An Abundance of Thought

Usually I only write blogs about books that I like so much that I can't stop thinking/talking about them, but this is not the case this time. I mean, I liked An Abundance of Katherines just fine, but I liked Looking for Alaska better and, hey, I didn't write a blog about that.

I started this book last Monday night and this morning I was still only halfway through it. It's not a page-turner by any means. I never found myself thinking, "What's going to happen to Colin Singleton next?" To put it vaguely, it's a book about a recent high school graduate who wants to matter but doesn't think he does (matter, that is). He has spent basically his whole life, since discovering when he was three years old that he was somewhat of a child prodigy, trying not to fall to the wayside. He claims there are two groups of child prodigies: those who grow up to be average human beings, and those who turn into geniuses. Colin doesn't think he's a genius, and doesn't think he really can be a genius, but he's going to try, because he wants to matter. His motto is, "What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?"

Getting to all that philosophical stuff later, let me introduce you to the other characters:

Hassan: Colin's best (and only, considering his child prodigy-status did not exactly grant him the social skills necessary to be generally liked) friend, who is a self-described "not-doer." He graduated the year before Colin and took one of those "years off" which he intended to extend indefinitely, because he is a not-doer. He doesn't do things. He's chubby and likes to watch Judge Judy. He doesn't like things that aren't funny, and he turns every situation into a joke. I could get into the awesomeness of his and Colin's friendship, like their code word ("dingleberries") for when one of them is pushing a subject too hard (like when Colin tries to get Hassan to sign up for college classes, or when Hassan makes jokes about the Katherines), and how they speak in Arabic sometimes so no one around can understand them, and how they give themselves alternate identities when meeting new people, but I won't do that. Intentionally.

Lindsey Lee Wells: A girl Colin and Hassan meet on their road trip, the purpose of which was to mend Colin's broken heart because K-19 (we'll get to that later) broke up with him. It turns out, she's dating a boy named Colin... who is a total jerk, but whatever. Lindsey is a chameleon; she says the only true sentence about herself that starts with "I" is "I'm full of sh-t." i.e. She has a Southern accent around the old people who knew her when she was a kid, she's a bubblegum-chewing pop tart around her boyfriend, and she's all deep and philosophical around Colin.

So, throughout the story we find out that Colin has dated 19 girls named Katherine. They all spelled their names the same way. He only really talks about Katherine I, the girl he met when he was like 8 because her dad was his tutor, and Katherine XIX, the girl who most recently broke up with him. His relationship with Katherine I lasted only 2.5 minutes, and most of the others lasted only a few days or weeks, but K-19 lasted a whole 343 days. So he's basically a brokenhearted puddle of mush, but you get the impression that he only thought he loved her because having a girlfriend made him feel like he mattered. Like she thought he mattered enough to be with him, so now he's not even a child prodigy anymore, not a genius, and not anyone's boyfriend either. Yes, Colin Singleton is kind of pathetic.

So Hassan decides to take him on a road trip, during which Colin decides to turn the patterns of relationships into a mathematical formula to determine who will dump whom and when. He comes up with something that actually makes some mathematical sense, except for some reason it does not apply to Katherine III because the graph of Katherine III is upside down, which means that he would have broken up with her. Which he does not remember as true, because he believes himself to be the victim of nineteen Colin-dumpings by nineteen Katherines.

So he calls her. Mind you, they were 10 years old when they dated. She confirms that, yes, he broke up with her. So his Theorem IS right! [This brings on all kinds of philosophizing about how we remember things and how, in our brains, there is always room for the truth even if that's not how we choose to remember it]

Somewhere in there, we find out another reason why Colin may have been so attached to K-19. Because she and Katherine I are... THE SAME PERSON. It was just a twist I didn't see coming. And also kind of adorable, seeing they met when they were 8 and she was always kind of fascinated by him. But, alas, he does eventually realize that it was not meant to be with Katherine the Great (nickname). Or, necessarily, any Katherines.

Oh, Colin also has a penchant for anagramming. This will come in handy later.

Anyway, on the road trip, Colin sees a sign for the grave of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Gutshot, Tennessee. Now, when I first read this, I was like, "Why would the Archduke Franz Ferdinand be buried in the United States? Let alone Tennessee?" but I put this thought aside for the sake of moving along in the story. They stop to see the Archduke, who Colin thinks will give him some kind of empowerment to move on with his life, and they meet Lindsey, who works at the general store and also gives tours of the Archduke's grave.

Lindsey's mom, Hollis, shows up later and recognizes Colin from a televised smartypants competition (which he won) called KranialKidz. She offers him and Hassan a place to stay and a job going around interviewing people in Gutshot for some kind of memorial thing she's putting together. They accept and move in with Lindsey and Hollis, who pretty much owns the town because her grandfather, Fred N. Dinzanfar, started the factory where everyone works or has worked.

The parts where they go around and interview people are kind of boring, so I'll skip to the part where Colin and Hassan get chased through the woods by a feral pig and a swarm of hornets into a graveyard where they find Hassan's new girlfriend and Lindsey's boyfriend, um, doing stuff. So they speak in Arabic and Hassan tells him to record the conversation [because of the interviews, Colin always has a tape recorder] with The Other Colin in which TOC admits that he's been cheating on Lindsey and threatens to beat Colin up if he tells her. So he doesn't tellher, he plays the recording, and there's a big fight, and Lindsey breaks up with TOC. During the fight, however, Colin looks up at the Archduke's grave and anagrams it and has a marvelous revelation... but that rascally John Green doesn't tell us what it is.

Later on, Lindsey tells Hollis she's spending the night at her friend Janet's (there is no Janet, as far as I know) when really she's going to her secret hiding place, this cave she hasn't shown to anyone but Colin-- not because she wanted to bring him there particularly, but because he is the only person skinny enough to fit through two rocks to get there. Colin realizes this is a code and goes to meet her there, and they argue over which of them is more self-centered (Lindsey says she is because she never does anything for anyone else and changes herself to be what they want her to be, Colin says he is because... he pretty much is), and then he tells her the story of all the Katherines. The first good story, according to Lindsey, that he has ever told.

So then they're all happy together and he's all "My first Lindsey," and she's all, "My second Colin." They go back home and Colin works them into the Theorem and discovers that she is supposed to break up with him after 4 days. So then on the 4th day, he wakes up all paranoid and finds a note next to his bed:

Colin,

I hate to fulfill the Theorem, but I don't think we should be involved romantically. The problem is that I am secretly in love with Hassan. I can't help myself. I hold your bony shoulder blades in my hands and I think of his fleshy back. I kiss your stomach and I think of his awe-inspiring gut. I like you, Colin, I really do. But-- I'm sorry. It's just not going to work.

I hope we can still be friends.

Sincerely,

Lindsey Lee Wells.

P.S. Just kidding.

And there it is: the "Eureka moment" that Colin has been waiting for.

"I figured something out," Colin said aloud. "The future is unpredictable."

Hassan said, "Sometimes the kafir* likes to say massively obvious things in a really profound voice."

Then later, Colin tells Lindsey about his revelation at the Archduke's grave. Franz Ferdinand anagrams to "Fred N. Dinzanfar," Lindsey's great-grandfather's name. So I was right and the Archduke is NOT buried there! It was one of Fred N. Dinzanfar's last wishes for his grave to read "Franz Ferdinand" because he, like Colin, wanted to be remembered. Except that eventually nobody will even know the secret, because everyone will think the Archduke is buried there. And he won't be remembered.

So finally Colin realizes that maybe it's not mattering that matters, because eventually even the most famous of people will be forgotten. Stories matter, because when you tell someone a story, it changes them in some way. Even forgotten stories matter, because of that whole spot-in-your-brain-for-neglected-truths thing. So he throws away the Theorem because he no longer believes that the point of being alive is to try to do something remarkable.

*"Kafir is a not-nice Arabic word meaning 'non-Muslim' that is usually translated as 'infidel.'" Also it's what Hassan always calls Colin when he's being all smartypants-y or self-centered or whatever. Also he calls him sitzpinkler, which is the German word for "wimp."