On Reading John Green's Paper Towns: Some Thoughts

Checking the reviews of John Green's Paper Towns on Amazon I was struck by how many were annoyed with Quentin's adulation of Margo--how baseless it seemed. But then that was exactly as it was supposed to be. After all, it was not just about childhood affection, or conventional romantic attraction, but a case of the uncool entranced by the cool, and more precisely his fuzzy notion of who the apparently cool person was, which is a silly thing to begin with and ultimately shown up as deluded.

Yet the book's failure to leave a reader as entranced diminishes the impact of the conclusion's revelation that Margo has all along really just been a scared, confused girl trying to sort things out.

The impact of the revelation is diminished still more by the book's opacity regarding that fear and confusion. Yes, she was shaken by that early contact with death. Yes, she was alienated by the paper-like superficiality of the suburban world she grew up in. But these things are not really delved into, and while one can chalk this up to the limits of the narrator's viewpoint, one can come away suspecting that the hidden depths are really not all that deep. And I will say it--the limited viewpoint is overrated, the omniscient underrated, in ways all too reflective of the deeply flawed priorities of the literary tastemakers of the past hundred years. "What we wanted was a ventilation of the point at issue," Wells said when explaining the difference between his style and Henry James--and that is exactly what we did not get here.

Which can really rankle after three hundred pages of watching the rather less interesting Quentin and his mostly one-note buddies pursuing a mystery consisting mainly of dead ends.