Wow, that sounds portentous, doesn't it? But I mean it quite literally. I have a very different life--ok, a sort of different life--than I had before I was teaching children's literature. One big difference is that these days I occasionally--even, often--write about living authors. One of the big perks, frankly, of being a Victorianist is that the authors are all dead. I mean this in the nicest possible way. They died many years ago, most of them of natural causes, having already written many wonderful (and sometimes not-so-wonderful) books, and I don't have to feel bad about anything I say about them because they don't know I've said it. (Or if they do, I think I'm safe in assuming they don't care.)
When you write about living authors, however, you can't just irresponsibly say whatever you want. (Not that I ever did that, of course...) You feel responsible. You can even occasionally wonder what they think. And, sometimes, you can even find out. Now, so far, this has actually been all good. I still have the message on my voicemail that John Green left me after he read my review of Paper Towns. (Yes, I'm a nerd that way. Or maybe a nerdfighter.) (He liked it. That's why I kept the message.) And the other day Neil Gaiman linked to my column on Coraline (scroll down), and said he liked it, and that made my day.
So actually of course I'm really glad to be writing about living authors. It's exciting and unpredictable. And it makes me feel like part of a community.
I'm giving a talk about Stephenie Meyer this weekend. Do you think she cares?
Showing posts with label John Green. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Green. Show all posts
Monday, March 23, 2009
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Why I do what I do
Sometimes my students ask me if authors really think about "that stuff" (symbolism, metaphor, allusion, intertextuality) when they write their books. Here is the unequivocal answer: yes.
John Green rocks.
John Green rocks.
Sunday, September 07, 2008
Book Review: Paper Towns
We don't really know each other very well. Even in an age of facebook, blogging, twitter, and text-messaging, our efforts to know and be known are still halting, partial, and frequently stymied by prejudice and preconception. And yet, the effort remains a fundamental human impulse--we keep trying, even as we fail again and again, to make connections that are lasting and meaningful.
Quentin Jacobsen (Q) is a teenager like many others, on the outskirts of high school popularity and relatively comfortable there. He doesn't have a girlfriend or a date for prom, much to his parents' consternation, but he has a group of friends--"band geeks," they call themselves (though Q himself is not in band)--and that's pretty much enough. He does, though, have one thing most band geeks don't have--a history with the most popular girl in school, Margo Roth Spiegelman. She and Q are next-door neighbors, and once in elementary school--before the demands of popularity became quite as pressing--they discovered a dead body in a park while out bike-riding. Although Margo Roth Spiegelman (almost always referred to by all three names) no longer rides bikes with Q--or seems, sometimes, even to know he exists--the incident somehow still defines both of them.
John Green has been publishing smart, funny, and poignant novels about teenagers for three years now, and fans of his previous two novels, Looking for Alaska (Printz award winner for 2006) and An Abundance of Katherines, will not be disappointed by Paper Towns. Margo Roth Spiegelman has a certain resemblance, for example, to Alaska Young, in that they are both young women who become objects of both adoration and speculation. Becoming an object, though, turns out to be a problem for both the girls who are adored and the boys who adore them or speculate about them: we are all more complicated, Green's novels remind us, than the stories others tell about us. Adoring someone from afar may give us a sense of purpose or meaning, but in the end it minimizes both the object and the adorer, who can lose sight of himself in his obsession. Margo Roth Spiegelman, unlike Alaska, both embraces and resists her objectification. She's known all over school for her adventures, most of which seem larger than life, and she delights--or so it seems--in her reputation. But when she enlists Q in one last big adventure, then disappears, she leaves in her wake a mystery that teaches Q and his friends as much about themselves as it does about her.
As in his previous novels, Green here centers his novel on a compelling group of quasi-misfit characters who nonetheless manage not to seem like outsiders or losers. They're folks who have decided--as so many of us do--that high school social hierarchies are not going to do them any favors, so they (mostly) opt out. Realistically, they are also delighted when, on rare occasion, they find themselves invited in: Q's friends' reactions to their sudden popularity late in the novel is as convincing as it is amusing. I love Q's friend Radar--whose nickname is hilariously inappropriate but sticks, as such things often do--who, despite his relative acceptability in the social hierarchy, fears that he can't quite live down his parents' record-setting collection of black Santas. And his friend Ben, obsessed with girls and videogames but childishly delighted by his own outrageous braggadocio. More than once reading the novel I found myself laughing out loud. But as often as it made me laugh, it made me think, and the persistence of Whitman's Leaves of Grass throughout the novel formed an important part of that thinking. Margo Roth Spiegelman uses Leaves of Grass as part of a clue to her mystery, but Green uses it as well to comment on the process Q goes through in finding Margo Roth Spiegelman:
Like Whitman, like Q, Green tries to make us hear those voices: the voices of those whom we admire as well as those we avoid. In Paper Towns, he makes them come alive, in all their ridiculous adolescent angst as well as their honest and poignant earnestness, in their pleasures and their pains. Margo Roth Spiegelman may remain something of a cipher, but at least Q realizes that she is, and why--and that, in itself, is a big step for the boy who has called her his "miracle."
Reading over this review I find that I make it sound somewhat painfully earnest, which it is decidedly not. Or, at least, not only. I don't object to earnestness in fiction, and Q is an earnest type--as are his predecessors Miles and Colin. But he's also funny. Still, I'm afraid you're going to have to read it to find that out for yourself--what's funny in context often isn't, out of context, and all the quotes I pulled sound a little silly in the middle of my prose. Trust me, they work really well right where they belong.
(I read an ARC of Paper Towns which I received from the publisher after mentioning on the blog that I didn't have one yet. Thanks, Jillian!)
Quentin Jacobsen (Q) is a teenager like many others, on the outskirts of high school popularity and relatively comfortable there. He doesn't have a girlfriend or a date for prom, much to his parents' consternation, but he has a group of friends--"band geeks," they call themselves (though Q himself is not in band)--and that's pretty much enough. He does, though, have one thing most band geeks don't have--a history with the most popular girl in school, Margo Roth Spiegelman. She and Q are next-door neighbors, and once in elementary school--before the demands of popularity became quite as pressing--they discovered a dead body in a park while out bike-riding. Although Margo Roth Spiegelman (almost always referred to by all three names) no longer rides bikes with Q--or seems, sometimes, even to know he exists--the incident somehow still defines both of them.
John Green has been publishing smart, funny, and poignant novels about teenagers for three years now, and fans of his previous two novels, Looking for Alaska (Printz award winner for 2006) and An Abundance of Katherines, will not be disappointed by Paper Towns. Margo Roth Spiegelman has a certain resemblance, for example, to Alaska Young, in that they are both young women who become objects of both adoration and speculation. Becoming an object, though, turns out to be a problem for both the girls who are adored and the boys who adore them or speculate about them: we are all more complicated, Green's novels remind us, than the stories others tell about us. Adoring someone from afar may give us a sense of purpose or meaning, but in the end it minimizes both the object and the adorer, who can lose sight of himself in his obsession. Margo Roth Spiegelman, unlike Alaska, both embraces and resists her objectification. She's known all over school for her adventures, most of which seem larger than life, and she delights--or so it seems--in her reputation. But when she enlists Q in one last big adventure, then disappears, she leaves in her wake a mystery that teaches Q and his friends as much about themselves as it does about her.
As in his previous novels, Green here centers his novel on a compelling group of quasi-misfit characters who nonetheless manage not to seem like outsiders or losers. They're folks who have decided--as so many of us do--that high school social hierarchies are not going to do them any favors, so they (mostly) opt out. Realistically, they are also delighted when, on rare occasion, they find themselves invited in: Q's friends' reactions to their sudden popularity late in the novel is as convincing as it is amusing. I love Q's friend Radar--whose nickname is hilariously inappropriate but sticks, as such things often do--who, despite his relative acceptability in the social hierarchy, fears that he can't quite live down his parents' record-setting collection of black Santas. And his friend Ben, obsessed with girls and videogames but childishly delighted by his own outrageous braggadocio. More than once reading the novel I found myself laughing out loud. But as often as it made me laugh, it made me think, and the persistence of Whitman's Leaves of Grass throughout the novel formed an important part of that thinking. Margo Roth Spiegelman uses Leaves of Grass as part of a clue to her mystery, but Green uses it as well to comment on the process Q goes through in finding Margo Roth Spiegelman:
'I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen,' Whitman writes. And then for two pages he's just hearing: hearing a steam whistle, hearing people's voices, hearing an opera. He sits on the grass and lets the sound pour through him. And this is what I was trying to do too, I guess: to listen to all the little sounds of her, because before any of it could make sense, it had to be heard. . . . I tried to hear, inside a song I'd never heard before, the voice I had trouble remembering after twelve days. (ARC, 196)
Like Whitman, like Q, Green tries to make us hear those voices: the voices of those whom we admire as well as those we avoid. In Paper Towns, he makes them come alive, in all their ridiculous adolescent angst as well as their honest and poignant earnestness, in their pleasures and their pains. Margo Roth Spiegelman may remain something of a cipher, but at least Q realizes that she is, and why--and that, in itself, is a big step for the boy who has called her his "miracle."
Reading over this review I find that I make it sound somewhat painfully earnest, which it is decidedly not. Or, at least, not only. I don't object to earnestness in fiction, and Q is an earnest type--as are his predecessors Miles and Colin. But he's also funny. Still, I'm afraid you're going to have to read it to find that out for yourself--what's funny in context often isn't, out of context, and all the quotes I pulled sound a little silly in the middle of my prose. Trust me, they work really well right where they belong.
(I read an ARC of Paper Towns which I received from the publisher after mentioning on the blog that I didn't have one yet. Thanks, Jillian!)
Saturday, August 09, 2008
How I spent my Friday
So here I am at Terminus, and yesterday was a busy day. I took a long walk in the morning (waking up on Eastern Time when you're living in Central Time gives you these opportunities) then went to hear a talk on parenting in the Potterverse. I love when people don't think Mrs. Weasley is a model mom, I'm just saying.
Then lunch, where I heard the lovely and talented Cheryl Klein give a terrific talk about what we can learn (about writing) from the Harry Potter series. Turns out there's a lot, all about character development and plot and theme. Good stuff, and she's a great speaker.
I skipped out from the conference for a bit after lunch to see and hear John Green speaking at the Chicago Public Library, with his special guest, Hank Green! Nerdfighters galore! (There's a pretty large overlap between the Harry Potter fandom and Nerdfighteria.) John read from his forthcoming novel, Paper Towns (why has no one sent me an ARC of this yet?), and answered questions in his best "Question Tuesday" style. My favorite line from his answers: "having nerdy parents is a tremendous blessing." Are you listening, kids?
Then back to the conference for more talks, the best of which was a fascinating examination of Severus Snape as a character who is "coded feminine" -- that is, who occupies a position in the literature more typically occupied by a female character. Fun stuff.
Then lunch, where I heard the lovely and talented Cheryl Klein give a terrific talk about what we can learn (about writing) from the Harry Potter series. Turns out there's a lot, all about character development and plot and theme. Good stuff, and she's a great speaker.
I skipped out from the conference for a bit after lunch to see and hear John Green speaking at the Chicago Public Library, with his special guest, Hank Green! Nerdfighters galore! (There's a pretty large overlap between the Harry Potter fandom and Nerdfighteria.) John read from his forthcoming novel, Paper Towns (why has no one sent me an ARC of this yet?), and answered questions in his best "Question Tuesday" style. My favorite line from his answers: "having nerdy parents is a tremendous blessing." Are you listening, kids?
Then back to the conference for more talks, the best of which was a fascinating examination of Severus Snape as a character who is "coded feminine" -- that is, who occupies a position in the literature more typically occupied by a female character. Fun stuff.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Book Banning? No!
John Green, author of the fabulous, award-winning Looking for Alaska (and the equally wonderful An Abundance of Katherines), finds himself in the odd position of having to explain that he is not a pornographer. Check out his video, below, and then write a letter, if you feel so inclined.
For what it's worth--as I wrote to John myself a few minutes ago--I read James Kirkwood's far edgier boarding-school novel Good Times/Bad Times in high school. I also read Romeo and Juliet, The Scarlet Letter, and Tess of the D'Urbervilles, to pick three almost at random. All have far more "edgy" content--premarital sex, unwed motherhood, suicide pacts, rape, and the like--and no one uttered a word of complaint, as far as I know. Edgy content, after all, is what teenage life is like. And the point in Alaska, as John makes clear in the video (and as is blindingly obvious to anyone who has read the book) is that physical intimacy is no substitute for emotional intimacy. In fact it can detract from it.
John is not a pornographer. Don't ban books. Period.
For what it's worth--as I wrote to John myself a few minutes ago--I read James Kirkwood's far edgier boarding-school novel Good Times/Bad Times in high school. I also read Romeo and Juliet, The Scarlet Letter, and Tess of the D'Urbervilles, to pick three almost at random. All have far more "edgy" content--premarital sex, unwed motherhood, suicide pacts, rape, and the like--and no one uttered a word of complaint, as far as I know. Edgy content, after all, is what teenage life is like. And the point in Alaska, as John makes clear in the video (and as is blindingly obvious to anyone who has read the book) is that physical intimacy is no substitute for emotional intimacy. In fact it can detract from it.
John is not a pornographer. Don't ban books. Period.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
