Mark Reads ‘Looking For Alaska’: sixty-nine days after through one hundred two days after

Sixty-nine days after it happens, as the group abandons the Investigation, the Colonel decides to unleash a secret plan of Alaska’s to set things straight. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to read Looking For Alaska.

sixty-nine days after

It seems they really have lost Alaska.

I have a feeling that this is where Green might go with this novel, that he’ll intentionally refuse to answer what it was that the daisy inspired in Alaska. I would certainly like to know, but I will be pretty satisfied if he makes this book about accepting loss and the unknowable shit that comes with it. Instead, what these chapters do is show us how these four characters, who have all had to deal with the pain of losing Alaska Young, stop trying to make this about their own lives and their own growth, and decide to do something they should have done a long time ago: honor her memory.

Because whatever it was that made her tear away from school in such a hurry might not ever be known, and these kids (especially Miles and the Colonel) have to come to terms with that. In a way, Looking For Alaska is turning into this rumination on the idea of privacy. There are so many things that we do as humans that’s private. These are things that only we will know until the day we pass on from this earth, and there are things we have thought or done that we will never share with even our best friends, our lovers, our spouses, or our significant others. It’s just the nature of who we are, and there are a myriad of reasons why we are such personal, private beings. There comes a point where satisfying our own curiosity engages far too much with this concept, and I think that’s what Miles and the Colonel have done here. Why does Alaska deserve to have her life upended, all her personal thoughts and actions put under a microscope for inspection?

Thus, the Colonel moves on. (For now. He could change in the last twelve pages or so.) He introduces Miles to a new idea, one he’s been holding on to a long time, a memory of Alaska’s that is lovely and does a service to her: the Alaska Young Memorial Prank. As soon as the Colonel revealed the name of the prank she wanted to pull–“Subverting the Patriarchal Paradigm”–a smile spread across my face. The thing I most miss about Alaska (and the tone of this book, for that matter) is how much fun she could be. While Miles and the Colonel always seemed irritated by her constant change in mood and her random nature, I found that to be her strongest quality. Whatever you could say about Alaska’s behavior, she was never boring. Even if she was struggling with her own identity and self-worth in the wake of her mother’s death, she never failed to make those around her feel more alive, and that is a wonderful thing to possess.

Normally, I might complain that it’s cheap for a first-person narrator to willfully exclude details of what’s going on (as we don’t find out about the prank until it happens), but I am 100% in favor of Green doing this in this case. It creates a beautiful sense of urgency and accents the humor that is to come later. And, I might add, it’s nice to be laughing at this book again.

eighty-three days later

Bless the Colonel. Only he would spend an entire week planning out every detail of the Alaska Young Memorial Prank, going so far as to think of every possible problem that might stop it and coming up with answers for those too. Again, I actually really love that we don’t know what the hell is going on at all with this prank, but the Colonel reveals two small details needed to execute it: a stripper, and some help from Miles’s dad.

what.

eighty-four days after

All we needed to do was convince the Eagle to let “Dr. William Morse,” a “friend of my dad’s” and a “pre-eminent scholar of deviant sexuality in adolescents,” be the junior class’s speaker.

I….I just can’t deal with this. This is so beautiful. THIS IS TOO GOOD. They’re going to have a stripper pretend to be a scholar? And speak on Speaker Day? Well, I imagine there won’t be much speaking going on.

The real cherry on top of this for me, though, is the fact that Miles calls his father and gets him to go along with this. The last few times Miles has called his parents, things have been rather awkward and strained. It’s for a good reason, of course, since he’s been dealing with the death of Alaska, so it was a nice change of pace to see him and his talk like this. I especially enjoyed that his father didn’t bother to ask him what the prank was; he just agreed to do it. Perhaps it’s a combination of any number of factors: he wants his son to have a similar experience to him; he wants his son to enjoy Culver Creek; he wants his son to have a moment to bring him out of the funk he’s been in since Alaska died; or perhaps he just loves a good prank. Any way you put up, it’s a nice moment between father and son.

It works beautifully, and unlike the Colonel stealing the breathalyzer, the Eagle doesn’t seem to suspect a single thing. (Though it was weird that Longwell showed up with Miles. What a strange combination.)

Oh god this is really happening and I cannot wait.

one hundred two days after

Bless this chapter forever. This is one of the funniest and most fantastic things I’ve read, and after pages of some truly depressing and frustrating character development and plot twists, it feels like a gift. It’s like we’ve been counting down to this moment instead. Like the execution of the prank a few days before Alaska passed away, I was impressed by what a page-turner this was. Even if I had a general idea of what was going to happen, the details were still a mystery to me. Plus, I just wanted to see how this was going to be pulled off.

Major points to the Colonel, of course, for coming up with all of the ways to ensure this actually happened as plans. First of all, it’s brilliant that he has the entire junior class donate money so that the school isn’t technically paying for a stripper. On top of that, the culture of anti-ratting proves to be the best weapon of all: not a single person clues in the Eagle to the possible upstaging of Speaker Day at Culver Creek.

After a close call when the stripper is late, the prank is finally set into motion. I have re-read this part at least five times since I first did. It is an act of beauty. It is an act of joy. It is the most fitting tribute to Alaska Young that I could possibly imagine. Even the speech itself (WHO WROTE IT IT IS SO BEAUTIFUL) is actually kind of good! But when Lara stands up to objectify Dr. William Morse, right on cue, I squirmed with joy in my seat. And then:

“Well, it is certainly important to subvert the patriarchal paradigm, and I suppose this is a way. All right, then,” he said, stepping to the left of the podium. And then he shouted, loud enough that Takumi could hear him upstairs, “This one’s for Alaska Young.”

They use Prince’s “Get Off,” and this is the best detail out of everything. It seriously is because I love Prince and because there really isn’t a better song to be the soundtrack to one of the funniest pranks in the world. And yet what draws me to the joy of this all is the fact that this is done in the name of Alaska Young, that this act that could very well get a lot of people in trouble is fraught with so much happiness and unbridled silliness. There hasn’t been a lot of this at Culver Creek in one hundred and two days. There’s been almost no talk of bufriedos, few visits to the Smoking Hole, and a serious lack of humor. Alaska’s death cast a grim pall over the school, and it took this act to bring back that sense she represented so well. The energy that leaps off the pages is so infectious at this point that I simply didn’t want it to end.

So when the Eagle shows up in Room 43, I really didn’t want him to take this moment away from them:

“I know it was y’all,” said the Eagle.

We looked at him silently. He often bluffed. Maybe he was bluffing. “Don’t ever do anything like that again,” he said. “But, Lord, ‘subverting the patriarchal paradigm’–it’s like she wrote the speech.” He smiled and closed the door.

I love it. I know there’s not much left (tomorrow is the last review!), but I am really happy with how this is all coming together, and I hope that Green can sustain this feeling until the end.