The Great Perhaps: Looking for Alaska by John Green

John Green's Looking for Alaska is the A Separate Peace for this generation. Just as John Knowles' coming-of-age novel dealt with the nature of friendship, trust, guilt, and loss for generations of post-World War II readers, this novel takes on the deep, first cuts of life--what it means to know another person, what it means to love, and what what it means to lose a friend to a death both senseless and deeply meaningful.

Miles Halter is skinny, brainy kid, loved by his parents, favored by his teachers for his academic skills, and yet almost invisible in his humdrum Florida high school. Miles' one quirk is his erudite obsession with biographies and famous last words--Rabelais' "I go to seek a Great Perhaps," and Simon Bolivar's "How will I ever get out of this labyrinth?" To escape his own labyrinth of aimless adolescence, Miles chooses to attend his father's prep school, Culver Creek, just south of Birmingham, in his junior year, drawn to the "Great Perhaps" of another, perhaps better self and more exhilarating life.

Miles gets his "perhaps" instantly. His roommate Chip Martin, self-proclaimed "the Colonel of Catastrophe," takes him in tow, gives him the proper preppy nickname of "Pudge," and introduces him to his own friends, Takumi, a Japanese student, and Alaska Young, brilliant, funny, sexy (although with distance-boyfriend Jake), and haunted by some unspoken tragedy. In short order Pudge is introduced to boarding school hazing and misdemeanors, smoking and drinking, sneaking out at night, and carrying on a constant state of prank warfare with the "Weekday Warriors," rich kids who leave their spartan, un-air conditioned concrete block dorms for the luxury of their parents McMansions in Mountain Brook, the old money suburb of Birmingham.

It is Alaska, though, who is the impetus for all that happens to Pudge at Culver Creek. Alaska takes the lead in the high jinks, scrounging up cartons of cigarettes, which she sells to the student body for pocket money, and scouring the rural surrounds in her scruffy Volkswagen for booze, vodka for the Colonel's milk, and Strawberry Hill coolers for late-night sessions near the creek. Alaska is a conundrum, a girl with a huge zest for life in precarious balance with a haunting tragedy in her past, which she finally confesses in a drunken game of Best Day-Worst Day--the memory of being immobilized, unable to call 911 as a seven-year-old as she watched her mother die of a brain aneurysm. Alaska seems always on the brink, on the edge of something, but it is she who leads Pudge across the line from childhood.

Once, early on in the year, she and I had walked down to the Smoking Hole, and she jumped into Culver Creek with her flip flops still on. . . . As I sat on the concrete, my feet dangling toward the water, she overturned rocks with the stick and pointed out the skittering crawfish.

"You boil 'em and then suck the heads out," she said excitedly. "That's where all the good stuff is."

She taught me everything I knew about crawfish and kissing and pink wine and poetry. She made me different.

In the first half of the novel, titled ominously "Before," Pudge slowly becomes a different person. In the fiercely loyal group he learns how to know a person and how to be a friend. As he learns his friends' life stories and meets some of their families, the story moves toward the final day of the "before," the night of January 10, when the friends gather to celebrate the success of their revenge prank on the Weekday Warriors, to smoke, drink, flirt, and make out a bit.

Later in the early hours of January 11, Alaska comes to the boys' room distraught and begs the boys to set off firecrackers to distract the headmaster's attention so that she can drive off the school grounds. Groggy and used to her moodiness, they do as she asks, only to be awakened in a few hours with the news of her death in a head-on collision with a police car whose flashing lights were meant to warn of a jackknifed truck on I-65.

In the "After," Chip and Miles are stunned with grief and guilt, knowing they should never have let her drive, drunk and overwrought as she was. Yet they find evidence that her death may have been suicide, either deliberate or impulsive, and with Takumi's help they try to discover what happened in those last three hours of Alaska's life. Looking for Alaska, they find one answer, written in her copy of The General and His Labyrinth in which she has written in the margin by the famous quote, "How will I ever get out of this labyrinth?" her own words "Straight and fast." Painfully they put their questions to the police who worked the accident scene, Alaska's boyfriend Jake with whom she talked that night, and even Takumi, who saw her searching for wild flowers before she drove away and finally realize that she had forgotten to put flowers on her mother's grave as she always had done on January 10.

But with an understanding of why she left campus the two boys are still left with the Great Perhaps of why she died as she did. In a climactic moment, the Colonel insists that they retrace her last moments and drive through the still glass-strewn area where she died.

Five miles north of school, the colonel moved into the left lane of the interstate and began to accelerate. I gritted my teeth, and then before us, broken glass glittered in the blaze of the sun like the road was wearing jewelry, and that spot must be the spot. He was still accelerating.

I thought, "This would not be a bad way to go."

I thought, "Straight and fast. Maybe she just decided at the last second."

Then POOF we are through the moment of her death. We are driving through the place that she could not drive through, passing onto asphalt she never saw, and we are not dead. . . . I realized it in waves...and I thought, God, we must look so lame, but it doesn't much matter when you have just now realized, all the time later, that you are still alive.

Embracing each other as they stop the car, Chip and Miles know a certain peace. Alaska has chosen her own way out of the labyrinth, and they realize that they have chosen the longer, perhaps the harder way.

As Miles writes in his religion final,

"We think we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.

So I know she forgives me, just as I forgive her. Thomas Edison's last words were "It's so beautiful over there." I don't know where there is, but I believe it's somewhere, and I hope it's beautiful."