Paper stories about paper towns

John Green's Paper Towns is the first really great book I've read in a long while. That's not to say, though, that it's the one I've liked the most.

In freshman year, I got hit with two whoppers of novels, two books that had a superb premise, and really delivered in terms of prose and ideological meatiness and story. They were Markus Zusak's The Book Thief, about a German girl living during World War II, and Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's Good Omens, about a biblical war over the antichrist. Now, near the end of my high school career, I meet Margo Roth Spiegelman in Paper Towns, and if you meet her, you won't forget her any more than I will.

What Paper Towns is about initially depends what you want to get out of it. The prologue implicates that we are in for a twisted story about a high schooler who goes mad. The ensuing nighttime car chase gets us pumped for a novel full of action. Clues left by Margo give us an aura of a mystery novel. Paper Towns is all of those and none of them. All, in that you will get those elements from it, if you see it. None, because the book eventually takes a surprising and somehow satisfying turn towards life philosophy near the end (though we should have seen that coming, since Whitman was involved).

I felt the book was slow at times, especially in the middle. Quentin (the main character) has an obsession with finding Margo, whether she's dead or not. He comes across as stupid at some points, though his friends will sometimes attempt to point out this flaw, and often succeed. And then there's the narrator's contributions; he'll ironically place a summary of Moby-Dick in the middle of Q's obsession, commenting on the character of Ahab while Q sits oblivious. I didn't find this stupid, but cleverly ironic. It must be the way it was presented.

The most interesting part about the story, though, is still Q's thought process. How right is he? How close has he come to Margo's actual thought processes as he continues his obsessive search? And when he gives up special moments at the close of his high school career to dedicate himself to finding her, is he making a mistake, or doing the right thing? The climactic scene (which also involves a car chase) didn't illuminate much more in the lives of the main characters, but John Green had had the entire book to do that by this point. And when Q finally reaches his goal, the result is incredibly satisfying.

The result is this: I don't know if I like the book, or if I like Margo's character, which I now understand much more fully than I or Q did for most of the novel. But it's going to stay with me for a long time, because it's an incredibly well-developed story. And I'm going to miss it.