I spend my days in sketchy corners of Twitter and YouTube where I get triggered to write about topics that probably no one cares about. But it’s fun so here we are.
“To weird”, he said.
“To weird,” we clinked cans and sipped
Turtles All the Way Down, John Green
I read a tweet about a year ago (now deleted) about how similar John Green novels are. I felt so embarrassed because when I was 17 John Green was the Peter Van Houten to my Hazel Grace Lancaster, pre-Amsterdam trip. I once borrowed four, yes 4, John Green novels from my high school library. Paper Towns, An Abundance of Katherines, Will Grayson, Will Grayson, and The Fault In Our Stars. I read all except Will Grayson, Will Grayson because I couldn’t keep up with the weird two-author format. Years later I read Looking for Alaska and Turtles All The Way Down. It’s been nearly two years since I read the most recent one, Turtles All the Way Down and so, I’ve had plenty of time to think about John Green’s works.
It’s true, they are all very similar. I read the same book multiple times and the only thing I can say to defend myself is that John Green’s books are very, very quotable and I love quotes.
So let me give a summary of the books, without giving away too much, just for context.
Looking for Alaska follows a teenage boy (Miles) who seeks a profound meaning/experience in his life. He falls for a girl, Alaska and he tries to understand her.
Paper Towns follows a teenage boy (Quentin) who is fascinated by a girl, Margo Roth Spiegelman, who is considered to be this cool girl that everyone wants to be or be friends with.
An Abundance of Katherines follows a teenage boy (Colin) trying to be a genius by attempting to discover something. So he comes up with a formula that predicts how long his relationships with girls named Katherine lasts (he’s dated like 20 of them…).
The Fault In Our Stars is the most known John Green book. It’s about a teenage girl with cancer who falls for a teenage boy who also had/has cancer and is dying. They bond over their love for a novel called An Imperial Affliction by Peter Van Houten.
Turtles All the Way Down. For a while, maybe two years, this was my favorite book. In this book, John Green writes about Aza Holmes, a teenager with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).
Similar plotlines
When reading Looking for Alaska and Paper Towns I got the impression that life is about chasing something great, unusual, and perhaps even unreachable. Both Miles and Quentin are trying to find a girl (Alaska and Margo). John Green starts both stories with a Tumblresque quote signaling the story’s direction. The “signal quote” is placed somewhere in the first few pages.
“The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle…But my miracle was different. My miracle was this: out of all the subdivisions in all of Florida, Indeed up living next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman.” (Quentin, Paper Towns)
“So this guy, François Rabelais. He was this poet. And his last words were, ‘I go to seek a Great Perhaps.’ That’s why I’m going. So I don’t have to wait until I die to start seeking a Great Perhaps.” (Miles/Pudge, Looking for Alaska)
It comes to no surprise that both stories are centered around a girl. The thing about Alaska and Margo is that they are very, very similar. Popularity, beauty and quirky habits are characters that both have. On the other hand, Miles and Quentin are generally irrelevant in their schools. They’re nobodys who want to save themselves from their situations and think that this girl(s) is the Great Perhaps, the Miracle, the answer, etc.
John Green writes things like, “If people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.” (Miles/Pudge, Looking for Alaska). Drizzle wishes it was always followed by a hurricane so that it could mean something in the world precipitation. Instead, it’s just drizzle. Even the Weather app doesn’t pick it up sometimes. It wants to be seen and to mean something and so it seeks its hurricane; its great perhaps. Do you see the problem with this?
It ties into the whole discussion about Manic Pixie Dream Girls in literature, mostly film and TV. Basically, a MPDG is a free-spirited character (female) with a peculiar background or habits that draw the (usually male) protagonist towards them. The male protagonist is always in love with the MPDG and she exists to teach the protagonist some grand lesson. Alaska is there to show Miles that life shouldn’t be taken so seriously. She says cringey things like “Y’all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die.” Look, I get it. Teenagers have mental illnesses that push them to make questionable life choices. We’ve all been there. But this line…really, John? Oh and just before that, he writes, “She looked at me and smiled widely, and such a wide smile on her narrow face might have looked goofy were it not for the unimpeachably elegant green in her eyes. She smiled with all the delight of a kid on Christmas morning…” Really? The problem here is that it’s not just one or two sentences. It’s the whole book. You find parts like these describing the MPDG (Alaska or Margo). In another part he writes, “…she (Alaska) was beautiful. In the dark beside me, she smelled of sweat and sunshine and vanilla.” Yes, sweat. It’s almost as if these protagonists have literally nothing going on for themselves and that is why their stories center around these MPDGs.
Let’s look at Paper Towns and how Quentin actually spent days searching for clues about where Margo is and then he goes on a road trip to find Margo who had ran away from home just before the end of high school. The same Margo who he barely hung out with. She had her own social life with friends and a boyfriend, until he cheated on her, and then she suddenly shows up at Quentin’s window asking for help in her immature middle-of-the-night revenge scheme as if the entire 9 years where they barely talked hadn’t happened. Regardless, Quentin felt that he needed to do what he did. The entire book is him trying to figure out where she went and then actually dragging his friends on a long road trip from Florida to New York. But what does Quentin have outside of his Margo obsession? Nothing. She’s his “miracle” and the strangest thing is that we barely learn anything about her in the book. She’s only there to reveal to him that paper towns like theirs only look good from the outside. “…everything’s uglier up close”. I guess she’s there to make sense of the book’s title. Even though the book is mostly about her and paper towns get mentioned very few times.
Characters of color
This is a touchy topic. Personally I don’t care if a book lacks diversity among its characters, especially if it’s set in what can be assumed to be a predominantly white society. I do, however, think it’s ridiculous to include non-white characters for shallow comedic plotlines. This is a common feature in John Green’s books.
In An Abundance of Katherines you have Hassan who is of Arab origin, in Paper Towns Marcus is black and Daisy Ramirez is obviously latina, in Turtles All the Way Down.
Hassan serves as Colin’s sidekick in An Abundance of Katherines, he’s written in a way that doesn’t make you care much about him even though he’s always there. I can’t even remember anything significant about him other than something to do with baguettes. In Paper Towns, Quentin mistakenly buys a confederate flag T-shirt for Marcus while on their road trip to New York, and it’s all resolved as a small funny mistake. Also it is mentioned somewhere (or maybe multiple places) in the book that Marcus’ parents own a large collection of black Santas. I know: what? In Turtles All the Way Down, Daisy says things like, “I have the soul of a private jet owner, and the life of a public transportation rider”, and in reference to being asked why she used past tense in a conversation about Star Wars, she says, “Because all of this happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Holmesy. You always use the past tense when talking about Star Wars. Duh.” I love Star Wars, but this is a bit cringey.
After reading Turtles All the Way Down I realized that Aza is just a female version of Colin from An Abundance of Katherines. She and him are seemingly calm and sensible in comparison to their best friends, i.e. Daisy and Hassan, who tend to be very out there with this and that. Like Hassan, Daisy comes off as a rebel who is there to bend societal codes of conduct in order to get what she wants. Hassan is self-proclaimed slacker, whereas Daisy convinces Aza to participate in her plan to win a reward for information about the fugitive billionaire, Mr. Picket, and she uses Aza’s connection to Mr. Picket’s son, Davis, to do that.
Again, pointless plotlines that make them come off as ridiculous characters in comparison to the protagonists, and, as a matter of fact, every other character.
The writing
If you’re a regular here (thanks by the way), you might’ve noticed that I tend to use a lot of John Green quotes in my writing. There’s here, here, here and here.
I love John Green’s quotes, I won’t lie. However, it comes off as if his books are repetitive pop albums where every song was carefully crafted to be on the Billboard Hot 100. I don’t read much, but I’ve read enough to see that John Green’s novels have an unusually high number of quotable lines. I mean, I even wrote this. It’s almost like he knows there’s a niche for his words somewhere on the internet: Tumblr. There’s an attempt to be profound and interesting, but it has been done so many times throughout his writing career that it has gotten old and boring.
Quotes like “I go to seek a great perhaps” and “everyone gets a miracle” make it seem like there’s something more to life than what we have right now. I don’t know about others, but when I read most of these books between the ages 17 and 20, I found myself wishing I could escape to an unknown place or that I could find someone to help me escape the little labyrinth that I felt I was living in. That stopped me from living in the moment and I spent my days in my room dreaming of what couldn’t be. Frankly, I’m tired of running away from places and as I figured last year, the only miracle I get in life is being able to do what I can do; the daily mundane tasks and not-so-mundane ones like writing that allow me to grow. Really, life is that simple; a complete opposite of what a John Green quote/book will try to tell you.
I think John Green is smart in the way he uses words. I love that. He makes me feel things when I read his works, depending on the situation I’m in. I remember saying “pain demands to be felt” to myself over and over, back in my teenage depression days. That quote still gets me through things. But as a novelist, I know now that he is basic. There isn’t much to think about when you read most of his books. The plots tend to be shallow, especially considering how some of these stories focus on the protagonist’s female love interests who we don’t learn anything significant about. Despite the quotes and the very vivid descriptions of physical beauty, Margo and Alaska are still two very mysterious and unknown people.
The Fault In Our Stars was John Green’s best work. It has its flaws (kissing in the Anne Frank House???), but is different from the rest. TFIOS is just two people who are uniquely compatible and they fall in love despite both of their lives literally hanging by a thread. No one is seeking the other to find themselves. Each is a whole person wanting to love someone else. Very matured when compared to the likes of Colin, Miles and Quentin whose entire personalities are based on finding/understanding girls who each think is his better half. The most impressive thing in TFIOS, to me, is Augustus’ character development where he later understands that he is not a nobody after all. Someone cares about him and even though it isn’t a hurricane of people building monuments and naming streets after him, the terminally ill drizzle that admires him is still precipitation and that’s all that matters.
the writing nib 