An Abundance of Katherines

An Abundance of Katherines Review

John Green’s second novel is his most deliberately strange and his most underrated. Where Looking for Alaska announced a serious literary ambition and The Fault in Our Stars became a cultural phenomenon, An Abundance of Katherines sits quietly in the catalog as the book Green fans recommend when they want to show someone a different angle on his work.

Colin Singleton is a child prodigy — the kind who could read at two, who learned twelve languages by sixteen, who appeared on television as a curiosity — and he has been dumped by nineteen girls, all of them named Katherine. The novel begins the morning after Katherine XIX ends things and follows Colin and his best friend Hassan on a road trip to Gutshot, Tennessee, a small town where a factory produces the drawstrings used in almost all American sweatpants. Colin spends the trip trying to derive a mathematical theorem that could predict the outcome of any romantic relationship.

The Theorem

The theorem is both joke and thesis. Green actually derived the equations — they are reproduced in a mathematical appendix at the novel’s end — and the underlying question is genuine: can pattern recognition in past relationships tell you anything true about future ones, or are the patterns you find only the projections of your current state of mind? The answer the novel arrives at is characteristically Green: mathematical models of human feeling are reductive and also the kind of thing a brilliant, emotionally avoidant nineteen-year-old would spend six months on.

Colin and the Post-Prodigy Fear

The novel’s emotional core is Colin’s terror of ordinariness. He was exceptional at fifteen in a way that adults noticed and celebrated. He is not certain he will be exceptional at twenty-five in any way anyone will notice. This is a specific and rarely examined adolescent anxiety — not the fear of failure but the fear of having already peaked — and Green handles it with honesty and actual wit.

Hassan

Colin’s best friend Hassan is a larger, more religiously observant, funnier person who punctures Colin’s self-absorption with the casual precision of someone who has been doing it for years. He is one of Green’s best supporting creations, fully inhabited and not subordinated to the protagonist’s growth.

Our rating: 3.9/5 — Green’s most intellectually playful novel and his most honest treatment of post-prodigy anxiety, best appreciated by readers willing to engage with both the theorem and the footnotes.

The Second Novel and Its Peculiarities

An Abundance of Katherines, published in September 2006, was John Green’s second novel, arriving in the wake of Looking for Alaska’s Printz Award and the expectations that creates. It is a deliberately strange book — stranger than its predecessor, more formally playful, and more interested in comedy than in tragedy. It did not win major awards and has never achieved the cultural reach of The Fault in Our Stars or Looking for Alaska, which makes it, paradoxically, the Green novel most worth seeking out for readers curious about the range of what he can do.

The mathematical appendix at the back of the book — the actual equations for Colin’s theorem, derived with input from a mathematician — is either the novel’s finest flourish or its most alienating gesture, depending on the reader’s disposition. It is exactly the kind of thing that could only exist in a YA novel written by someone confident enough to trust their audience with genuine intellectual content.

Road Trip as Literary Device

The road trip structure that Green uses here — Colin and Hassan driving from Chicago to Gutshot, Tennessee after graduation — is one of American fiction’s most portable narrative devices: remove characters from their defining contexts and see who they are without those contexts. Colin has been defined by his prodigy identity for his entire life; stripped of the environment where that identity operates, he has to find out whether he is anything else.

Green, born in Indianapolis and deeply familiar with Midwestern landscapes, renders the American interior with the affectionate realism of someone who actually looked rather than imagined it. Gutshot, Tennessee — the kind of town that produces the drawstrings for most of America’s sweatpants and almost nothing else — is observed with the documentary precision of a writer who understands that specific, unglamorous places are where most American lives actually unfold.

The Theorem’s Emotional Logic

The theorem Colin is building is ostensibly about predicting romantic outcomes, but its real subject is the human desire to find pattern in pain. Being dumped nineteen times hurts. Having a theory about why it happens — a theory in which the outcomes are determined by variables rather than by anything Colin himself lacks — is a way of converting humiliation into data. Green understands the appeal of this, and he is kind enough to let the theorem be partially right before showing Colin the things it cannot account for.

The Theorem of Heartbreak

An Abundance of Katherines (2006) follows Colin Singleton, a washed-up child prodigy who has been dumped by nineteen girls all named Katherine, on a road trip to Gutshot, Tennessee. There he tries to devise a mathematical “Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability” to chart the course of any relationship — a comic premise Green uses to probe the gap between cleverness and wisdom, and the difference between mattering and being remembered.

A Quiet Standout

For all its comic machinery, An Abundance of Katherines is the John Green novel that most rewards rereading, precisely because it refuses the emotional grandeur of his more famous books. Its stakes are small and human — a smart boy learning that being remembered is not the same as mattering, and that the next chapter of a life cannot be derived from the last. Readers who know Green only through The Fault in Our Stars will find here a writer willing to be funny, odd, and genuinely unsentimental, and the result is one of his most durable and least imitated books.