Paper Towns

 (Read this one in March 2025)

Another bit of a "quick read", picked up I think from a supermarket charity shelf. I didn't realise John Green was the Fault In Our Stars John Green until talking about it after, and I haven't read that so won't say anything else about it.

My initial note (four or five pages in) was "first person American quirky, Wes Anderson vibes". By this I mean earlier Wes Anderson, recognisably Americana-ish, Salinger eccentrics vibes. Talky high schoolers in unusual situations? John Hughes another flavor note.

 

The book is from 2008 and does a lot of pre-ubiquitous-internet internet references, that sort of date it and sort of create a weird nostalgia snare: combined with the bookish self-consciousness of the rest of the novel, it evokes a now possibly wholly-dissolved membrane between digital mediation and analogue solidity, which perhaps is me retrofitting an ill-considered cultural notional something more to the book than might have been intended.

 

As the book itself seems to suggest, maybe now we're processing things differently (he drafted into a phone) we lack something that used to be offered by well-thumbed page corners turned down, highlighted connections and margin notes. Stuff literally hidden in doorways. Maybe those memories are as simultaneously there-and-not-there as the title conceit.

As a novel, though, it's deeply novelish - a manic pixie American dream girl (Margo) is quest object for the massively square Quentin, in a slightly old-fashioned (even for 2008) follow-the-clues road trip romance, complete with tokenistic support ensemble (also: too much dialogue). It seemed particularly frustrating to have a support ensemble that then just evaporates for the denouement, even as the now squarer-than-square narrator foregrounds them, and the "real" life they represent, as part of his justification for avoiding any sort of commitment to the joyful abandon signified by Margo.

Thusly, the Narrator wades squarely through Whitman, Woody Guthrie and various modes of wanderlust 'til he finally recognises his shadowy anima... and walks away from it? An apparent acceptance of enduring alienation, from true-but-too-eccentric love, or self, or something, seems yet another dumb decision made with all the dumb, square certainties of youth. 

 

Which, of course, resonated. Probably I would have loved this in my late teens/early 20s, though would even then have compared it unfavourably to early Douglas Coupland. 

 

What I got most from it now was a reminder of what it was like to find depth and power in books, music, and those cross-references that mattered more than everything else when that age, in that age.