{"id":675,"date":"2011-12-08T06:00:15","date_gmt":"2011-12-08T14:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/?p=675"},"modified":"2011-12-02T11:24:04","modified_gmt":"2011-12-02T19:24:04","slug":"mark-reads-looking-for-alaska-the-day-after-two-days-after","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/2011\/12\/mark-reads-looking-for-alaska-the-day-after-two-days-after\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Reads ‘Looking For Alaska’: the day after \/ two days after"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the days after it happens, everything was awful. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to read Looking For Alaska<\/em>.<\/p>\n

fuck<\/p>\n

the day after<\/strong><\/p>\n

(Obviously, a trigger warning for discussion of death, grief, and loss.)<\/p>\n

How do you talk about this? How do you write about an event that fundamentally changes what this book is about? What am I supposed to say that’ll make this feel better or make it…I don’t know, make sense? I guess there really is nothing, and having had to deal with the death of my father five years ago, I know how absurd this process is.<\/p>\n

It’s hard for me to parse words together in a way that’s not incoherent blabbering. It’s still hard for me to talk about death, even if I haven’t been hurt about my father’s death in a while. I suppose that it’s also difficult because I worry about repeating myself on this site; it’s not the first time I’ve written about it. But, yet again, I’m struck by how well an author is able to convey the confusing and horrific moment of learning someone you loved died, of cycling through the various stages of grief, and of giving us a part of life’s terrible cycle that we’ll all have to deal with at some point in our lives.<\/p>\n

There are a couple unbelievably heartbreaking things I want to point out before we get to my own Sob Fest 2011. Well, that’s weird to say because the next two chapters are difficult to get through because of the heartbreak, but a few things stood out to me. Of course, as soon as the Eagle tells the Colonel and Miles that something terrible has happened, I knew Alaska was dead. There was no way around it, and no clever trick. There was no reason to call them to a public meeting in the gym if she’d just gotten hurt. There was only one way this could unfold, and I hated it. I wanted more from Alaska, and I wasn’t going to get it.<\/p>\n

And I remember having unbelievably selfish reactions to the death of my father that later left me feeling ashamed. We don’t see the reactions here from Miles, but a lot of what he says and does mirrors what I felt at the time. But before that happens, Miles has to go and shatter my heart into a trillion pieces.<\/p>\n

The Eagle walked up to the podium and said, “Is everyone here?”<\/p>\n
“No,” I said to him. “Alaska isn’t here.”<\/p>\n
The Eagle looked down. “Is everyone else here?”<\/p>\n
“Alaska isn’t here!”<\/p>\n
“Okay, Miles. Thank you.”<\/p>\n
“We can’t start without Alaska.”<\/p>\n
The Eagle looked at me. He was crying, noiselessly. Tears just rolled from his eyes to his chin and then fell onto his corduroy pants. He stared at me, but it was not the Look of Doom. His eyes blinking the tears down his face, the Eagle looked, for all the world, sorry.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I didn’t cry at this reveal. I like this book, but I’m not necessarily attached to any of the characters. Well, except for Dolores Martin, of course. MY TRUE LOVE. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t upset. This was<\/em> upsetting for any number of reasons, but I found that Green’s detailed account of Miles and the Colonel’s reaction to Alaska’s death to be utterly frightening in its accuracy. Again, I mean that relative to me; all of us react and cope in different ways, but this mirrored my own reaction to learning off my father’s death that I found myself taking breaks from the book every couple of minutes.<\/p>\n
It’s common for people to simply disbelieve the news, and Miles does that almost immediately. “She’s not dead,” he thinks. “She’s alive. She’s alive somewhere.” Because it would be easier to deal with misinformation or a cruel, senseless practical joke than to deal with the fact that Alaska is not coming back, and with the guilt that comes from realizing that he and the Colonel contributed in a way to Alaska dying.<\/p>\n
And that is<\/em> a very selfish reaction in a way, but I’m glad it’s not ignored by Green. While Alaska made her own choices (I already hate talking about her in the past tense), these two have to cope with the fact that they helped her escape so she could drive drunk away from the school.<\/p>\n
There are just so many devastating details here, and I can’t imagine this was easy for John Green to write. The image of the gym in “disintegration” is utterly haunting to me. The thought of the Colonel just lying there, screaming in grief, is fucked up. Miles telling the Eagle that Alaska’s playing a prank is horrific. All of these scenes are stitched together with the ghost of Alaska Young, and I found myself thinking about how Alaska would react to these things, how she’d make a joke, or how she’d silence everyone with some brilliant pearl of sad, devastating wisdom, or how she’d find a way to say, “Fuck it all,” and pass around a bottle of Strawberry Hill to drink the pain away.<\/p>\n
Christ, she is really gone.<\/p>\n
The other thing Green captures really well is how death can unhinge a person in a way, and he demonstrates this in the narration. Miles’s sentences become much longer, running into one another. He jumps from one topic to another, and we can see this in how Green breaks up these sections with double spaces. There’s no narration to tell us how Miles gets from one place to another and even if Green didn’t intend that, it’s a brilliant way to show us what the experience is like. I’ve always had a good memory, but there are patches of time on the day my father died that I simply cannot recall. One thing just drifted to another.<\/p>\n
I know so many last words. But I will never know hers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Just….goddamn it. She’s gone. And the final image of this chapter, with the Colonel collapsed on the ground, hyperventilating out of fear and shock, is a fitting end to this experience: death is debilitating to these people, and they’ve just lost someone who has meant a lot to them, and there’s nothing they can do to change it.<\/p>\n
two days after<\/strong><\/p>\n
I didn’t sleep the night my father died either. I entertained this bizarre notion that if I did<\/em> fall asleep, I would die and not wake up again. In hindsight, it’s pretty funny that I thought this. Well, at least to me it is. I mean…did I suddenly believe goblins existed and lived under my bed? I can’t explain a lot of my behavior that week, actually. I suddenly decided that a guy I’d met the day before my father’s death was totally going to be my first boyfriend, and that ultimately ended in disaster. I remember going back to work maybe two days later and zoning out for hours at a time when I should have just stayed away for a week. I made awful decisions and it’s just what happened. The experience was like being bumped out of orbit; it took a while to find my way back to a path that was familiar or made sense.<\/p>\n
I went home the day I found out; my brother came to pick me up, and we went straight to my mother, and just hearing her was enough to undo me and heal me at the same time.<\/p>\n
“What can we do for you right now?” my mom asked.<\/p>\n
“I just needed you to pick up. I just needed you to answer the phone, and you did.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
It might seem a bit silly that this would be all it takes to feel something solid and dependable again, but it worked for me. I felt better just seeing my mom, even though I was a terrible mess for the first hour I came home. It was a very basic need: I just need you here, right now, in this moment, and that’s all I ask of you. Just don’t leave. Be here.<\/p>\n
And now she was colder by the hour, more dead with every breath I took. I thought: That is the fear: I have lost something important, and I cannot find it, and I need it. It is fear like if someone lost his glasses and went to the glasses store and they told him that the world had run out of glasses and he would just have to do without<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I think John Green has introduced what will eventually be the explanation for the title: Miles has lost Alaska, physically and emotionally, and she has left him something to find. Part of me wants to side-eye this because Alaska can no longer be an active character in the narrative, but then part of me understands how I used my father’s death to grow myself, and it’s really not that much different at all. Again, I think I’ll wait to see how this pans out, but it’s a weird dynamic.<\/p>\n
I suppose the same thing goes for the Colonel, but Green seems to be focusing more on how he and Miles are coping with the loss of their best friend. I actually feel like the Colonel is taking this worse than Miles, and understandably so. He’s known Alaska for years, and given what happened the night before, he’s incredibly quick to blame her and then himself for what happened. Figuring this out is going to be immensely complicated, too, because there’s no easy way to assign blame. Hell, I don’t even know that these two should<\/em> do any such thing. What would it help? What would it change?<\/p>\n
I’ve mentioned before that I largely read on a Kindle and I sort of adore the “Public Highlights” feature, and there’s yet another example of people highlighting a fantastic piece of writing that struck me:<\/p>\n
What the hell is instant?<\/em> Nothing is instant. Instant rice takes five minutes, instant pudding in an hour. I doubt that an instant of blinding pain feels<\/em> particularly instantaneous.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Which is something I latched on to when people kept assuring me my dad’s death was quick and painless. It seemed absurd. How the hell would you know that??? How could<\/em> you know that? But it speaks to how bizarre a lot of the reactions to death are, and I remember constantly questioning why<\/em> our society seemed to hold on to so many idioms or customs. At the same time, I was fascinated by my own father’s funeral and at the intersection of Hawaiian culture with Buddhist and Shinto tenets at work. One of those involved the fact that my father was cremated not long after death. I’m actually thankful for this because I never once saw his body, and I’m okay with that. One of my fears manifests here in this chapter when Miles dreams of a naked Alaska who becomes very, very, very dead. I simply didn’t want to remember my father in any way like that.<\/p>\n
So I’m intrigued by this. I was truly unprepared for Alaska’s death, and I want to see what John Green does with it. Also, what the fuck<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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