So this is my least favorite John Green book so far, but the thing about that is that saying “least favorite” in this context is about like saying, “Oh, that chocolate ice cream with the peanut butter swirls really just pales in comparison to the mint-chocolate chip and the Cherry Garcia over there.” You give me the fucking ice cream right now and I will shove it in my face.
Nominally, An Abundance of Katherines is about a former child prodigy named Colin who has just graduated high school and been dumped by a girl named Katherine for the 19th time. He and his best friend Hassan, an overweight Muslim who is a year older than Colin, and refuses to go to college, decide to go on a summer road trip to try and get out of their heads. But really, this book isn’t about how Colin is obsessed with dating Katherines. Really, the Katherines are incidental, and other than providing Colin with an excuse to come up with his mathematical Katherine dumping formula (which works on people not named Katherine just as well as it does on Katherines), this is actually a book about young people making that perilous transition from the structure of high school where your parents and your teachers tell you who to be and where to go, to the world outside where you have to decide for yourself.
Colin is an interesting way in to this thematic exploration because so much of his identity is caught up in being better and smarter and faster and knowing more than other people. He is obsessed with making a mark on history and pours his entire self into that endeavor, because what else is a child prodigy good for? What’s the point?
I think John Green is just as fascinated by child prodigies as he is anagramming and math* (even though he is bad at it and had to have a mathematician friend help him with the math in this book), and it shows. I wasn’t aware that there was a difference between geniuses and prodigies, but apparently there is. The difference, according to Colin, being that geniuses create knowledge or theories or apply existing knowledge in interesting ways so as to make a real, quantifiable difference in the world. Their brains are wired for different thinking. Prodigies, by comparison, aren’t wired for creation or innovation, only extremely fast learning. Colin learns languages and words and facts and has an iron clad memory, but none of that knowledge he accumulates adds anything to the sum of the world (as he sees it). But Colin wants to do more than just exist as a repository of knowledge. He wants to make a quantifiable difference in the world, and he decides he’s going to do that by creating a formula that will be able to predict the relationship lifespan of any given couple.
*Both of which Colin is obsessed with.
Anyway, he and Hassan (who is delightful) end up spending their summer in a small town in Tennessee, lured there by a tourist trap claiming that the Archduke Franz Ferdinand is buried there, he of starting WWI fame. And of course it ends up being the perfect place for them to find out what kinds of people they actually want to be.
This is definitely the most cutesy of JG’s books. The set-up demands an instant suspension of disbelief, and Colin’s underlying arc is classic bildungsroman, but where the book shines is where John Green always shines for me. In the language and the specificity of his characters. In allowing those characters to be flawed and make mistakes and be unlikeable for a little while. In his wit and sense of humor. In creating characters who are allowed to be smart and complex instead of shallow and predictable. And sure, a lot of his characters are similar to one another, but so what. Authors have obsessions and proclivities just like the rest of us, and they write about what interests them. It’s when they stop writing books about things that truly interest them that you have to start worrying. Colin is also the most “unrelatable” of Green’s protagonists. I put that in quotations, though, because it’s ultimately his journey to learn that he’s just as human as anyone, and maybe that’s better than being a prodigy anyway.
I am now officially out of John Green books to read, so no pressure or anything, John, but any day now on that next book of yours.
