Distoibed By You

I said I would try to lighten up the rest of the this week. But listen, it's January. I don't know about you, but I really can't get too excited about the temperatures rising from around zero to around freezing. It's still Just. Too. Dang. Cold. To. Go. Out. And I'm on day two of having a kid at home who is prostrate from exhaustion. He slept all yesterday morning and then for another half hour late in the afternoon, and we sent him to bed last night at 8:30. He slept soundly until this morning at 6:30, when he got dressed for school, sat in a chair looking pale and wan for a few minutes, and then ran down the hall retching, after which he was sent back to bed. He can lie around and read, but so far he hasn't slept for more than 30 minutes at a stretch.

And I've read a bunch of disturbing books this week. Some I will not even discuss, because I don't know why I let myself read them in the first place. Now that I have, I keep trying to adopt the attitude of the old woman in Moonstruck who is eating alone in a restaurant when an old man apologizes for disturbing her because his too-young girlfriend just threw a glass of wine at him. The old woman (played by Olympia Dukakis) gives him a look and says "I'm not distoibed by you."

But, the truth is, I am distoibed. Last time I read a book by John Green, I said that I thought he would be pleased that I found his books disturbing, and he commented that he would. His newest one, Paper Towns, is no less disturbing to me, and for some of the same reasons. The parents are all cruel, absent, and/or clueless. The adolescents are so deeply into figuring out who they are that it's hard for them to see anyone else clearly. The love interest, Margo, seems to have figured out some things that the protagonist, Quentin, wants to share, but his search for her, while exciting and amusing in parts, didn't seem to me to end up being worth the time and the trouble he took. It struck me as a leftover-hippie novel, an updated version of The Catcher in the Rye, with all of Margo's disdain for the way high-schoolers are judged for their carefully constructed facades. And here's part of the resolution, in which Quentin learns that "imagining isn't perfect. You can't get all the way inside someone else. I could never have imagined Margo's anger at being found, or the story she was writing over. But imagining being someone else, or the world being something else, is the only way in. It is the machine that kills fascists." So yeah, don't trust anyone over 30. What keeps this novel from falling into the flower child mindset entirely is that the kids don't use mind-expanding drugs.

Maybe I shouldn't have read Paper Towns in the depths of winter, my least favorite season. The author really is amusing; I like the way he writes dialogue, and I love the way he constructed his post today at Sparksflyup. And there's always something interesting in the background of one of his books, like what a "paper town" is, and that they exist.