Last week after a (second) recommendation from one of my friends, I put some books by John Green on hold at the library and on Friday two of them came in: An Abundance of Katherines and Paper Towns. John Green writes for young adults but also people, and this combination led me to read An Abundance of Katherines on Friday and Paper Towns on Saturday.
Except for his most recent novel, the main characters of all of his books are teenaged boys. This really didn’t stop me from identifying with the characters. Colin Singleton, the main man from Katherines, has a hilarious sidekick named Hassan; Quentin Jacobsen, from Paper Towns, has two best friends and spends most of the book searching for the enigmatic Margo Roth Spiegelman, with whom he discovered a dead body at the tender age of nine.
Though Katherines is about a child-prodigy searching for a unified Theorem to catalogue the arc of the nineteen times he’s been dumped by a girl named Katherine (yes, really) and Paper Towns is about a guy searching for his missing friend, they obviously have some things in common. Both characters, although they go about it different ways, are at the end-of-high-school precipice in their lives. They’re both deeply enmeshed in a search for a single object or person and a singular love of the variety that I remember well from high school. These characters are pulled toward things like asteroids getting yanked down to Earth by gravity. They can’t help it, until they can.
It wasn’t that long ago that I was in high school, and I remember well the feeling that the entire world could revolve around a single person. Nothing could possibly be past the horizon of them; they were the ultimate endpoint. Of course, that’s not so much the case in reality.
What I like about John Green’s books is that they tell stories about well-drawn characters that have realistic feelings. What I also like is that he is funny in unexpected ways. I’d laughed out loud within 23 pages of starting An Abundance of Katherines, and with Green it’s not a drawn-out, cumbersome humor. In one scene in Paper Towns one of the characters flees a van with beer leaking out of it wearing only a graduation gown and nothing else, and I almost died at the on-point image of his robe billowing in the wind.
What made me wish for more of these books was just the horizon I mentioned before. Each of the main characters, at some point, reaches the horizon they’ve been searching for (in some cases, it’s a little different than expected). As a reader, I’m always curious about what happens then. I know that usually when you attain some kind of resolution, it’s not so much an ending as a beginning, and life sort of unspools in a new trajectory. I can recall being poised at the end of high school with the rest of life stretching out below me so vividly and so ripe with possibility that it made my chest want to explode. You can hardly breathe for the infinity of it all. But life, as usual, did not turn out to be endless joy and opportunity. Life roughed me up a little (and yes, a very slight amount compared to some people). Don’t get me wrong; I still see possibilities everywhere, but not in quite the mind-exploding way of the end of high school, where these characters are perched.
Of course, that probably says more about me as a (slightly older) adult reading young adult fiction, but I do feel that these stories have the option of going there. I suppose it’s a positive when you stop reading a book and are still interested in where a character could go next. Plus, I’m a fan of any author that can make me laugh out loud.
I’d recommend these to anyone who has ever searched for something, and especially young adults; I think they render well that every stage in life does come to an end, and eventually you move beyond them in the quest for something bigger and better. If you have a free afternoon, check out some John Green.