Math is Not The Answer: John Green’s An Abundance of Katherines

I picked up John Green’s latest novel, An Abundance of Katherines, at the Pengiun/Putnam warehouse sale awhile back for a mere dollar or something like that. The only thing that was wrong with the book was that a couple of sentences were mistakenly reprinted twice on a subsequent page. I was really anticipating the chance to read this book, though, because Green’s Looking for Alaska instantly became one of my favorites when I read it last year: it’s one of the great coming-of-age/boarding school novels that us English types all seem to go for. Abundance maintains Green’s irreverent style, but it’s not as deeply affecting as Looking for Alaska. The characters aren’t nearly as endearing, but, they’re likeable enough. Unlike the typical coming-of-age novels with their disaffected protagonists, the Holden Caulfield types, Green’s protagonist in Abundance cares too much and wants to matter and be a genius more than anything, except maybe to fall in love with a Katherine.

An Abundance of Katherines follows the protagonist, Colin Singleton, a former child prodigy, and his best friend Hassan, a lazy, super witty, extremely loveable Islamic fat kid, on their impromptu road trip across the country, ultimately landing them in Gutshot, Tennesse, where they meet Lindsey Lee Wells, a captivating young female in the vein of Alaska, and land jobs cataloging the stories of old-time workers at the town’s tampon factory.

Green works in quirks for his main character, Colin, that are even more clever and gimmicky than Miles’s penchant for recalling famous last words in Looking for Alaska.  Colin Singleton is a master anagrammer–he can anagram virtually any word or phrase into something clever and poetic–who has only dated girls named Katherine, nineteen of them in all.  He also is in the midst of developing a mathematical theorem that will predict when relationships will end based on dumper and dumpee variables.  Like I mentioned before, Colin is nothing like the typical protagonist in a bildungsroman–he is unpopular, but, he cares a lot and works extremely hard with his studies, and it took me about one hundred pages before he started to grow on me.  Ultimately, the novel is good fun.  I don’t think it will stay with me the way Looking for Alaska has, but, it’s a good story about eccentric teenagers hurtling forward into a world of irrevocable change and maturity (sort of) and embracing life, its impredictability, and the power of storytelling and the importance of making your own.