Holding Up The Universe

It does not take long for Libby’s mind to turn to boys and the potential for romance once she gets back to school. Of course, considering that adolescence is a developmental period marked by the surge of hormones, romance is a common theme of young adult literature. However, romance is a theme of the genre for a more important reason, as well: adolescence is a period of finding and embracing one’s identity—including sexual identity. For many teens, it can be a period rife with confusing and conflicting feelings as they struggle to identify and accept their sexuality. Readers may be able to see themselves in Libby as she makes her way through the halls of Martin Van Buren High School, thinking about the potential for love.

Jack and Libby’s lives often echo one another’s, despite their significant differences. These pages also highlight Jack’s tumultuous romantic life. Jack finds himself in a tricky situation—he has made out with a girl that was not his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Caroline, while drunk at a party. While Jack’s friends think he has just been carousing, readers know the truth: Jack thought he was making out with Caroline, he just could not tell the difference. Readers see his prosopagnosia on full, terrifying display in this section. As Jack walks through the halls, he finds himself surrounded by strangers. He constantly has to listen and ask leading questions to determine to whom he is speaking because there are very few people he can identify regularly. Like Libby, Jack also wants intimacy, but for completely different reasons. For Jack, his relationship with Caroline provides him a rock to cling to. Even though she does not know about his prosopagnosia, she can tell him “who’s who,” and as long as Jack is with her, he feels safe (62).

These pages also provide insight into more peripheral—but still important—characters, namely, Libby’s and Jack’s parents. Like Libby and Jack themselves, these characters are complex and multi-dimensional, and none of them are perfect. Will Strout is a kind, sympathetic man who clearly loves Libby, but he is perhaps too protective of her, which becomes more apparent later in the novel. Similarly, Dusty suggests that their parents frequently fight, and Jack recounts their father’s infidelity. In casting the novel’s adults as complicated, flawed characters, Niven shows readers that there are no perfect people. In fact, imperfection is another central theme of the text and an important one for Niven’s audience—primarily adolescents—to understand. Especially in “clique-ish” environments like public high schools, it is easy to elevate popular peers like Caroline or Kendra Wu to a status of perfection. However, Niven shows that even seemingly-perfect individuals, including one’s parents, have flaws.

The novel also raises the question of whether a perceived “flaw” might actually be a good thing. After all, Jack clearly considers his prosopagnosia to be a flaw—he says more than once that there is something “wrong” with him (17). Similarly, Libby often seems to waver between embracing her weight and treating it as a shortcoming. As the characters develop over the course of the novel, they beginto embrace these flaws as unique components of their identities rather than as things to keep secret or feel guilty about. However, the novel asks readers to draw a line between those sorts of “flaws” and the flaws that other characters showcase, such as Jack’s dad’s infidelity, Moses Hunt’s aggression, and Caroline Lushamp’s passive-aggressive brand of bullying. Given that adolescence is a critical moment for developing personality and becoming the type of person that one wants to be, Niven argues that not all imperfection is equal. Some flaws are inherent, perhaps because they are innate, and these are the ones that should be embraced; others are flaws of one’s own choosing, and these are the ones that are problematic.