This review contains mild spoilers for An Absolutely Remarkable Thing.
It’s hard to believe in ourselves sometimes. And by ‘ourselves,’ I don’t mean each of us - I mean all of us. People. Humanity.
The miracle of intelligent life feels less like a wonder and more like a bummer when we see what we’re doing - and not doing - with that intelligence. We could achieve so much - we could feed the world, we could reduce human and animal suffering, we could learn to live and work better with each other, we could make beautiful art and explore and understand the universe. Instead, we wage wars and build bombs and burn carbon and fell trees and let people die of preventable diseases and test cosmetics on animals and overturn ecosystems and increase the gap between the rich and the poor instead of closing it and pollute basically every medium of potential pollution we can find.
Some people think we haven’t heard from aliens because they don’t exist. Others think they’ve definitely seen us and are too smart to have anything to do with our dirty, violent, wasteful little planet.
Hank Green is of a third opinion. If aliens existed, they would find us beautiful and marvelous and worth protecting - not from other aliens, or from cosmic perils, but from perhaps our biggest threat: ourselves.
Such is the premise of A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor, Green’s second novel and sequel to his fantastic debut work An Absolutely Remarkable Thing. An Absolutely Remarkable Thing is an outstanding book, but A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor is different, new, and even better. Green takes all of the things that made the first volume so insightful, captivating and compelling, and he brings them to the next level.
The unique, hilarious, and endearing voice of protagonist April May is joined in A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor by four other narrating characters as well as deftly inserted excerpts from fictional primary sources, a challenging literary strategy that Green executes masterfully and which not only heightens the story’s tension and energy but also gives it much more flavor and range in its perspectives and its commentary.
A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor also deliciously ups the ante in continuing the plot initiated in An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, with intensified excitement, raised stakes, and even more thrill, mystery, action and suspense. The story is everything readers could have asked for after An Absolutely Remarkable Thing.
It builds on all of the hard establishing work done by its predecessor; it resolves the burning mysteries of the first book in a way that is not only satisfying but completely unexpected and delightful; and it ends on a poignant final note with all loose ends tied up. Its premises are even more fascinating and mind-blowing to think about than those of the first book.
Finally, there is the most important part - the ideas. The themes. The gold mine of observation, analysis and commentary that Green has to share are what made An Absolutely Remarkable Thing not just good, but indeed remarkable. A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor, despite having a much more action-filled, event-driven plot, sacrifices no level of sophistication or space in exploring ideas. Instead, it’s actually even more penetrative and thoughtful than An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, and the ideas it discusses are new and different from those of the first book.
An Absolutely Remarkable Thing explores human nature and society by examining how humans would think about aliens; A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor does so by considering how aliens would think about us. An Absolutely Remarkable Thing is about how humans respond to challenges from external sources; A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor is about how humans respond to challenges we create ourselves.
A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor contains critiques of capitalism, of the concentration of power, of the attention economy, and of the perverse epidemic of loneliness that has come to grip our ever more connected world. It explores our relationship with technology, and how we take opportunities to build a more communal, mutually understanding and equitable society and instead use them to be more isolated, to confirm our existing views, and to enrich the powerful and leave everyone else behind. And it talks about how all of this is a product of our broken systemic conceptions of value.
As with An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor forces us to see and think and ask questions about deep, important problems that humanity faces. But also like An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor has me hopeful for and in awe of the truly special thing that our species is.
It’s about how the wonders of sentience and empathy can overcome the evolutionary inertia of self-interest. It’s about how if we care enough and work hard enough we can help the many take on the few. Ultimately, it’s about how for all our failures and all our flaws, we are still amazing, and meaningful, and worth loving and protecting.
A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor is about the beautiful and foolish endeavor that is humanity. But it’s also in itself an attempt to believe in humanity - and that, indeed, is a beautifully foolish endeavor.
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