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.