John, I have a confession to make: While reading Paper Towns, I felt bored. Let me explain why: on the one hand, it's the book--it seems to move more slowly and say less than your previous two. Looking for Alaska had all the pretensions of a first novel. But I like those pretensions, the fact that when a writer is starting out, he or she tries to explain the whole world and everything in it, and how we the readers should live our lives. Which Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Katherines both do quite well. Paper Towns seems shriveled by comparison, its moral being not that the world is an extraordinary place full of extraordinary people, but that we must, for reasons of living, see people as only ordinary.
On the other hand, there's me. Because I was a friendless misfit at a high school just like Q's, I feel I know the meat of the story already and don't need to be told it. I remember being awkward and rejected at dances, not going to parties and then feeling alone in the crowd when someone was nice enough to invite me, feeling the "high-school-is-ending-so-we-have-to-reveal-that-deep-down-we-all-love-everybody-bullshit." I've had Q's experiences, all but the frantic road trip that forms part three of the book, but including the painful realizations that accompany its end...and I don't need to be told that these things happen.
The thing I do wish is that I'd had a Ben and a Radar, people I was actually friends with, or thought I was--by sophomore year of high school I was thoroughly disillusioned with my classmates. I wish I'd had friends, I wish I'd had that kind of adventure...and yet I can't envy Q, because I have perspective he doesn't. Being in college, I know life will get better for him without Margo and without high school. He'll go to Duke, find love (or at least lust) there, learn to imagine people--and himself--more complexly, without the sad paper girl who has haunted his dreams all his life. I'm glad I didn't have a Margo Roth Spiegelman, because I can make my own adventures; I don't have to follow someone else to make my life interesting.
To be fair, John, I copied down a lot of quotes. Your books (thus far) are extremely quotable, which is good because I like reading things I can savor on my tongue like bites of a GoFast bar. But I'm not reading this one aloud, because in the middle it bored me, and at the end it made me feel empty, the kind of emptiness I expected from Looking for Alaska, which made me scared to read it for my whole first year of being a Nerdfighter. (Listening to you read a draft of Paper Towns in a Youtube video from 2007 is what inspired me to read all your books together. Now that's ironic.)
But the end of Looking for Alaska was beautiful and uplifting, and I'm certainly not complaining about the male stripper. In Paper Towns, however, the quest leads only to a dimensionless girl, in a town that exists only on maps, and so instead of a book of ideas, this was a paper book. It baffles me how, during the wondrous time that the first years of Brotherhood 2.0 must have been, you created a story that was this empty.
Tomorrow I shall start Will Grayson, Will Grayson. It isn't all yours (cowritten); but perhaps it was time for that. I hope it's one I can read aloud.
Most sincerely,
Mara
So you know for me Paper Towns is my favorite. Like you can identify with Colin, I can identify with Q., because when I first read Paper Towns I was very much in the same place he was. But I can understand why you felt the way you did, since I'll agree that it wasn't John's most profound book (for me, the one that holds that spot is TFiOS.)
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