Paper Towns

What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.

Considering that my last foray into contemporary-realistic YA fiction was not exactly a success coughBefore I Fall by Lauren Oliver cough I was very careful when it came to choosing my next novel in this genre. I finally managed to look at someone who I have a great amount of respect for: John Green. I love all the stuff he has done outside of being an author, with Nerdfighters, Crash Course, and Vlogbrothers to boot. And besides, I liked both Looking for Alaska and The Fault in Our Stars , so I felt ready to explore another of John Green's books, and I chose this one. Was it good? Not really. At least, not for a John Green novel.

I must say that the first thing that I noticed about this text is the plot. Now, stop me if you've heard this one before: A guy meets this really hot girl who manages to spout some deep platitudes about life, then, just as the guy is about to fall in love with her, she disappears from the plot for some reason, forcing him to realize that the girl he knew was only that type girl to him, and a different person to someone else. You stopped me yet? You should have, because that is the same basic plot as Looking for Alaska. The only difference here is that Alaska has a few advantages over Paper Towns. One of these is that this theme was only somewhat present in Alaska, mixed in with other themes in the book, which I won't spoil. However, here, the theme of identity is all we have and the basic plot is not strong enough to hold it up. The second advantage that Alaska has is that we get to spend more time with Alaska before she disappears from the plot, making the search for her by the main character, that much more understanding and believable. We have met Alaska along with the main character Pudge, and we can understand why he “looks for her”, so to speak. Now, Quentin may have spent even more time with Margo, knowing her since they were a kids, but from a reader's standpoint, I simply didn't care. We only get so see her directly interact with Q for a small number of scenes, or about the beginning 25% of the book, and half of that time, she spouts stupid philosophy that I will get into later. Then once she is gone, I felt like his search for her bordered on an obsession. I felt like he had learned everything he had to learn about Margo and the theme identity in the first 50% of the book, and then apply that to himself. So then, I was left wondering why he continued his search.

Then there is how identity is explored.. I like how it was introduced in this text, talking about the Dr. Johnson Johnson episode, and how that is tied to the identity of all the main characters of the plot. Every character gets some kind of development, like Ben, who seems like a cheezy lady's-man, turn out to be an inexperienced teen, and Radar, who had a calm demeanor mask the problem of dealing with parents who collect black santa memorabilia. Margo, on the other hand, is a character that has little reason to change, and honestly, her concepts about identity do not make sense. Her big philosophical info dump is that we all live in ‘paper towns' or that we all strive for homes and cars and whatnot that don't mean anything, and that we are all living fake lives as a result. At first, I thought her idea of people living in paper towns might be interesting, as it could have applied to the metaphor for Orlando, a place that, with its many theme parks, manufactures fun and excitement...as long as you are willing to pay for it. However, then her idea of paper towns begins to break down the more one thinks about it. How do you know that this isn't what someone wants for their life? What about how it isn't the stuff you gain, but the experiences you have that make the differences? And why Margo thinks New York will be any different than Orlando, is beyond me. What is so non-papery about New York? Does it have any magical fantastic stuff that I am unaware of? It feels like this character is selfish and rude to everyone because only she and her fantastic 18 year old brain has life all figured out.

Margo's annoying theme aside, I still liked how the characters were written. They felt like teen boys and girls, with some really funny male-style humor thrown in every now and again that had me laughing. And, at first, I liked how the main characters managed to connect the dots in finding Margo, even if the plot did begin to slow down in these scenes at times. John Green's writing also manages to shine through when he writes about the final feelings of graduating and leaving high school forever, In fact, there are a few times when I wasn't surprised to hear “Graduation (Friends Forever” by Vitamin C playing in my head, and not in a cheesy way either. This novel does manage to make that feeling come back to me and I think that is because of Green's writing. Then there are the metaphors with the various poems and novels mentioned in the text. They were very well done and very well executed.

I must say that I that this is my least favorite of Green's book so far. Yes, it does have the ability to be a good story about a young man graduating from high school, but ability does not translate into reality. The main problem being Margo and all her pretentious lines that she says, along with how the ending really solved nothing and, in my opinion, made this book's journey all for naught. I think I'm going to give this book a three out of five. If you liked this novel, I can understand, but I just couldn't get past fricken Margo Roth Spiegelman to make any of this novel worth reading again.

So this is the last of John Green's books that I hadn't read. And it, like the others, boils down to much the same plot. Boy meets Girl, Girl affects Boy's life in a profound way, Boy loses Girl and has to deal with the changes she's wrought AND her absence. On one hand, I feel like Green needs to branch out and find a new plot, on the other hand, he writes this plot so well. And even within this plot he writes such different books. The Fault in Our Stars was slightly different, in that Girl lost Boy and had to deal with it. Unlike Looking For Alaska, in Paper Towns Girl didn't die, but Boy still lost her nonetheless. In Will Grayson, Will Grayson, the plot was changed to “Boy meets Boy, Boy changes Boy's world, Boy loses Boy and has to deal with the loss and the changes.” But in all fourbooks the protagonist winds up dealing with something John Green has mentioned repeatedly in his vlogbrothers videos: imagining people complexly.

What does that mean?

It means not making preconceived notions of what people are or how they think. That woman who was rude to you yesterday, she's a bitch, right? Instead of just deciding “well she's rude and mean” imagine her complexly. Maybe she has a migraine, maybe she overslept and her entire morning was a cascade of failure. Maybe she has a sick kid and an out-of-work husband at home and they're struggling to make ends meet on her minimum wage income. Imagine her complexly and you'll realize that she has problems of her own, and maybe what you interpreted as a rude, mean-spirited remark was simply a tired tone of voice from a stressed-out woman. Maybe she was rude, maybe she looked at you as simply someone in her way because she didn't imagine you complexly. Imagining people complexly is another way of saying “treat people like PEOPLE and not just bit players in your own little drama.” That can be a hard task when not everyone is doing it.

In Paper Towns, Margo Roth Spiegelman is an enigma, even to the boy who's been her neighbor for sixteen years and from whose perspective the book is written. She's been a different person to every person in high school, letting no one see the real Margo until she runs away and leaves a trail of clues for Quentin, her neighbor, to find. Quentin's had a crush on her since he was ten, but it's only in following her clues that he begins to see Margo as Margo, and not as the idea of Margo he had constructed.

It's an important lesson, and maybe the reason it shows up in all of John Green's books is because it is so incredibly important and yet so rare to find and so difficult to do. John talks about the concept in a speech he gave at the Alan Conference but the important part is here, I think:

“Let me tell you what is, in my opinion, the central problem of human existence: I am stuck in my body, in my consciousness, seeing out of my eyes. I am the only me I ever get to be, and so I am the only person I can imagine endlessly complexly. That's not the problem, actually. The problem is you. You are so busy taking in your own wondrousness that you can't be bothered to acknowledge mine.When I was a kid, I believed in an embarrassingly total way that I was the only human being in the world and that all the other people, including my brother and parents and everybody, was in fact an alien, and that the aliens had created the entire world to do a series of controlled experiments on how a human child—me—would respond to various forms of trial and tribulation. And when I wasn't around, they would take off their human costumes—the aliens had very advanced costuming technology, naturally—and they would do alien stuff. You know, go to the alien zoo and watch the alien local news and whatever else. I really believed this.And obviously, on some level, this indicated the kind of massively narcissistic worldview that would later require decades of therapy to adjust. But in a way, I was right. I am the only person whose existence I can directly attest to. By the way, when I've talked about this in the past I've seen people nodding, like they also believed in their childhoods that they were the only real person in the world, and I would imagine that right now, some such people are probably feeling the comfort we feel when we learn that our delusions are shared, that we are not alone even in our darkest corners.... I will acknowledge that you are all likely to be people. The probability that I am the only person in the world is extremely small—it is that number that infinitely approaches zero but isn't zero. And yet. On some level, I have to take it on faith that you are as complex as I am, that your pain and joy and grief are as real and as meaningful as my own.”

The entire speech is very much worth reading. John Green is extremely eloquent (as good writers must be!) and his perspectives on things are usually worth reading.