Looking for Alaska

My first exposure to John Green’s Looking for Alaska was in my often talked about children’s lit course this past semester. We’d been discussing censorship and the challenging of various books, and my professor brought up a video that John Green had made in which he addressed his views on the banning of his own book. For some context on this video, John and his brother stopped speaking for a year except by video, which they posted on YouTube to each other every day. I was immediately struck by the intelligence, and quick wit of this author, who clearly believed in what he had written, and didn’t feel the need to censor anything in his novel, because those elements were helping him get to the greater truth. To paraphrase John Green paraphrasing William Faulkner, “I am not interested in the facts, only the truth.” That is exactly what Looking for Alaska does. It finds the truth despite the facts, and speaks with the voice of an adolescent splendidly.

            The novel of course is split into two parts, before and after, which makes writing any sort of review for it rather difficult, since I can’t talk at all about the after, or why there even is an after to talk about. Alas, I’ll just have to leave that in as a hook to you, future reader, and assure you that this is a first class novel worthy of your time. Yes, it was written for high schoolers. But honestly, at this point, who cares? I’m just as interested in reading about awkward first sexual encounters and the idiosyncrasies of teachers now as when I was sixteen. John Green has mastered the high school voice, such that I immediately loved the main character Miles “Pudge” Halter and would have probably been his friend. In fact as I was reading I really wished that I were in with the group that Pudge was, best friends with the Colonel and desperately in love with Alaska Young, your typical enigmatic troubled teen girl who is heartbreakingly beautiful and never going to be with you. It is this talent of Green’s to write voice so well that each character is distinct, but believable, that makes the novel successful.

            Of course I’m a sucker for language in general, and when not working in his characters voice, Green displays his skill of creating a scene, a feeling, what have you, that is beautiful without showing off. This is not the prose of James Joyce, and yet there is a beauty in simplicity, in explaining the details of a mundane dorm room or particularly dull professor that still turns into polished and wonderfully readable writing. For me it also helped that the Alabama boarding school where the novel is set is based quite heavily upon the boarding school one of my best friends attended, and being able to link her stories into the background knowledge that Green works off of was a fun personal endeavor for me.

            So I’ve babbled for a while, haven’t I? You are sitting there still wondering why on earth you should read this book. It is not enough that I tell you too? No, in all seriousness, this is a novel that covers the full scope of human emotion. I laughed out loud (yup, I LOLed), I cried, I felt awkward for some characters and thrilled for others. There is everything on these pages, and Green has given the story to his reader in a way that is easy without being patronizing. He wants the reader to understand grief and love and humor and all that is essentially high school, while also still acknowledging that a sixteen year old can have elevated thoughts, even existential questions about life. It is a successful novel that is most certainly on my re-reading list, and a novel I feel may just be worthy of the title “The Catcher in the Rye for this generation.” There now, you have to read it, just to see if I’m right. Don’t you love the pull of a grandiose statement?