After reading Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan back in May, I ended up checking out three John Green books from the library, wanting to read more of him, thinking I liked his literary voice. Looking for Alaska was OK: hugely readable but also a bit over-dramatic/too much of an “issues” book for me. I liked the offbeat humor of An Abundance of Katherines more. Paper Towns, though, is far and away my favorite of John Green’s solo works. The plot has some similarities to Looking for Alaska: smart/nerdy guy falls for crazy/unpredictable/smart/hot girl, but Paper Towns is laugh-out-loud funny in a way that Looking for Alaska only occasionally is, manages to be suspenseful and exciting without being melodramatic, and is also very much a self-consciously smart book: there’s a whole lot of Walt Whitman in these pages.
Because the story’s a mystery, complete with clues that the characters have to follow, it’s hard to say much about the plot without saying too much, but: Quentin Jacobsen, aka Q, is a well-adjusted high-school senior. (His parents are both therapists, so he thinks about well-adjustedness more than you might expect.) He’s smart, he’s well-behaved, he’s content with his daily routines: he has a perfect attendance record at school. But he’s also totally in love with his neighbor, Margo Roth Spiegelman: they’ve known each other since age two, and were friends as kids, but now she’s popular and he’s not and so they don’t have occasion to hang out much, until she shows up at his bedroom window at midnight and talks him into accompanying her on a late-night revenge adventure (her boyfriend’s been cheating on her with her best friend). Margo is simultaneously pushy/awful/selfish and really great; hilarity ensues, and then Margo disappears. She’s left home before, so no one’s too concerned at first, but days pass and she doesn’t come home and Q begins to worry.
I like how Q learns about himself and about friendship as the book progresses: how he realizes he’s not as much of a scaredy-cat as he and others might have thought, and how he realizes that other people are, well, people, with as much of an inner life as he has. I like how he reads Leaves of Grass—first just looking for clues, but then really reading it, thinking about the world and multiplicities of voices and multiplicities of metaphors and how the way we choose to see the world shapes us. I like the unabashed lyricism this book sometimes has, like when Q, talking about someone who died, says this:
I always thought of it like you said, that all the strings inside him broke. But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe the strings break, or maybe our ships sink, or maybe we’re grass—our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is alive. We don’t suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you’re imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose the grass, you’re saying that we are all infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. The metaphors have implications. Do you know what I mean? (p 301)
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