Paper Towns (Please Don't Make Me Title This "Imagine Others Complexly")

When we decided to do John Green Week, it was just assumed that of course I would write about Paper Towns, his third novel (not counting co-authoring a couple more). We’ve technically left ourselves room to do another week of these posts down the road, as there are still two books to talk about, but this one is, for me, by far the most important. Kansas said in her post that she wanted to write about Pudge because his character is relatable considering who she was as a teenager. Sometimes I wish that was how I felt about Paper Towns, but it’s not and I don’t know if it ever will be. Sure, Teenage Lemon related, but Adult Lemon doesn’t relate any less. It continues to be the book I pick up when I want to be reminded of how it is exactly that I’m supposed to be a person and exist in the world. I read it at least once a year, and even though I have a hard copy, I bought it on my Kindle so I can have it with me all the time.

So, basic outline: Paper Towns is about a boy named Quentin, nicknamed Q, and a girl named Margo Roth Spiegelman. They grow up next door to each other in a ubiquitous suburb of Orlando, friends as children and acquaintances as teenagers. Margo is the undisputed queen of their high school, known for going on adventures, disappearing for days at a time, meeting interesting strangers, etc. She’s able to do this because of her combination of creativity, restlessness and being hot, and the image she cultivates of herself is very mysterious-- she really does have these crazy experiences, sure, but she lets the rumors fly about the details, and no one understands how she comes up with her ideas. She’s the definition of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, up to and including the night she picks Q to be her sidekick in enacting revenge on all who have wronged her, and subsequently disappears, for good this time. And Quentin? He’s just there. He spends his time doing homework, playing video games with his best friends, and not much else.

John Green has said since publishing this book that it’s an example of heavy-handed writing, that he couldn’t have made his point any clearer without titling the novel The Patriarchal Lie of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl Must Be Stabbed in the Heart and Killed (please read that post here, as it is the best), which, you know, is true, although there are still (many...so many) people who accuse him of furthering the trope with this book. So, just remember that it’s impossible to do anything right in this world ever. Anyway, Paper Towns and Looking for Alaska look very similar from a plot summary: boring boy meets interesting girl, girl changes boy’s life for the better and leaves boy to pick up the pieces and carry on as a better, though sadder, person than he otherwise would have been. That’s a manic pixie dream girl plotline exactly (although I would argue that neither of the girls actually fit the trope when you really look at them). But the difference is that in Paper Towns, the girl gets a voice. Manic pixie dream girls are all about what’s imposed on them. The boys who love them see only what they need to see, and they’re used as tools to fulfill whatever narrative the boy needs in his life. Alaska definitely gets this treatment, although, encouragingly, the book’s lack of answers defies the trope by not allowing Pudge to come to a conclusion about her role in his life. In Margo’s case, she turns out to be a complicated person because she is both more and less interesting than Q wants her to be.

The reason I continually come back to this book is because one of my foundational beliefs is that everyone is equally a person. I don’t mean that everyone should have equal rights, although that is also obviously true-- I mean that, in my everyday life, when I interact with someone, it’s the default to categorize. Immediately, I want to put someone into a box I can deal with, and usually that means I want to think of that person either as less than me or as more than me. The danger of thinking of someone as less than you is being proven every second of every day, but there’s also danger in thinking of someone as more than you.

In Paper Towns, Margo is always more than everyone else. She does things no one else would or could do. No one understands the way her mind works. And the only thing it leads to is complete isolation. When she’s around her best friends, none of them really know her, and when she’s with Q, it’s clear he’s seeing her as the personification of everything he’s ever wanted. In some ways, it’s satisfying for her to know what everyone believes about her. She’s idolized, and it’s awesome. For whatever reason, in Margo’s mind, being seen as adventurous and elegant and creative-- as more than everyone else-- is worth the sacrifice. Except eventually, it isn’t.

So Quentin, who starts out believing that Margo is, in some essential and undefinable way, more of a person than he is, has to go through the weeks after her disappearance trying to figure out who she really was as her own person, rather than just in relation to him. He comes up with a few different ways to understand her, which structure the book into its three sections. But the thing is that all of them fail. Every metaphor he finds that describes how people relate to other people falls short when he tries to understand Margo, because:

“The fundamental mistake I had always made-- and that she had, in fairness, always led me to make-- was this: Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.”

So, exhausting though it is, my goal has become not to allow myself any of the shortcuts that make relating to other people overly simplified, because in my experience they’re more often harmful than helpful. Instead, I’m trying to accept that people are people, and they need to be imagined complexly. I fail nearly constantly. But that’s the goal, and I owe a lot of thanks to Paper Towns for that.

-Lemon

Looking for Alaska and Why I Think It's Ok to Be a Boring Teenager.

Hooray! Hooray! It’s finally John Green week over here at The Vandenburg Rewrites, and, frankly, I am shocked it took us this long to get around to it. Lemon converted me to a lover of John Green almost two years ago when we first become roommates. I’ve briefly mentioned my previous apprehension with reading YA novels, but being persuaded to read The Fault in Our Stars (which inevitably gave way to reading his other three novels in about a week and a half span) was a big part of me getting over my “only-read-classics” mentality.

I’ll be honest, I don’t have a favorite novel of his. I love them all for very different reasons, and it seems wrong to pick a favorite, but if I had to pick a character of his that most truly spoke to my teenage soul, it’s Pudge from Looking for Alaska. May you be forewarned, I may let a spoiler slide, so if you haven’t read the book, approach with caution.

Ok, so let me tell you about Pudge, focusing mainly on his ideals and the way he sees his future and less on his unfortunate nickname. Pudge is a high school kid living in Florida with virtually no friends. He’s not bullied or anything; he just exists in a relatively invisible state at his school. Being an only child, his isolation exists even at home. His main, if not his only, area of interest is reading biographies and memorizing the last words of notable people.

The story opens at the beginning of  Pudge’s, whose real name is actually Miles, last week at home with his parents before he leaves to continue high school at a boarding school. His mother asks him why he wants to leave, and Miles replies with the last words of the poet, Francois Rabelais, the words that motivate him throughout the entire narrative: “I go to seek a great perhaps.”

He arrives at boarding school and stumbles into a small group of friends who seem to be interesting, unique and maybe even a bit dangerous. Within the first day he is smoking, laughing, and being hazed by older students by getting thrown into the school’s pond. This is what he’s been waiting for, his great perhaps. He is finally someone who things actually happen to.

Enter Alaska: The unstable, decidedly attractive, spontaneous girl who Pudge finds himself infatuated with. She is everything he is not. She is adventurous, daring, and has lived a life worth sharing stories about, which she does, often. So let’s go back. Miles/Pudge left Florida for a boarding school to seek a Great Perhaps. Based on the type of kids he encounters at school it could be said that a Great Perhaps has a broad, yet basic definition. It is a life of adventure, experience, risk-taking, a life lived to its fullest. This is how Alaska lives her life. That is not at all how Pudge lives his. He continues to return to this mantra-like quote again and again, even sharing it with Alaska, but it no way is Pudge really stepping out and seeking greater things.

He leaves his parent’s home and goes to a boarding school, the setting of all great coming-of-age stories, but it’s not all that risky or unique. This is the same boarding school his father went to, the same boarding school he grew up hearing stories about and forming a picture of in his mind. This new exciting terrain isn’t all that new to Pudge, yet this is where he goes to experience his teenage years.

Before he left for school, Miles/Pudge spent most of his time studying the stories of other people by reading biographies. When asked by his roommate, Colonel, what his “thing” is, he says memorizing last words, last words he gets from saturating himself in the stories of other people rather than creating his own. Their last words become his words, become points of wisdom by which he navigates his life. At school, Pudge finds friends to occupy his time rather than biographies, but he doesn’t let go of the words of others, and he spends his time studying another the story, the life of Alaska. She becomes to him an undiscovered biography.

This is then where we have to recast the Great Perhaps. It has an implied meaning, as noted, but I don’t think this is the only meaning. I think Pudge is seeking a Great Perhaps, I think his version looks a lot different than we may think it should or how Alaska’s looks, but I don’t think that is supposed to be seen as a condemnable characteristic in him. Alaska’s version of living is unstable, and her fate reflects that. As compelling as Pudge finds her, I don’t think he ever meant to seek out adventure in the way that Alaska does. His “seeking” is passive, better yet, I think it’s observant. He is experiencing things and learning invaluable lessons that are contributing to his maturity even though he’s not learning them first hand. I think Pudge is successful in his mission to move away. He leaves the school year with a completely altered perspective, and he will never be the same again, but he didn’t have to be reckless, let alone adventurous, to do it.

I think the freedoms of youth are idealized too often. I think they’re presented in a way that communicates if you’re not taking risks constantly and behaving as if there’s no tomorrow, as if you’re invincible, you’re wasting that time in your life, but I think that’s completely off. Youth must be embraced, of course, because of how many lessons there are to learn, but there’s not one ideal way to do it. I think Pudge’s method is often criticized by younger audiences, only to be appreciated when those type of people emerge into adulthood unscathed by teenage mistakes. Pudge experiences pain, loss, and true friendship, and I think that the amount of experiencing he did was really all he was looking for.

Another famous last word noted in the novel is from Simon Bolivar where he states, “How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!” The novel questions whether the labyrinth refers to life or what comes after. I don’t think there’s a clear right answer, so I’m just going to offer my educated guess. Life is the labyrinth. The labyrinth that teaches you one way to behave in your formative years and condemns those same methods when you reach the magical age of 18 and “become an adult,” or vice versa. It’s the harsh world that seems to intentionally confuse you, leading you along stray paths that look appealing, paths that the world tells you are appealing, that lead to destruction. The only solution then is to trust your instincts, to act in the wisest way you know how. This is something I believe Pudge does to the best of his abilities, and the thing that Alaska fails to do.

-Kansas

Books Belong to Their Readers

With the somewhat overblown panic these last couple of weeks about J.K Rowling's implication that she wishes she had paired Hermione with Harry, I’ve been thinking more than usual about the relationship between book and reader. While I was, you know, absolutely horrified by the possibility that she doubted her choice (#ginny4ever), it’s also struck me that I’m a little too accepting of what an author thinks about her own book, at the expense of forming my own thoughts about it.

Kansas and I are planning to write about John Green next week, so this will probably come up again, but something he brings up all the time is the idea that “books belong to their readers”-- that a book, or any piece of art, isn't a stand-alone thing. It's only complete when readers interact with it, which gives them just as much ownership over it as the author has. It came up again in my college hermeneutics class, this time more officially as reader response theory. And I didn’t like it. I want there to be a right answer, and if the right answer is that I get to decide what’s important about a book or how to interpret it, I’m never going to be satisfied with that. I want my right answer to be everybody’s right answer.

So in this case, I’m not really sure what to do when I read a book and get attached to the characters. I want to know what happens to them after the end of the story, and the answer is that nothing happens, because they only exist inside the book. But with Harry Potter, it actually appears possible to find out. Rowling has thought through the fate of seemingly every character, no matter how minor, and she is happy to share her imaginings with fans. There’s an epilogue too, so some of it is contained in the actual story, but most of it has been extra-textual. Interviews, lectures, Pottermore-- she’s put out an incredible amount of information about her created world in addition to what’s in the books themselves. And I’ve read all of it, of course. Even as I’ve slowly come to believe that authors don’t have unquestionable authority over their texts once they’re completed, published, and read, Harry Potter has always been the exception. Until, of course, the Harry/Ron/Hermione debacle of two weeks ago made me realize I'd been treating it differently than everything else I read.

So, there’s the issue of whether anything happens to characters after the end of the book. This is typically a pretty fraught issue, because the purpose of reading is relating, and if you see yourself in a character, you’re going to associate what happens to that person with what happens to you. The simple answer is that, regardless of what the author says, absolutely nothing happens to a character after the end of a book. They don’t exist outside its pages. That doesn’t mean it can’t be helpful to imagine futures for characters you care about, which plenty of people do, but it seems important to me to recognize that anything outside the pages of the book has no effect on the quality or content of the book itself.

And then there’s the second issue, which is whether an author’s perspective on their own work is more important than their readers’. This relates less to the fate of the characters than to the book itself, I think, because often when we search for symbolism or meaning, the question that comes to mind first is “Did the author intend for me to take it this way?” I’m of the opinion (though it took a lot of time for me to get there) that it doesn’t matter, because interpretation doesn’t exist in the book itself. It exists in the minds of the book’s readers. Something can be meaningful, can teach you and inform the way you look at the world or at other people, without the author having ever given it a thought.

In my black-and-white thinking, it’s easier to try to search for what the author meant, because if I do a good job, I’ll get a right answer and I’m done. What turns out to be much more difficult and complex is if I turn off the search for someone else’s ideas and start looking for my own. If I’m open to what the story has to teach me, through a sentence, a character, a theme or a metaphor, it suddenly doesn’t matter if my answer is right or not, because the purpose of reading is defeated with that mindset. We tell stories because people matter, because we want to grow in understanding outside ourselves. It’s certainly possible that trying to understand the author could be an interesting exercise, but if an author is good at their job, their work should help you understand more than just their own intentions while writing.

So my question has been how much privilege I give an author over their own story. Truthfully, I will probably always listen if a writer wants to talk about what they were trying to do with their own book. I will probably take that information into consideration as I read, and most of the time, their thoughts are going to be better informed than mine. But I’m also trying to allow myself the room to have my own thoughts about the work. If I find it to be meaningful or helpful in a way they didn’t intend, that doesn’t mean it’s wrong and doesn’t matter. It probably means my experience is different, my personality is different, my timing is different-- any one of a number of things. Growth and discovery are more important than thinking only about what the author intended.

-Lemon

Kevin Sampsell Writes About Love and I Love It.

I have this cool internship at a publishing house that’s like an unpaid version of my dream job, most of the time. On average days, I read all day long in a comfy chair whilst drinking a hot beverage. One of the major perks of interning there is that I get my hands on their newest books by both novice and established authors. I also get to sit around a conference table and listen to the editors talk about everything they’re reading, what they like and don’t like, all the while making mental notes to later add to my reading list. My scope of notable modern authors has increased dramatically since being there. To emphasize: it’s an absolute dream.

One of my most recent favorites and one of their newest titles, This is Between Us, by Kevin Sampsell, is a beautifully honest and extremely raw look at romance, but before I continue, base on our readership, I feel strongly that I should note this book is not for everyone. I used the term “raw” on purpose.  I absolutely think that Sampsell is communicating profound truths about romantic relationships and portraying a version of romance and women that so many writers, particularly male writers I have read, fail to do. I loved this book. That being said, read some reviews and write-ups before you delve in. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of our readers took offense to the way Sampsell chooses to communicate, which happens to segue nicely into what I want to talk about.

Sampsell’s semi-autobiographical novel closely examines the first five years of a couple who first met and started dating when both partners were married. This is a questionable start to a relationship and the narrator doesn’t attempt to justify infidelity. The approach to marriage within the novel is one that is widely accepted. In the novel, two people were unhappy in their marriages and sought out happiness elsewhere. Once together and happily divorced, they recognize their own personal views on marriage: they don’t really see the point, and neither one of them care to make such a permanent commitment though they love one another. This is an important frame for understanding the context of the novel.

As a reader, this is not something I agree with; my beliefs about marriage are completely opposite, but to discount a novelist because of differing views on love, marriage,  or even morality, is not doing you any favors. One thing I love about reading novels is that it allows me to experience things I wouldn’t otherwise; I’m able to learn lessons gleaned from distinct situations that I wouldn’t necessarily encounter organically, or that I have not yet experienced. I can understand the depths of a character’s beliefs and perspectives without having them in common. Not only does this type of reading give way to a greater perspective on the people you may interact with, it also sharpens and allows me to truly examine my own beliefs.

Most people I know, myself included, were raised by parents who shared their beliefs with their children in hopes that they would share them. As an adult, I believe many of the same things as my parents. Though even in the perspectives we shared, it was not enough for me to simply adopt them; I had to learn on my own. I have learned a lot of lessons in my life that allowed me to come to conclusions about my beliefs by experiencing them first hand, but when I think about some of the most formative things I’ve learned in the past 3-4 years, a lot of them haven’t come from experiences. They’ve come from books.

Sampsell’s book reinforced my own views on marriage, because I was able to experience, through his characters, the inevitable pain that comes through approaching a commitment without intentions of truly committing, but what stuck with me more than that is how much Samspell’s honest portrayal of marriage made complete sense to me. It made me feel supported in my individual struggles, it forced me to shake off the honeymoon phase and look honestly at my relationship that takes work every single day. I have come back to underlined sentences in that book at least once a week since I’ve read it. He tells you things that you’re definitely not going to hear in church or at bible college, but that maybe you should.

The point is, I loved the portrayal of not-so-romantic-romance in this book. I loved Sampsell’s writing. You should know your limits. I’m not recommending anyone read 50 Shades of Gray to “challenge” yourself, but I think there is a beautiful gift in literature as it allows us to grow and expand ourselves and be challenged in ways we wouldn’t otherwise.