Looking for Alaska by John Green
John Green is supposed to be THE guy for heart-rending teen romances, or so I’ve heard. This falls into that category. The Alaska of the title is not the state but a beautiful and troubled young woman, sort of a manic pixie fairy girl off her meds. Our protagonist “Pudge” is skinny and quiet and shy and is immediately drawn to Alaska as soon as he arrives at the boarding school in Alabama they both attend.
This novel has some charming characters. Pudge’s roommate and partner in crime is “The Colonel” who is the leader for the endless pranks students at this school like to pull. Pudge seems to go along with whatever his new friends do, whether it’s get drunk on cheap flavored wine or learn to smoke cigarettes. No one has cell phones in this book, so it has the quaint retro feel of the 1990s, though I’m not sure when it was supposed to be set. Takuji, their other friend, likes to do improv rap, and Lara is the cute Romanian girl who agrees to be Pudge’s girlfriend. They definitely all have a true-to-life insecurity and desperation for approval that teenagers often have. As with many literary characters, they read more famous literature than most real-life people do, but that’s to be expected.
Pudge’s relationship with Alaska intrigued me because it was like a rom com written from the male point of view. That is, he is really only in love with Alaska because of the shape of her body, and she calls him on it. Sometimes she’s kind and sometimes she’s a bitch to him and she tells him that she is both of these people but he always forgets the part of her that is less appealing because he loves her body. Pudge is the kind of character who doesn’t have much force of personality and gets drawn in the wake of stronger people. It’s an interesting choice for a narrative that doesn’t always work well, but Green pulls it off.
The tragedy that occurs is foreshadowed pretty heavily in the book so it’s not really a surprise. Afterwards, Pudge, Takuji and the Colonel do investigative work trying to make sense of what happened and why, at the cost of their friendships. That also felt real and familiar to anyone who has had a tragedy in their life. When something terrible and unexpected happens, you just want to make sense of it. Most people don’t get to make any sense of it, but the boys in this book do. They all loved her, and the only thing that diminishes this love is that you just know that no one would have cared nearly as much had she not been hot. Alaska can be callous and bitchy, but it doesn’t matter because she’s beautiful, so the boys love her anyway. She knows this and they know it, but they can’t help it. The memorial prank, which was hilarious, kind of highlights that.
This is a charming teen romance with a wallop of tragedy that likely has wide appeal. Green tries hard to lace it through with deep philosophical underpinnings, but even though I saw what the author was trying to do with it, I didn’t come away with anything even remotely resembling philosophical insight. When teenagers talk about the meaning of life and death and suffering and religion and the afterlife, it doesn’t make me ponder philosophy, it just makes me ponder teenagers being teenagers. It’s a pretty good book and I enjoyed reading it.
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