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In Book vs. Movie, we look at novels of any genre and compare them to their feature-film adaptation. This will usually happen when the film part of this equation is released. This will not be a review of the merits of either version of the story, but an essay on how each version of the story acquits itself within its medium. After analyzing both versions of the story, we’ll arrive at a verdict between which medium is more successful at telling its story, and whether any disparity between the two can be reconciled in a way that doesn’t impeach the winning version.

Paper Towns

Paper Towns is an adaptation of a young-adult novel written by John “The Fault in Our Stars” Green. It is a story about a high-school senior, Quentin “Q” Jacobsen, who finds himself finishing out his final year of school in two separate modes. In one, he searches for an old childhood friend of his, Margo Roth Spiegelman, who has up and left town. In the other, he develops and tries to bring closure and meaning to a social circle that consists mostly of his two friends, Ben and Radar. These two modes occasionally overlap with each other, and begin to fuse together as the search for Margo occupies more and more of Quentin’s time. The book is told in the first person, past tense.

The Book

Paper Towns starts up rather quickly, even given its overall short length. Our first exposure to the world of the narrator is as a kid, where he tells us about Margo and himself as nine-year-old neighbors in a suburb of Orlando, Florida. Having established this, it gives us our first introduction to what the thematic concept of the novel is going to be: Quentin and Margo happen upon a dead man in a neighborhood park, the victim of an obvious suicide. Their reactions to this discovery are very different, although they both leave the site equally quickly. Quentin has a fairly typical reaction; Margo, though, is more curious about the identity of the dead man than traumatized. She hypothesizes, coming to Quentin’s window later that night, that “all of his strings were cut”—a faint but unmistakable reference, in this context, to a breakdown.

After this point, the book flashes forward eight or so years to Quentin’s senior year in high school; in that time, we are told, he and Margo have drifted apart. They still live next door to each other, but rarely communicate and never socialize. She has become fairly popular, and is looked up to by a good amount of the student population. Quentin has his own friends, Ben and Radar, and as we catch up with the older versions of these characters, their senior year is coming to an end. Quentin’s life has become punctuated by predictability, which suits him fine.

That changes one night when Margo shows up at his window again, for the first time since they were kids, and this is what kicks the main plot of the book into action: Margo has a sort of all-nighter revenge bender she needs to go on, and she entices Quentin to join her as her getaway driver. She doesn’t have access to her car; Quentin has access to his, by way of a short narrative explanation that introduces us to two positively lovely characters we’ll come back to in a bit.

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