Review: An Abundance of Katherines

I'll be honest: I keep wavering on how to start this review. There's the intro that's waiting for its punchline:

A Muslim and a Jew head out on a road trip post-high-school graduation and end up in the small town of Gutshot, Tennessee. (or I suppose that could be the premise for a horror movie)

The zippy book jacket statement-of-the-problem:

Just out of high school, broken-hearted after a girl named Katherine has dumped him for the 19th time, child prodigy Colin Singleton figures his best is far behind him. Child prodigies rarely turn into geniuses--the ones who actually put something new into the world--and that leaves him as just another smart kid who doesn't really matter--who's very, very single once again. On a road trip with his best friend Hassan, his Eureka! moment finally hits him. He will write the Theory of Underlying Katherine Predictability--the formula that explains who in any relationship will be the Dumper and the Dumpee. Maybe then he can add something to the world, win back Katherine IXX, and make sense of his world.

Or perhaps the clever reference:

Remember the film Adaptation, that fabulously meta film about a screen writer trying to adapt the Orchid Thief into a movie? The first half of the film was purposefully slow, but, as the writing teacher predicts, if you give 'em sex and a murder at the end, they'll forget everything that came before and love you for it.

I thought of that film as I was reading John Green's An Abundance of Katherines. It was written in Green's usual style: smart kids, bursts of humor on both the intellectual and the slapstick levels. In this book he uses footnotes, which are also generally funny and clever. But the main character, Colin, is deep in heartbreak for much of the novel, and his main task is writing a theorem to explain why he was dumped by 19 Katherines in a row. Colin's friend Lindsey critiques him for not being able to tell a proper story; he forgets about beginning, middle, and end because he finds too much interesting information along the way and has to include it. Aha! I thought when I read that. Meta again. The structure of the book reflects, in part, Colin's approach to story. The result is that this book lacks the page-turning drive of Looking for Alaska (his first) or The Fault in our Stars (his most recent). This, his second book, is full of interesting things that I enjoyed, but it was easier to put this book down and walk away for a while. Even the history of 19 Katherines is told in snippets (which is a wonderful narrative choice). Colin does learn to tell a proper story in the end, and the pull of the book picks up halfway through as he eases out of heartache.

The way he makes math the subject--while staying witty, while not scaring away anyone who dislikes math (by putting most of the actual math in the appendix--makes the liberal arts student in me jump for joy. Math as art! As relationship! Math and literature hand-in-hand, and humor too!

All in all, it was a clever book that I enjoyed reading, though it wasn't John Green's best. There's more to say in this regard, but I'll save it for the next post.