A few spoilers here for future readers of Paper Towns...

John Green has a note at the end of the book where he mentions gratitude for Jon Krakauer and Into the Wild. (As a "particularly helpful book I read about disappearance".) When I read that note, the whole book made a lot more sense to me. Overall, I thought Paper Towns was fine and there were some moments of true YA brilliance. The entire opening segment is a bit manic in a wish-fulfillment kind of way (don't we all wish we could be that cool and smart as teenagers?) but it was as Margo's clues were revealed that I thought the plot really took off. The whole idea of false towns and pseudo-divisions (doomed subdivisions that are never built beyond the roads - they are all over Florida) is very interesting in an urban development sort of way and has a nice hook that carries the book beyond standard runaway fare. But Margo was a problem for me.

I was let down by the ending of Paper Towns as it just seemed to peter out. Margo, the ultimate planner, in reality had no plan. She had practically no money (who on earth was paying for her car insurance - the parents she despised?) but was going off on this glorious adventure to nowhere specific and just knew everything was going to be great. It made no sense to Quentin and no sense to me (not when you consider how careful she had always been about so many other aspects of her life). But when I saw that the life of Chris McCandless had been a resource for Green then I understood Margo a lot more. The idea was never a successful journey of self discovery - the idea was just running away for the sake of running.

Sherry Simpson, an associate professor at UAA and a member of my thesis committee way back when, came out with an essay collection last year, The Accidental Explorer. (If you're interested in Alaska or good travel writing,I highly recommend it.) One of her essays is "A Man Made Cold By the Universe" is about McCandless and the cult like following that has developed in the wake of Into the Wild. She traveled to the infamous bus, observes the many things written in a book there from other travelers and considers just what this one particular death has meant to so many people. She also writes about other instances of people lost in Alaska and how those have been viewed so differently (or hardly noticed at all). Here is the passage that really stood out to me:

We can't afford to take his story seriously because it doesn't say much a careful person doesn't already know about the desire and survival. The lessons are so obvious as to be laughable: Look at a map. Take some food. Know where you are. Listen to people who are smarter than you. Be humble. Go on out there - but it won't mean much unless you come back.

This is what bothers me - that McCandless failed os harshly, so sadly, and yet so famously that his death has come to symbolize something admirable. His unwillingness to see Alaska for what it really is has somehow become the story so many people associate with the place, a story so hollow you can almost hear the wind blowing through it. His death was not a brilliant fuck-up. It was not a terribly original fuck-up. It was just one of the more recent and more pointless fuck-ups.

This is exactly how I have felt about McCandless from the very beginning - and what I think has escaped so many of the more ardent fans of the book (and movie). He messed up, plain and simple. Why idolize someone who messed up? And that brings me back to Margo who because she does everything in such an over-the-top fashion seems like the book's heroine until the very end when it becomes clear that Margo doesn't know anything, doesn't have a clue - that she dropped out of high school weeks before graduation because she can not bear the fact her boyfriend cheated on her (how original is that?) and now she is simply someone driving to somewhere, looking for something. She is a fuck-up in process and no matter how cute that fuck-up might be, it doesn't change the truth about her.

In the summer issue of Granta last year the focus was on nature writing and Jason Crowley wrote the following in his editor's letter "The New Nature Writing":

I first read about McCandless in a 1993 article by Jon Krakauer in Outside magazine. It was about this time that I also read Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams (1986), a book that fundamentally changed the way I thought about nature and nature writing. For Lopez, writing about the North American Arctic was not an exercise in self-enthronement; he was not, like McCandless, a romantic adventurer and wilderness was not a screen on to which he wanted to project his longings and needs. As a field biologist he was engaged in nothing less than a struggle for exactitude: the struggle to find a language, free from cliche, in which to describe and explain in all its complicated particularity a landscape undergoing irrevocable change.

He continues a few lines later:

Lopez's book was not one of the many found among McCandless's possessions after his death. Nor is there any record of his having read it. If he had, his veneration of nature and in particular of the Alaskan wilderness may have been tempered by pragmatism, and he may not have lost his life.

We all want adventure - big romantic adventure - in our lives. We want a love like no other, we want the house and the car and dream. We want big lives with big rewards. We forget though the essential element of pragmatism; we forget that being smart is as important as being bold. I had hoped for more than this from Margo in Paper Towns; I had hoped for more Barry Lopez and less - far far far less - Jon Krakauer.