Paper Towns

Paper Towns is a novel by John Green. If you’re not familiar, he’s the author of The Fault inOur Stars and a few other great stories. Afaik, I've read everything he’s ever published so you can assume from that I really enjoy his work. For one thing, Green gives the reader a protagonist she can really get behind. This is important to me because I like that “we’re all in this together” feel in a book. I think most people do. How well would Rowling’s books have sold if everyone basically hated Harry Potter even though they enjoyed everything else? Would people have cared what awful things befell Draco Malfoy in the same way they cared about Potter if he had been the star of the series? Green’s books don’t have wizards in them anywhere, but he does have very sympathetic characters populating his stories.

The protagonist, usually a teenage male, but not always, is a likeable sort who is struggling with his teenage issues. Granted, Green’s teens are way smarter than average and much of the time they are smarter than many adults that you may know. One of the characters, usually not the protagonist, is a little wild and crazy while being very, very smart as well. The secondary characters are interesting and have their own merits, and once in a while they grow right along with the protagonist.  I’m not trying to address all his work here and now really, but I think it’s fair to say he has a little bit of a formula going on.

The main character is madly in love with someone who for some reason, is out of his reach and he spends the entire novel trying to change that or at least understand the dynamics of the situation. Sometimes something tragic happens and sometimes it doesn’t.  Usually the growth the character achieves by the end of the novel makes it well worth the read and Paper Towns is no different in that respect.

The main character, Quentin Jacobsen is enamored of his neighbor, Margo Roth Spiegelman who is out of his league and he pursues her relentlessly but this isn't a story about a stalker, I promise. Quentin’s pursuit of Margo is so relentless in fact, that it gets a little bit tedious in the middle, but not for long. There’s not enough tedium to make a person put down the book and go away forever.

For one thing, Green’s books aren't usually very long, around 250 pages for all of them so far, but I don’t know how long this one is exactly. I read it on my Kindle Paperwhite and it doesn’t tell me page numbers, it tells me locations or minutes left in the chapter or what percentage I’ve read. I read it in about a 24 hour time period so it must be just about that long.  I probably would have read it in one long sitting, but I had a bathroom tragedy occur which sort of put me out of reading mode.

Skip This Part

I read a great deal of PT in the bathtub. I confess it and own it, I am a bathtub reader. I put my e-reader in a Ziploc bag and read the hell out whatever it is I’m reading the hell out of at the time. So I was up to 40 percent into the story when I decided I should stop pruning myself and get out of the tub. So while I was toweling off and stuff, I knocked my hairspray can off the shelf and into the sink. Now this doesn't sound like a really big deal except it landed on its top and knocked the spraying mechanism off and it went flying. Suddenly my hairspray was projectile shellacking everything in a two foot radius. Boy were the dust bunnies surprised.  I grabbed it and put my finger over the nozzle to stanch the tide while I looked around for the sprayer top. it was on the floor and I had enough sense to make sure the little sprayer hole was facing away from me as I worked the top back on. Bad news was, the stem was jammed in and putting the little top back on only gave the hair varnish a wider trajectory.

My bathroom smelled like beehive hell and I was feeling faint from huffing hairspray. I scrabbled around and found a lid from some other bathroom product because the original hairspray can top had hit the recycle bin many moons ago.  I jammed that lid down over the spray and it promptly blew right back up into the air and I finally got the faceful of hairspray that I was doomed to get from the beginning. If I were Lucille Ball, this would have been my chocolate conveyer belt moment but instead of delicious chocolate, I got a faceful of spray lacquer. In all my many years on this planet, no one has ever told me this has happened to them so as far as I know, I’m the first.

I know why it happened too.  I’m being punished by the enviro gods.

For like my entire life, I always used pump style sprays when I used them at all. I figured my carbon footprint (what the hell does that even mean anyway since we’re all carbon based beings?) was big enough without messing up the ozone over my beauty routine. But when I cut my hair off this last time, I got myself some “real” hairspray. I use Tresemme because they don’t do animal testing and I’ll be dang if I participate in bunny torture, but if I had stuck, no pun intended, to my pump style hairspray, I never would have eaten half a can of the stuff. I finally got a lid wedged on top while the can sprayed itself out. It was freakishly cold too. I got to worrying that it might explode. I could see myself being discovered by the paramedics, dead or horribly maimed, on the bathroom floor smelling like 1984 (or 1962) amid the rubble.  Anyway, after getting the hairspray out of my eyes and face (it may never, ever be all the way out of my lungs) I just wasn’t in the mood to keep up with Quentin and his quest for Margo Roth Spiegelman.

Resume Reading Here

One of the things Green does that I like is that his characters are southern without being all heehaw toothless stupid. I mean, I like stories set in the south as much as the next heat addled southerner, but if you notice, the south is practically a character in most stories set in the south. The author, whoever he or she may be, is damn determined to describe the unique southerness of a thing thereby continuing to isolate southerners from the rest of humanity. I get so sick of it. There are all kinds of people in the southeastern United States just like anywhere else in the damn world and Green never makes a bfd out of his characters’ southerness. He might mention the heat, which is, let’s face it, inescapable, or something peculiar to the south once in a while, but it isn't harped on, dwelled on, or otherwise lovingly described until  the reader wants to rush out, dig up Tennessee Williams and slap his corpse.* Thank you for that John Green.

*Or is that just me?

Green introduces Moby Dick into the literary mix of his story making it easy for the reader to draw parallels between Capt. Ahab and Quentin.  He also uses Leaves of Grass as a literary device to further his story.  See what I mean about being smarter than most people you know? All in all, it’s not a bad type of story for a young adult to read. If they dig it and want to emulate the characters, it just means that they’re going to get smarter and possibly more carpe diem-y. Green’s characters, for all their quirks, are way better role models than Holden Caulfield or Alex, Dim, Pete and Georgie.