous wall of sound approach to musical theatre is too passé for it to be the Greatest Show).
Postscript: Having now seen the (quite good) stage version of Dear Evan Hansen staged by the Sydney Theatre Company, this story works best when it is clear that it’s about one anxious boy’s mental breakdown that sees him riding a wave of mania until his inevitable crash. The difference is that, apart from the songs, Dear Evan Hansen as a stage show is not trapped inside the head of a boy you can’t trust to tell his own story. This novel doesn’t work for many reasons and one of them is because it’s better in the experiential rather than the internal.
Sometimes you really do have to sing out your feelings … and Alana really is the villain of the piece.
