The all new 50 Books Challenge!
Title: Paper Towns by John Green
Details: Copyright 2008, Penguin Books LTD
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap: "Quentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving the magnificently adventurous Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she cracks open a window and climbs back into his life-- dressed like a ninja and summoning him for an ingenious campaign of revenge-- he follows.
After their all-nighter ends, and a new day breaks, Q arrives at school to discover that Margo, always an enigma, has now become a mystery. But Q soon learns that there are clues-- and they're for him. Urged down a disconnected path, the closer he gets, the less Q sees the girl he thought he knew.
# 1 Bestselling author and Printz-medalist John Green's brilliant wit and searing emotional honesty have inspired a new generation of readers."
Why I Wanted to Read It: Nearly two years ago, I finally gave John Green a chance with Looking For Alaska and I'm so glad I did. Last year I read The Fault in Our Stars and also really enjoyed it. Green's ability to write authentic, interesting teenagers has made me want to go through his bibliography, which is what I'm doing. So far this year, I wasn't impressed (to put it mildly) with An Abundance of Katherines. This was next on the list.
How I Liked It: Let's talk about John Green. I've mentioned in my previous reviews my journey with him as an author, from hearing both criticism and praise, to finally trying his work for myself and loving the first two books of his I read (Looking For Alaska and The Fault in Our Stars) which are, incidentally, his most acclaimed, and I've talked about why I loved them. Green is excellent at capturing what so very many, many authors have not, authentic-seeming teenagers. Which is partly why in checking out his entire body of work, I was so disappointed in An Abundance of Katherines. So for me, Green has a pretty broad range, in the three books of his I've now read, from staggering and brilliant to slightly worse than bland average. How does this latest entry fare?
But first! Our main character, Quentin Jacobsen, child of two psychologists (who do not pay very close attention to their only child yet do not realize it, so wrapped up as they are in their work), has friends at high school ("Radar", a Wikipedian-but-in-Green's-universe-it's-"Omnipedia", who resembles "Radar O'Reilly" from M*A*S*H except Black and his parents have the world's largest collection of Black Santas, and Ben, a horny, girl-crazy, much rebuffed girl-chaser who can't shake the nickname "Bloody Ben" after being hospitalized in tenth grade for a kidney infection which led to blood in his urine that was nastily rumored to be the result of chronic masturbation), but is pretty much plodding along. Except, of course, for his infatuation with his next-door neighbor and former childhood friend Margo Roth Spiegelman, a popular girl and object of his unrequited affections. Under the thumb of her extremely controlling (yet negligent) parents, she sneaks into his bedroom one night desperate for help with a task. Well, series of tasks, really: some serious and barely-legal (if legal) "pranks".
Turns out Margo's been cheated on, and betrayed by a lot of people and she's out for revenge (including getting a picture of her ex-boyfriend's genitals as he flees partially dressed from the house of the girl for whom he betrayed Margo). She finishes by helping Quentin get revenge on one of his bullies, and then after a night of mystery, she disappears at dawn, cryptically saying she'll miss him.
She then goes missing. The police are called, but Margo's run away before. Colin realizes she's left him many clues to find her, and slowly begins unraveling what happened to Margo.
In the meanwhile, though, he uses the skills (and ammo) he acquired from his night with Margo to fight back against school bullies and makes new friends, including with a friend Margo thought had wronged her. Finally putting the puzzle pieces together, Quentin has a horrible revelation about where Margo is and it's a race against time, having to leave his own graduation and prepare an epic (and ambitious) road trip.
He solves the mystery and all is resolved, or at least answered. Our characters move forward, and it's suggested that while some things may have changed, some things will always be, at least for now.
So how does this book fall between the revolutionary brilliance of Waiting For Alaska and The Fault in Our Stars and the tedious mediocrity of An Abundance of Katherines? Well, it varies (and we'll see) but happily, it at least nudges more toward the former. The book is as tightly paced and suspenseful and a read-until-you-finish project as Alaska and Stars, none of the plodding pace of Katherines. But it's not without its flaws.
The book frequently feels like Green is attempting to rehabilitate an '80s teen flick for a new century. The eager-to-get-laid (but getting nothing) buddy, the token (who literally identifies himself as the token Black friend; more on Green's writings on race later) Black friend, the dumb violent jocks and, oh look, the popular girl has fallen for the not-so-popular boy, and high school popularity is the most important thing in all of these kids' lives. But it has just enough of Green to make it subversive and interesting, along with some of Green's more questionable favorite tropes (he loves a cypher girl with a mystery identity, apparently: only one of his books I've read prior to this didn't contain one).
But first question, how do the teens speak? This is of course fifteen years after publication at the time of this writing. But while this felt more authentic overall than Katherines, it didn't feel as authentic as Alaska and Stars.
“Radar is going to prom,” he said morosely. Radar was our other best friend. We called him Radar because he looked like a little bespectacled guy called Radar on this old TV show M*A*S*H, except 1. The TV Radar wasn’t black, and 2. At some point after the nicknaming, our Radar grew about six inches and started wearing contacts, so I suppose that 3. He actually didn’t look like the guy on M*A*S*H at all, but 4. With three and a half weeks left of high school, we weren’t very well going to renickname him. (pgs 12 and 13)
Okay, references out of their timeline is possible for any teens, but I still think an explanation for a show that would've been off the air for over a decade before they were even born still wouldn't hurt (maybe somebody's parents/older sibling collect TV show DVDs, common in 2008, and the kids take to the show while bored one afternoon).
“Bro,” Ben said to Radar, “the freshhoneys know about the Bloody Ben story.” Radar put the handheld away finally and nodded sympathetically. “So anyway,” Ben continued, “my two remaining strategies are either to purchase a prom date on the Internet or fly to Missouri and kidnap some nice corn-fed little honeybunny.” I’d tried telling Ben that “honeybunny” sounded more sexist and lame than retro-cool, but he refused to abandon the practice. He called his own mother a honeybunny. There was no fixing him. (pg 16)
Calling it out as sexist is something, but Quentin Jacobsen, while not as annoying and insufferable as Colin Singleton, is still not without his flaws:
It struck me as somewhat unfair that an asshole like Jason Worthington would get to have sex with both Margo and Becca, when perfectly likable individuals such as myself don’t get to have sex with either of them— or anyone else, for that matter. That said, I like to think that I am the type of person who wouldn’t hook up with Becca Arrington. She may be hot, but she is also 1. aggressively vapid, and 2. an absolute, unadulterated, raging bitch. Those of us who frequent the band room have long suspected that Becca maintains her lovely figure by eating nothing but the souls of kittens and the dreams of impoverished children. “Becca does sort of suck,” I said, trying to draw Margo back into conversation. (pg 38)
Ugh.
Later that night, Ben called my cell.
“Hey,” I said.
“Bro,” he said.
“Yes,” I answered.
“I’m about to go shoe shopping with Lacey.”
“Shoe shopping?”
“Yeah. Everything’s thirty percent off from ten to midnight. She wants me to help her pick out her prom shoes. I mean, she had some, but I was over at her house yesterday and we agreed that they weren’t... you know, you want the perfect shoes for prom. So she’s going to return them and then we’re going to Burdines and we’re going to like pi—”
“Ben,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Dude, I don’t want to talk about Lacey’s prom shoes. And I’ll tell you why: I have this thing that makes me really uninterested in prom shoes. It’s called a penis.”
“I’m really nervous and I can’t stop thinking that I actually kinda really like her not just in the she’s-a-hot-prom-date way but in the she’s-actually-really-cool-and-I-like-hanging-out-with-her kinda way. And, like, maybe
we’re going to go to prom and we’ll be, like, kissing in the middle of the dance floor and everyone will be like, holy shit and, you know, everything they ever thought about me will just go out the window—”
“Ben,” I said, “Stop the dork babble and you’ll be fine.” He kept talking for a while, but I finally got off the phone with him. (pg 132)
A considerably more troubling exchange happens when Quentin stumbles across classmates having sex at a party.
I wanted to go home, but I knew I couldn’t rush Ben. This was probably the single greatest day of his life. He was entitled to it.
So instead, I found a stairway and headed down to the basement. I’d been in the dark so long I was still craving it, and I just wanted to lie down somewhere halfway quiet and halfway dark and go back to imagining Margo. But as I walked past Becca’s bedroom, I heard some muffled noises —specifically, moanish noises—and so I paused outside her door, which was open just a crack.
I could see the top two-thirds of Jase, shirtless, on top of Becca, and she had her legs wrapped around him. Nobody was naked or anything, but they were headed in that direction. And maybe a better person would have turned away, but people like me don’t get a lot of chances to see people like Becca Arrington naked, so I stayed there in the doorway, peering into the room. And then they rolled around so Becca was on top of Jason, and she was sighing as she kissed him, and she was reaching down for her shirt. “Do you think I’m hot?” she said.
“God yeah, you are so hot, Margo,” Jase said.
“What!?” Becca said, furious, and it became quickly clear to me that I wasn’t going to see Becca naked. She started screaming; I backed away from the door; Jase spotted me and screamed, “What’s your problem?” And Becca shouted, “Screw him. Who gives a shit about him? What about me?! Why are you thinking about her and not me!” (pg 182)
Yikes.
“Shut up, bro. I’m freaked out,” he said, looking at me, his eyes almost
crossed. “I don’t think I’m very good.”
“At what?”
“At kissing. And, I mean, she’s done a lot more kissing than me over the years. I don’t want to suck so bad she dumps me. Girls dig you,” he said to me, which was at best true only if you defined the word girls as “girls in the marching band.” “Bro, I’m asking for advice.” (pg 213)
That's all super-gross, but isn't some of it kind of intended to be? Isn't Quentin meant to be at least a little relatable?
And there in lies the dichotomy of a lot of this novel. I've talked before about the strange world of the 2000s and why some media has aged especially poorly, but Green appears to be veering both within what was standard at the time (the extreme backlash to the social justice movements of the 1990s in the strange new post-9/11 culture) and tentatively acknowledging the still-relentless forward march of progress. Want a great example?
CONTENT WARNING! ANTI-GAY SLURS AND BULLYING.
“What about Chuck?” she asked.
“Hmm,” I said. Chuck Parson was pretty horrible in all those years before he’d been reined in. Aside from the cafeteria conveyor belt debacle, he once grabbed me outside school while I waited for the bus and twisted
my arm and kept saying, “Call yourself a faggot.” That was his all-purpose, I-have-a-vocabulary-of-twelve-words-so-don’t-expect-a-wide-variety-of insults insult. And even though it was ridiculously childish, in the end I had to call myself a faggot, which really annoyed me, because 1. I don’t think that word should ever be used by anyone, let alone me, and 2. As it happens, I am not gay, and furthermore, 3. Chuck Parson made it out like calling yourself a faggot was the ultimate humiliation, even though there’s nothing at all embarrassing about being gay, which I was trying to say while he twisted my arm farther and farther toward my shoulder blade, but he just kept saying, “If you’re so proud of being a faggot, why don’t you admit that you’re a faggot, faggot?” (pg 60 and 61)
And then there's the weird obsession with high school popularity.
“Yeah. Damn, that’s good. That must help with your lady friend.”
“Ex-lady friend,” I corrected her.
“Suzie dumped you?” Margo asked.
“How do you know she dumped me?”
“Oh, sorry.”
“Although she did,” I admitted, and Margo laughed. The breakup had happened months ago, but I didn’t blame Margo for failing to pay attention to the world of lower-caste romance. What happens in the band room stays in the band room. (pgs 36 and 37)
So okay. We have a sometimes-awful protagonist who shares with his friends a really weird interest in their high school's social system that's way more Sweet Valley High than Looking For Alaska or The Fault in Our Stars, who's obsessed with another cipher dream girl. What redeems this book, other than the much-improved pacing?
For one, when the truth about Margo is revealed, there's a lot of reevaluating, including of Quentin's myths he's built up in his head about Margo, and conversely, myths people have built up about him. Finally, he has the realization that while not as hard-hitting perhaps as Alaska's, is still satisfying:
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. (pg 199)
So maybe in this way, Quentin's obsession with popularity and popular kids makes sense. A friend of his who ends up dating a formerly socially untouchable popular girl soon finds her to be a human being with likes and dislikes, rather than a celebrity. And arguably, it's Margo's myths (those that surround her and those that she believes) that play a huge part in her disappearance.
Talking about John Green, I know he's a far better author than An Abundance of Katherines would suggest. And this book, while not quite in the realm of Alaska or Stars, still shows that even his "mid-level" work still can shine.
Notable:
Once you've read a few books by an author, you start to notice patterns.
“So you’re going to prom,” I said to him. He looked up, and then looked back down.
“I’m de-vandalizing the Omnictionary article about a former prime minister of France. Last night someone deleted the entire entry and then replaced it with the sentence ‘Jacques Chirac is a gay,’ which as it happens is incorrect both factually and grammatically.” Radar is a big-time editor of this online user-created reference source called Omnictionary. His whole life is devoted to the maintenance and well-being of Omnictionary. This was but one of several reasons why his having a prom date was somewhat surprising. (pg 15)
I would expect no less than someone who turned the Make-a-Wish organization into the Genie program in Stars. It's an interesting choice which brand names to use and which to change.
________________________________________
Tribute to one of my favorite book blogs ever, here's a SIGNS THIS WAS WRITTEN IN 2008:
Radar tapped a locker twice with his fist to express his approval, and then came back with another. “Ben, getting you a date to prom is so hard that the American government believes the problem cannot be solved with diplomacy, but will instead require force.” (pg 16)
(Wouldn't that actually make it not that hard?)
I IM’ed with Ben, and then Radar came online. (pg 23)
(That made me so nostalgic, not gonna lie.)
________________________________________
Some less fortunate signs this was written in 2008:
Radar nudged me with one of the beer cups. “Look at our boy Ben! He’s some kind of autistic savant when it comes to keg stands. Apparently he’s like setting a world record right now or something.” (pg 179)
Ooof. And with that in mind...
________________________________________
This book was written, once again, at the time of this writing, over a decade and a half ago. Although "sensitivity readers" have gotten a lot of flack from people who have no idea what they are, all it means is someone with a specialized knowledge of the marginalized group for whom you're writing read your work to make sure you're getting everything right.
Which really would've come in handy for John Green, because he makes some wince-inducing choices in this book.
A Black character having parents who collect Black Santas written by a white author is not necessarily in and of itself a problem. But...
Radar threw his books into his locker and shut it. The din of conversation around us quieted just a bit as he turned his eyes toward the heavens and shouted, “IT IS NOT MY FAULT THAT MY PARENTS OWN THE WORLD’S LARGEST COLLECTION OF BLACK SANTAS.”
I’d heard Radar say “the world’s largest collection of black Santas” perhaps a thousand times in my life, and it never became any less funny to me. But he wasn’t kidding. I remembered the first time I visited. I was maybe thirteen. It was spring, many months past Christmas, and yet black Santas lined the windowsills. Paper cutouts of black Santas hung from the stairway banister. Black Santa candles adorned the dining room table. A black Santa oil painting hung above the mantel, which was itself lined with black Santa figurines. They had a black Santa Pez dispenser purchased from Namibia. The light-up plastic black Santa that stood in their postage-stamp front yard from Thanksgiving to New Year’s spent the rest of the year proudly keeping watch in the corner of the guest bathroom, a bathroom with homemade black Santa wallpaper created with paint and a Santa-shaped sponge. In every room, save Radar’s, their home was awash in black Santadom —plaster and plastic and marble and clay and wood and resin and cloth. In total, Radar’s parents owned more than twelve hundred black Santas of various sorts. As a plaque beside their front door proclaimed, Radar’s house was an officially registered Santa Landmark according to the Society for Christmas. (pg 22)
There's a good reason why Black people would seek to collect representations of themselves in culture, and a white author having white characters mock and tease (however affectionately, however their friend) a Black character for it is... well, you see why that's an unfortunate choice.
“So,” I said after hanging up. “How’s Angela?”
Radar laughed. “She’s good, man. She’s real good. Thanks for asking.”
“You still a virgin?” I asked.
“I don’t kiss and tell. Although, yes. Oh, and we had our first fight this morning. We had breakfast at Waffle House, and she was going on about how awesome the black Santas are, and how my parents are great people for collecting them because it’s important for us not to presume that everybody cool in our culture like God and Santa Claus is white, and how the black Santa empowers the whole African-American community.”
“I actually think I kind of agree with her,” I said.
“Yeah, well, it’s a fine idea, but it happens to be bullshit. They’re not trying to spread the black Santa gospel. If they were, they’d make black Santas. Instead, they’re trying to buy the entire world supply. There’s this
old guy in Pittsburgh with the second-biggest collection, and they’re always trying to buy it off him.”
(pg 195)
I opened the door and was greeted by Radar, who had an armful of plaster black Santas. “Gotta put away all of the nice ones,” he said. “God forbid one of them breaks.”
“Need any help?” I asked. Radar nodded toward the living room, where the tables on either side of the couch held three sets of unnested black Santa nesting dolls. As I renested them, I couldn’t help but notice that they were
really very beautiful— hand-painted and extraordinarily detailed. I didn’t say this to Radar, though, for fear that he would beat me to death with the black Santa lamp in the living room.
I carried the matryoshka dolls into the guest bedroom, where Radar was carefully stashing Santas into a dresser. “You know, when you see them all together, it really does make you question the way we imagine our myths.”
Radar rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I always find myself questioning the way I imagine my myths when I’m eating my Lucky Charms every morning with a goddamned black Santa spoon.” (pg 212)
Hang on, Black character! A white character is coming through to support logic!
And then, on a road trip through the south while scooping up shirts at gas stations just so the kids will have something to wear other than their graduation robes,
Finally, we unpack the last bag. It contains two large T-shirts, which Radar and Ben are very excited about, because it means they can be guys-wearing-gigantic-shirts-over-silly-r
obes instead of just guys-wearing-silly-robes.
But when Ben unfurls the T-shirts, there are two small problems. First, it turns out that a large T-shirt in a Georgia gas station is not the same size as a large T-shirt at, say, Old Navy. The gas station shirt is gigantic—more garbage bag than shirt. It is smaller than the graduation robes, but not by much. But this problem rather pales in comparison to the other problem, which is that both T-shirts are embossed with huge Confederate flags.
Printed over the flag are the words HERITAGE NOT HATE.
“Oh no you didn’t,” Radar says when I show him why we’re laughing. “Ben Starling, you better not have bought your token black friend a racist shirt.”
“I just grabbed the first shirts I saw, bro.”
“Don’t bro me right now,” Radar says, but he’s shaking his head and laughing. I hand him his shirt and he wiggles into it while driving with his knees. “I hope I get pulled over,” he says. “I’d like to see how the cop responds to a black man wearing a Confederate T-shirt over a black dress.” (pg 256)
Okay, the last line, fine. But the white characters laughing at a racist (literally genocidal) shirt that a Black character has to wear... oof.
For some reason, the stretch of I-95 just south of Florence, South Carolina, is the place to drive a car on a Friday evening. We get bogged down in traffic for several miles, and even though Radar is desperate to violate the speed limit, he’s lucky when he can go thirty. Radar and I sit up front, and we try to keep from worrying by playing a game we’ve just invented called That Guy Is a Gigolo. In the game, you imagine the lives of people in the cars around you.
We’re driving alongside a Hispanic woman in a beat-up old Toyota Corolla. I watch her through the early darkness. “Left her family to move here,” I say. “Illegal. Sends money back home on the third Tuesday of every month. She’s got two little kids— her husband is a migrant. He’s in Ohio right now—he only spends three or four months a year at home, but they still get along really well.”
Radar leans in front of me and glances over at her for half a second. “Christ, Q, it’s not so melodratragic as that. She’s a secretary at a law firm —look how she’s dressed. It has taken her five years, but she’s now close to
getting a law degree of her own. And she doesn’t have kids, or a husband. She’s got a boyfriend, though. He’s a little flighty. Scared of commitment. White guy, a little nervous about the Jungle Fever angle of the whole
thing.” (pgs 256 and 257)
"Illegal", ew.
________________________________________
Radar already had his handheld out; he was searching Omnictionary for the phrase. “The picture’s of Woody Guthrie,” he said. “A folksinger, 1912 to 1967. Sang about the working class. ‘This Land Is Your Land.’ Bit of a Communist. Um, inspired Bob Dylan.” Radar played a snippet of one of his songs— a high-pitched scratchy voice sang about unions.
“I’ll email the guy who wrote most of this page and see if there are any obvious connections between Woody Guthrie and Margo,” Radar said.
“I can’t imagine she likes his songs,” I said.
“Seriously,” Ben said. “This guy sounds like an alcoholic Kermit the Frog with throat cancer.”(pgs 108 and 109)
Okay, I'm a Woody Guthrie fan, quite so, and that's still a funny read.
Final Grade: B
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