I’m not sure how to feel about it. I’ve read little snippets and bits of it before. I have had the entire plot spoiled for me by the Internet, but that doesn’t much matter; it’s not one of those books that relies strictly on a twist.
I really wanted to hate it, but I couldn’t, at least at first. The flow of the book is very good—I can’t think of another word for it. It’s that feeling that a book is comfortable to inhabit; that I can suspend my disbelief and settle into it without always thinking how I’m going to word the review.
I liked the first couple of chapters best, because they chronicled the protagonist’s out-of-placeness in a new setting and that’s a feeling I understand well. There’s duct tape and a lake and his crush on Alaska and all of this is great; I was going, man, they’re right: maybe this thing is a classic.
Then he ended up rooming with a clever, funny dude who liked him and fell in immediately with the cigarette-smoking Smart Kids, which seemed almost too easy. Drinks and Kurt Vonnegut in a field; it almost makes you wonder if John Green has ever read Kurt Vonnegut or if he thought, “college thing, gotta have it”. He has his characters archly fling the word “pretentious” around, as if to keep critics from using that word in reviews.
It’s all a part of that tendency—a trademark of John Green novels—for every single character to be so darn clever that it’s almost precious. His writing is always flow-y enough that it’s just barely believable, but the sharp edges of unrealism poke through the fabric. It echoes the epigrammic nature of certain passages of Oscar Wilde; quit it with the fortune cookies already, Oscar.
John Green is a genuinely intelligent guy and it bugs me that he’s putting all his intelligence into the promotion of this kind of coffee-shop philosophy the characters talk, which caffeinates but does not satisfy, which falls just short of the real thing. I like to talk that kind of shop myself because it’s fun to do, but there’s no viable alternative presented in Looking For Alaska, and I guess we’re expected to think that that’s the end of it: that what we read on our Starbucks sleeve or emblazon at the top of a Tumblr blog is just as good as what we’ve learned from history, religion or experience.
