I’ve been in the news a bit lately. Well, sort of. A young lass with the same name as me has attempted to become the world’s youngest person to sail unassisted around the globe. Imagine if our paths crossed, the socially awkward, bookish J.W. and the seafaring prodigy J.W: hilarity and valuable life lessons, I’m sure, would ensue. Basically, this is the concept behind John Green and David Levithan‘s collaborative novel, Will Grayson, Will Grayson. Two young men, both of them named, you’ll never guess, Will Grayson, are slightly troubled and questioning kids whose lives intersect by chance one evening in Chicago in a porn store called Frenchy’s. Lives are changed, and lessons are learned; and all of it is told in the characteristically hilarious and touching writing of John Green and David Levithan. Together they manage to make teenaged characters into the kind of teenager you wish you had been at that age, smart and funny, yet endearingly clueless about the intricacies of life and love.
Will Grayson 1 lives by a rule which has never failed him yet: don’t care about anything and just shut up. Essentially, this is his way of protecting himself from getting hurt. His best friend, the three hundred pound, musical loving, openly gay Tiny Cooper is the centre of his universe. In Tiny Cooper, Green has written another fantastic best friend character, whining and self-centred as he may be, he’s also laugh out loud hilarious. Enter a burgeoning relationship with possibly gay Jane, a best friend who is writing a musical about his fabulous self, and Will 1 finds his tried and true method of getting by beginning to falter.
“NO. No no no. I don’t want to screw you. I just love you. When did who you want to screw become the whole game? Since when is the person you want to screw the only person you get to love? It’s so stupid, Tiny! I mean, Jesus, who even gives a fuck about sex?! People act like it’s the most important thing humans do, but come on. How can our sentient fucking lives revolve around something slugs can do. I mean, who you want to screw and whether you screw them? Those are important questions, I guess. But they’re not that important. You know what’s important? Who would you die for? Who do you wake up at five forty-five in the morning for even though you don’t even know why he needs you? Whose drunken nose would you pick?!”
Will Grayson 2 is a little harder to love, depressed, angry, cruel – he shuts everyone out in the most abrupt manner. He’s fending off a not-really-friend’s unwanted attention, dealing with his father’s absense, his rampant depression, his sexuality and retreating into the haven of an online relationship with Isaac. This Will is much harder to connect with as his reluctance to reveal himself to his peers and family also extends to the reader. However, as his life begins to change through a chance encounter with Will Grayson 1, he becomes not altogether likable – this could be a case of hitting too close to home though – but we can understand the why he acts the way he does.
she asks me if i took my pills before i ran off this morning and i tell her, yeah, wouldn’t i be drowning myself in the bathtub if i hadn’t? she doesn’t like that, so i’m all like ‘joke, joke’ and i make a mental note that moms aren’t the best audience for medication humor. i decide not to get her that world’s greatest mom of a depressive fuckup sweatshirt for mother’s day like i’d been planning. (okay, there’s not really a sweatshirt like that, but if there was, it would have kittens on it, putting their paws in sockets.)
As the two Will Graysons meet, relationships blossom, lives and attitudes change and an epic musical is written and performed. Adolescent relationships and friendships are dealt with all the emotional seriousness they are felt with at that age, and the wealth of pop-cultural references and sassy dialogue prevent things from ever getting too heavy. Will Grayson, Will Grayson is a fun read from two well established young adult authors, and the quirky hijinks and supporting characters make it a vibrant look at adolescence.
Finally! I sped through Paper Towns over the course of roughly twenty four hours; staying up until 2am (hey, that’s pretty late for me now) and finishing it off in one sitting the next day. The mystery surrounding the narrative of Margo Roth Spiegelman demands the readers attention. I’ve made it pretty clear in my reviews of both Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Katherines that the female characters in John Green‘s young adult fiction come across as mere devices for the enlightenment of the male characters, but in Paper Towns Green seems to be critiquing that approach, or at least questioning the validity of it.
In Paper Towns, John Green again creates quirky outsiders just on the edge of full-blown geekery; I often wonder how much of these male lead characters are evidence of Green’s own idiosyncratic personality. Quentin Jacobsen, or Q as he is more commonly known, is close to graduating from high school. Friend to the band geeks, but not musical himself, his social group hovers towards the outer edges of the high school milieu. His next door neighbour is the queen-bee of the high school social world, Margo Roth Spiegelman, who he has been madly in love with since they were children. As children, they discovered a dead body in a local park but drifted apart over the years. Until one night, just a few weeks away from graduation, Margo appears at his window and lures him into a night of adventure of elaborate pranks and spirited youthful antics. The next day, she disappears.
It was life as it had always been — only more fatigued. I had hoped that last night would change my life, but it hadn’t — at least not yet.
Q is left behind with a series of clues, including highlighted passages of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”, and induced by his all too brief contact with Margo, sets off to find her and discover who she really is. Until about halfway through I thought that Paper Towns was going to follow the same paths as Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Katherines – and while all three novels have very similar storylines, Paper Towns diverges from the usage of a female character as the gateway to the male’s understanding of love, life and everything in between. While Q’s quest does have aspects of this, the combination of analysis of “Song of Myself” and Q’s unveiling of his illusions of Margo and lack of real understanding or knowledge of her as a person elevate Paper Towns to a increasingly complex self-referential piece of literature.
And all at once I knew how Margo Roth Spiegelman felt when she wasn’t being Margo Roth Spiegelman: she felt empty. She felt the unscaleable wall surrounding her. I thought of her asleep on the carpet with only that jagged sliver of sky above her. Maybe Margo felt comfortable there because Margo the person lived like that all the time: in an abandoned room with blocked-out windows, the only light pouring in through holes in the roof. Yes. The fundamental mistake I had always made — and that she had, in fairness, always led me to make — was this: Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.
In discovering Margo, after an epic twenty-four hour road trip with his closest friends (and it must be mentioned that Green writes friendships so well), Q learns that a) she didn’t want to be found, and b) his illusions and his idealization of her does not match up to the “real” image of Margo Roth Spiegelman. This unequal distribution of images of a person isn’t unsettling to Q’s entire understanding of life, however, but offers him a lesson in the perception of the Other, and that ultimately reveals more about himself than it does about her. While Margo is an intriguing character, the novel is about Q’s revelation about perception and understanding, and it is written in such a beautifully simple and engaging manner, keenly aware of the growing pains of adolescence. Margo is used as the motivation that sets in motion Q’s mission to further self-awareness, but in a much more complex and satisfying way than Green’s previous novels.
I have so much more to say about this novel, but I think it is going to take several further readings before I really am able to articulate what I want to say. (And, incidentally, I think that someone with the knowledge and extreme patience with French psychoanalytical theory could write a killer Lacanian analysis of Paper Towns.) However, Paper Towns is a deeply insightful novel, with characters and issues that are easy to relate to, and, finally, a female character that is more complex than divining light for the slightly awkward male character.
John Green‘s second novel An Abundance of Katherines again relies on the trope of feisty female as the emotional saviour of a socially awkward young male, yet manages to be an inviting, and very funny, look at teenage relationships and friendships. After being dumped by his nineteenth girlfriend named Katherine, child prodigy Colin Singleton sets of on a cross-country road trip with his best friend Hassan in order to clear his mind and work on a mathematic formula which predicts the rate of relationship failure. Colin does come up with his desired formula, but more importantly, learns along the way, with a little help from a smart and sassy young woman named Lindsey, that the unpredictably best parts of life cannot be measured. Despite An Abundance of Katherines following a very similar track as Green’s previous novel, there is enough quirky characters and genuine humour and warmth to distinguish it in its own right.
“May I be excused for a moment?” he asked.
“Is it important?”
“I think I have an eyelash in my pupillary sphincter,” replied Colin and the class erupted into laughter. Ms. Sorenstein sent him on his way, and then Colin went into the bathroom and, staring at the mirror, plucked the eyelash from his eye, where the pupillary sphincter is located.
After class, Hassan found Colin eating a peanut butter and no jelly sandwich on the wide stone staircase at the school’s back entrance.
“Look,” Hassan said. “This is my ninth day at a school in my entire life, and yet somehow I have already grasped what you can and cannot say. And you cannot say anything about your own sphincter.”
“It’s part of your eye,” Colin said defensively. “I was being clever.”
“Listen, dude. You gotta know your audience. That bit would kill at an ophthalmologist convention, but in calculus class, everybody’s just wondering how the hell you got an eyelash there.”
And so they were friends.
Socially awkward and intellectually gifted, Colin Singleton is broken up over his most recent break-up with Katherine #19. (I’ve tried not to over think how such a socially inept young man has managed to charm nineteen Katherines, when he is completely and utterly devoid of social skills.) His best friend, the hilarious Hassan, takes him on a cross-country road trip to heal his wounds, landing finally in Gutshot, Tennessee via a visit to the grave of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. There they meet Lindsey Lee Wells and decide to stop in Gutshot working for her mother. Bonding with Lindsey and her friends, and working on his formula to predict the outcomes of his Katherine relationships, Colin learns a little about himself, and a lot about life.
The reading quieted his brain a little. Without Katherine and without the Theorem and without his hopes of mattering, he had very little. But he always had books. Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.
My main issue with Looking for Alaska [review] was the use of Alaska as a narrative device rather than a fully fleshed out character; her motivations are hidden, but only to be uncovered by our sleuthing protagonist. In An Abundance of Katherines, the female romantic lead, Lindsey, forms a more genuine connection with Colin without the manic mood swings or mysterious air, before exploring their relationship further. Though Colin does come to see the unpredictability of life as a grand pleasure through Lindsey’s influence, it seems to shift based on more a shared experience – they both overcome heartache and find each other, and happiness, despite of it.
An Abundance of Katherines is full of random trivial tidbits and a number of seemingly insignificant subplots, all of which somehow manage to strengthen a reader’s perception of the story and the characters. The friendship between Hassan and Colin is very funny, a pair of more unlikely friends you could not imagine, but their sincere affection and friendly vernacular are so endearing. Even if his use of female characters is a little problematic, John Green knows how to write about close friendships and An Abundance of Katherines is a clever and amusing look at the complexity of friendships, relationships and our own understanding of life.
In John Green’s Looking for Alaska, Miles ‘Pudge’ Halter, a fan of the last words of famous individuals, decides to act on the advice of Rabelais’ supposed last words to seek the “Great Perhaps” by transferring from his high school in Florida to the boarding school Culver Creek in Alabama. Moving from a mostly friendless school life to the constant companionship of Culver Creek, Miles learns to combine social and educational responsibilities. His immersion into a group of merry pranksters, including his roommate the Colonel, introduces him to the desirable and yet distant Alaska Young. Alaska is the teen literature equivalent of film’s Manic Pixie Dream Girl, eccentric in her behaviour and tastes, with carefully affected quirks, which exist solely in order to teach the young, male protagonist about Life. Or, as is the case in Looking for Alaska, death.
Just like that. From a hundred miles an hour to asleep in a nanosecond. I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.
The novel is divided into two distinct parts, Before and After, although until the After we can only guess what the before and after refers to. I have a soft spot for boarding school stories, stemming I think from a youthful foray into Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers series, which is why the Before section of the novel was so appealing. I really loved the Before section, as the group bonded and went through requisite teenage rituals of drinking and smoking and pulling elaborate pranks, learning to deal with unrequited desires and sex. The companionable intimacy was warm, rich unlikely dialogue and a romanticized view of the banal daily realities of their lives (similar to The Perks of Being a Wallflower‘s “we were infinite” moments.) Although Alaska did show signs of being another fantasy of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl for Miles, the one who would show him about life, love and making it through the labyrinth of suffering, it never reached that stage, as the event the Before has been leading up to is Alaska’s death. On the verge of consummating his desire for her, distraught and drunk Alaska asks for the Colonel and Miles to cover for her and she drives off into the night toward her death.
I hadn’t thought of her smell since she died. But when the Colonel opened the door, I caught the edge of her scent: wet dirt and grass and cigarette smoke, and beneath that the vestiges of vanilla-scented skin lotion. She flooded into my present and only tact kept me from burying my face in the dirty laundry overfilling the hamper by her dresser. It looked as I remembered it: hundreds of books stacked against the walls, her lavender comforter crumpled at the foot of her bed, a precarious stack of books on her bedside table, her volcanic candle just peeking out from beneath the bed. It looked as I knew it would, but the smell, unmistakably her, shocked me. I stood in the centre of the room, my eyes shut, inhaling slowly through my nose, the vanilla and the uncut autumn grass, but with each slow breath, the smell faded as I became accustomed to it and soon she was gone again.
Wracked with guilt, and what feels like only the slightest suggestion of grief, After shows Miles and the Colonel not only dealing with the possibility of their role in her death but attempting to resolve the circumstances of her death. Was it an accidental collision, or illustrative of suicidal behaviour? Miles and the Colonel focus their attentions – perhaps as a way of showing their grief – to playing detective. As the pieces come together, their conclusion amounts to little more than a heartfelt response to a homework essay for a religion class. They don’t come to terms with death itself, only with Alaska’s death. Her role and her death is minimized to freeing them of their own guilt – the upstanding young men learn their lesson, but the manic, troubled young girl must die for them to do so.
All problematic issues aside, Green’s writing style is lively, littered as it is with interesting references and lively dialogue. I’ve a feeling I would have loved it as a teenager, as it focuses on bookish, slightly socially outcast students who manage to navigate the weird terrain of high school with style, smarts, charm and just the right amount of awkwardness. Nonetheless, the reduction of Alaska to a totem of male fantasy and deliverance from guilt is disappointing, but I intend to read more of John Green’s young adult fiction in the future.
