When I was in high school at the turn of the century, while too young for bars and too old and cool for McDonalds, some friends and I would sit cross-legged on the platform between railway tracks at the train station of our town and play ‘pulse murder’. This was a game where you sat in a circle, and held hands, and one person was the murderer (I forget how they were assigned), and sent a number of squeezes, or pulses, around the circle. If you received one squeeze you were killed, while everyone else tried to figure out the origin of the ‘pulses’ before everyone had been taken out. We did this at night, in November, in the middle of Finland, where it was cold and dark from early in the afternoon; under the halogen lights of the platform our faces were half in shadow, our eyes hooded, our breath visible and vaporous.
Perhaps it was just an excuse to hold hands, that circle the eye of the storm of adolescence.
Paper Towns is a Young Adult novel by John Green; I picked it up because I started reading The Fault in Our Stars for a research
project but found it too depressing, considering, though I liked the narrator’s voice and the writing overall. A paper town means many things in the novel; it’s set in a suburb of Orlando, and it refers to subdivision developments that were partially built but never bought up and therefore never finished, sort of pre-ghost towns, but it’s also to do with maps (which I love) and signifiers for things and ideas that don’t really exist or don’t exist in the way we think they do.
One of these ideas lives right across from narrator Quentin ‘Q’ Jacobsen, embodied in Margo Roth Spiegelman, a dominant figure in the high school as well as Q’s emotional terrain. Margo’s childhood friendship with Q fizzled out by senior year, as she became the girlfriend of a popular dude and became a force to be reckoned with in her own right, and he started hanging out in the corridor outside band practice waiting for his two friends Radar and Ben. One night Margo invites Q on an adventure distributing revenge and rewards to the people in her circle who have wronged her or helped her and committing mild vandalism; he hopes their old bond is reignited but the next day she is gone. As Margo is already 18, the police aren’t really interested, and Q, Radar and Ben take it upon themselves to follow clues to her disappearance, while finding out that Margo is a lot more troubled (though we never really find out exactly why) and a lot more complicated than they had anticipated.
In my dream, her head was on my shoulder as I lay on my back, only the corner of carpet between us and the concrete floor. Her arm was around my rib cage. We were just lying there, sleeping. God help me. The only teenaged guy in America who dreams of sleeping with girls, and just sleeping with them. And then my phone rang. It took two more rings before my fumbling hands found the phone lying on the unrolled carpet. It was 3:18 A.M. Ben was calling. (p. 176)
There’s a road trip, and hi-jinks, and middle-class adventures, as Q and his friends explore the darker and more isolated niches and corners of the town they thought they knew intimately–derelict strip malls, 24 hour hypermarkets after midnight, office buildings after hours–as well as the poetry of Walt Whitman and their own sense of transgression and morality. The characters are quirky and articulate, and generally well-meaning, but what’s best about Paper Towns is that it celebrates the spaces and shadows that teenagers carve out for themselves between the benign or controlling searchlights of their parents’ gazes. The internet is a thing for them, but social media isn’t, which makes it feel almost retro; 10 years later tracking down Margo might have been as easy as scrolling her Instagram page (or not–is Instagram a paper town itself?).
Paper Towns (shamelessly? cynically? good-heartedly? who is YA for?) tugs at all the heart-strings I hold that lead back to my high school years; the drama and the questioning, but most of all the liminal times between school and home, the interstitial spaces between the routines inscribed by the rest of the world: the bike rides on back streets, the children’s playgrounds at 3am in high summer when there seemed to be no end or beginning to light, the awning of the closed concert hall during a thunderstorm, the park benches or bus stops–or that one winter, the end of the railway platform furthest from the station building.
