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
No comments:
Post a Comment