Summer Reading #1: Looking for Alaska

Looking For Alaska by John Green (2005)

Overview

I can’t think of a better book to have started my summer reading spree with. John Green’s Looking For Alaska is packaged as a categorically “young adult novel”, but as any good book about teenagers and for teenagers, it has no place within those strict boundaries. The novel follows Miles Hunter, who goes to boarding school for junior year in search of “the Great Perhaps”, and finds much more than he could have imagined.

Miles narrates the story in first person, and his character is fascinating enough to justify this. In his home in Florida, he lives in voluntary isolation from the world, absorbed in reading biographies and learning famous dead people’s last words. He is searching for something without knowing what it is, and in the course of the book he finds it in Culver Creek Preparatory School in the most unexpected ways. The book is divided into two halves, “Before” and “After”, pivoted around an experience that is as traumatic to the reader as it is to the characters. I’ll leave the discussion of that to the spoiler section.

John Green has an uncanny ability to get into the head of a loner teenager who experiences life for the first time. On a superficial level, Green adopts many of the clichés of coming-of-age stories – first cigarette, being hazed by seniors, getting caught up in petty high school feuds, being attracted to a girl for the first time, etc etc etc. But there’s a reason these clichés exist; they’re an integral part of teenage life in a context like this one. But Green takes those tropes and makes them an honest part of Miles’ life. He avoids the easy trap of trying to create characters and a context that are vague enough for anyone to project themselves into. He captures the feeling of being in a consciously formative stage in life; wrestling with the invincibility and vulnerability of adolescence with startling sincerity.

So give this book a go, especially if you went to boarding school or are going to boarding school. It is a powerful and honest coming-of-age tale, the likes of which I haven’t encountered since I read The Perks of Being A Wallflower, and it has instantly become one of my favourite books. I will most definitely be revisiting this one many, many times in the years to come.

Arbitrarily Decided Grade: A

Spoiler-filled discussion (MAJOR spoilers)

First of all, I must admit a ridiculous amount of bias for this book. Miles’ story in its framework (at least in the Before section) uncannily parallels my own life. If you haven’t been to boarding school, I promise you, the description of boarding school life here is pitch perfect. And beyond that, it understands a very strange niche of teenagedom – smart kids who go to school with lots of other smart kids, studying their asses off while simultaneously experimenting and breaking rules and trying to be badass. The feeling that this book captures better than I’ve ever seen captured is what it’s like to find what it’s like to feel at home because of the people around you after years of being comfortable in perfect isolation.

There are some moments of pure genius in Looking For Alaska. The bit about Miles kissing Lara for the first time is a great piece of writing. The rapport that the Colonel and Miles build up is another great example. And then there’s Takumi and his “Nobody catches the motherfucking fox”. Or Alaska’s education on how a blowjob is given. I could go on and on. The entirety of Before is this awesome.

And then there’s After. Oh, the After. When I first realised that she’d died, I was so angry and so betrayed. There was no rhyme or reason to it, it felt like cheap emotional manipulation. But as I went on, I realised that that must be what the Colonel and Takumi and Miles felt like. I grew so attached to these characters without even realising it. I can almost hear their voices even now, with banter so comfortable and relentless that I feel as if they were my friends.

I don’t know why Alaska died. But I also know that it doesn’t matter. It matters that her friends tried to find out why. But in the end, this is not a book about growing up quickly in the wonderful world of adolescence. It is not a book about grieving the death of a friend. Well, it is about those things, but it is not exclusively about those things. What brings Before and After together is the essay Miles writes at the end. Realising that when you love someone, you seem them as more than the sum of their parts. And that is beautiful. And channeling that idea so perfectly makes this book beautiful; makes it something to be cherished as if it were a living, breathing thing.