Paper Towns

A friend recommended this. It’s technically young adult fiction – the same author wrote The Fault in Our Stars. But I didn’t realize that until I was quite a bit into it.

Quentin grew up next door to Margo. They were friends when they were younger. They once discovered a dead body in a park together.

Flash forward 10 years. Quentin is kind of a nerd, and Margo is the popular girl in school. One night, she improbably shows up at his window and invites him on an elaborate adventure of reverge. Then she disappears.

It’s a very good book – an absolute page-turner. I think I finished it in two sessions, maybe four hours total. It reads quickly, and it’s hard to put down.

A “paper town,” for the record, is a fake place that was invented by a map maker. They used to put them on physical maps, and if the same “paper town” appeared on some other map, then the original map maker knew that someone had copied their map.

The figurative definition of the phrase “paper towns” changes over the course of the book. But the core theme is that people are not how we see them. We form opinions and images of people that don’t necessarily correlate with what they actually are. Our idealistic impressions of people are often at odds with their messy realities.

Quentin’s friend Ben sums it up:

“It’s easy to like someone from a distance. But when she stopped being this amazing unattainable thing or whatever, and started being, like, just a regular girl with a weird relationship with food and frequent crankiness who’s kind of bossy – then I had to basically start liking a while different person.”

Near as I can, this is the most-quoted passage of the book, which essentially repeats the same thing (from Quentin):

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.

And then the same basic thought, from Margo (speaking of Quentin):

“You had been a paper boy to me all these years – two dimensions as a character on the page and two different, but still flat, dimensions as a person. But that night you turned out to be real.”

It’s a coming of age story – Quentin is just about to graduate high school. And the idea of the book is that growing up is a process of reconciling our dreams and fantasies with reality. We “whittle away” the projections we have about things and are confronted with what lies beneath.

You know your problem, Quentin? You keep expecting people not to be themselves.

Great book. Really enjoyed it.