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Title: The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
Details: Copyright 2012, Random House
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): "Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel’s story is about to be completely rewritten.
Insightful, bold, irreverent, and raw, The Fault in Our Stars is award-winning-author John Green's most ambitious and heartbreaking work yet, brilliantly exploring the funny, thrilling, and tragic business of being alive and in love."
Why I Wanted to Read It: Working my way through John Green books!
How I Liked It: There are some books where you know the story without reading the book. No, I'm not being crass or making a comment about overused tropes. I'm telling you that you don't have to have ever read Moby Dick to know it's about a whale that's really hard to get. You've probably never read an actual book by L. Frank Baum, but you surely know about the plot of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. You've never read Christine but you know it's about a killer car. So what happens when you actually go to read the book for which you know (or think you know) the story? And what does that mean for this book, probably John Green's best known?
But first! Meet Hazel Grace Lancaster ("Just Hazel"), 16-years-old and living with terminal cancer, first diagnosed early in puberty and living on borrowed time thanks to a new drug, she has no real idea how to be a teenager and doesn't really see the point. She fills her days with America's Next Top Model, one last friend from school Kaitlyn she sees sporadically ("Kaitlyn just happened to be an extremely sophisticated twenty-five-year-old British socialite stuck inside a sixteen-year-old body in Indianapolis. Everyone just accepted it." pg 42), and a book she adores and rereads over and over, An Imperial Affliction about a girl living with cancer named Anna (the author, Peter Van Houten, is a recluse and has never written another book). At her mother's urging (and Hazel's awareness of how depressing it is to have a kid with cancer), Hazel grudgingly attends a cancer patient support group.
While she sees some people she recognizes (her friend Issac, who has lost an eye to cancer and is about to lose the other), a gorgeous boy she doesn't know stares at her. She learns he is a cancer survivor (who has lost a leg) there to support Issac. They hit it off and not even the cringe-y support group leader (churchy Patrick who conducts meetings "in the literal heart of Jesus") can disrupt their rapport. She learns his name is Augustus "Gus" Waters and more meetings ensue, including Gus reading Hazel's favorite book and it becoming his favorite, too.
Unlike Hazel, Gus is able to get a hold of the book's reclusive author via email (Hazel was still trying by post) and the author claimed that Hazel's many burning questions could only be answered in person. So it's a mission to Amsterdam, the only problem being that being stricken with cancer generally means you're pretty tight on money (in the United States) so without any, they're left to just wonder, particularly since Hazel spent her Wish from the Genie Foundation (the book's version of the Make-a-Wish program) on a trip to Disney World years before. But Gus still has a Wish and it's for them to go to Amsterdam and meet Peter Van Houten. They are both overjoyed.
The trip to Amsterdam starts as kind of a wonderful dream. They eat wonderful food (comped for them by Peter Van Houten) at a wonderful restaurant where locals salute the "beautiful couple". Everything goes wonderfully until they meet the actual Peter Van Houten and learn it was his assistant Lidewij who set up everything and Peter Van Houten is a nasty, abusive drunk. The kids leave and Lidewij quits in horror. To try to make it up to them, she takes them to the Anne Frank House. Hazel, who had been trying to push away any romantic notions about Gus because of her illness (and the fact his last girlfriend died of cancer), is seized with both the emotion of meeting Peter Van Houten (and having him let her down so spectacularly) and the emotion of the Anne Frank House (seeing the names of the 103,000 dead from the Netherlands in the Holocaust, Hazel sees there are "four Aron Franks. Four. Four Aron Franks without museums, without historical markers, without anyone to mourn them. I silently resolved to remember and pray for the four Aron Franks as long as I was around. (Maybe some people need to believe in a proper and omnipotent God to pray, but I don't.)", pg 201). Hazel and Gus have their first kiss there, where Hazel is shocked at both the inappropriateness and the strange appropriateness ("Anne Frank, after all, kissed someone in the Anne Frank House, and [I thought] that she would probably like nothing more than her home to have become a place where the young and irreparably broken sink into love." pg 202).
Hazel and Gus then have sex back at his hotel room, a first for both of them, and Gus reveals a horrifying secret. They return home to the States and deal with it. Peter Van Houten comes to America, but Hazel wants nothing to do with him, although she does learn why Van Houten is the way he is and the sad reason for his novel. Van Houten's former assistant finds an important letter for Hazel among his things that puts a lot into perspective. The book ends with Hazel's subtle processing of this perspective.
Once again, I'm struck by how well Green writes teenagers. No, I'm not a teenager. But before Green, I don't recall reading too many literary teenagers that actually made me recall what I was like as a teenager (and reading literary teenagers as a teenager, I seldom if ever felt "seen"). I feel like too many adult authors attempt to dumb down what teenagers are really like, and you end up with these creepy flat little half-drawn characters that have no interests (or even lives) besides their high school's social ecosystem and what effects it. But Green's teenagers (from the now two books I've now read) have special interests and obsessions, have smart-ass remarks that are actually pretty impressive, have sexual feelings and sometimes sex lives (neither of which are treated like a Big Deal), and overall read more authentically than just about most teenage main characters I've ever read (and I've read a lot).
Something else besides that, though. I've read many, many, many books with teenage protagonists, but I've also read quite a few books about teenage cancer patients/survivors/victims. This was practically a genre unto itself in the '80s and '90s and generally the afflicted wasn't the main character and their affliction was generally just presented to help the main character's plot development. These books were pretty much one-note sad and the illness was sweeping and non-descript. A little research shows John Green apparently has significant experience in this area (pediatric cancer) and also did his homework, because this book goes into far more detail than those other books ever seemed to do. But more importantly than that, he handles how teenage patients handle their illness, at least these teenage patients, and it's not quiet, willowy, tragic stoicism. They crack gallows jokes with fellow patients, they ponder both a world beyond and the world they're living in, and they struggle with the same teenage nihilism but with that added edge.
The illness in this book reads a lot better than any of the books in the genre I mentioned (I don't know, "Weepy Teenage Dying of Sad in the Waning Decades of the 20th Century"?), but the illness is far more authentic and far more terrifying. Part of that's the realism that makes the book so much better than the old teenage books, because these characters run the gamut of emotion, as in real life. They have moments of sadness and agony, but they also have fun, laugh, make dumb decisions, experience fury and anger, and live their lives as long as they've got.
But those things aren't generally what's talked about when people mention this book. The most I heard about it was the criticism.
I've talked before about how the most virulent of criticism of John Green has not aged well, to put it mildly. But the criticism of this book in particular was, well, particularly loud. I'd heard allegations the two teenage characters had sex at the Anne Frank House (they do not, they share their first kiss there), I'd heard allegations they made out at the Anne Frank House (no, it's a single but meaningful kiss, although once Hazel realizes what they did, she's horrified they were witnessed by adults surely angry that they were "making out" in such a place), I heard that an adult who would write a sex scene between two underage characters is disgusting (the sex scene exists but is incredibly tame and pretty vague and if people think this is significant-- they really haven't read much YA, just saying. Also, some teenagers do have sex? And adults that write about it are usually remembering back to when they were teenagers themselves and thus their own experiences as a teenager? I digress!) and a plethora of other bad faith arguments (including John Green does not have cancer so he shouldn't write about it).
This is not to dismiss any criticism of Green or of this book, certainly! But to point out that there was a fervor around it (that thankfully seems to have died off) that blew things out of proportion to the point where I had heard more about this book through critics than I did through praise of the fact it's a bestseller.
I don't necessarily care about underage characters that have sex, nor do I think it poses some sort of risk to young readers to read about it (save for getting bad sex advice, but better sex education would help that, so that's a different argument). From the cries about the sex scene in the book, I was honestly surprised at how brief it is, and how vague, and how non-sensationalized (Hazel's shirt gets briefly tangled in her breathing tubes and Augustus wonders how she gets undressed every day; Hazel briefly worries her underwear doesn't match her bra; Hazel herself remarks that it's the opposite of how she imagined it would be, it's "slow and patient and quiet and neither particularly painful nor particularly ecstatic," pg 207).
As for the kiss at the Anne Frank House... well. I'll be honest. I struggled a bit with how I felt about it. The kiss, the first between two characters that feared getting together for the fact they were brought together by terminal illness (and they do not know how long they have and they've barely lived at all), does have a kind of resonance with the real life young girl who made joy out of the absolute worst and more inhumane life has to offer. However, the response from the adults in the House (clapping and cheers, to which laughing Hazel curtsies and smiling Augustus bows) made me a bit twitchy. I get it's a part of the tiny bit of happiness in the midst of so much tragedy, and the fact it occurs in a place of such tragedy (where hope was kept as much as it could be) is thematically relevant.
But while I'm not especially concerned with fictional teenagers having sex causing harm by imitation, I can far too easily see planned first kisses, and even wedding proposals by fans of the book meant to imitate this pivotal, fictional scene between two fictional teenagers scarred by deadly cancer. That wouldn't be John Green's fault, by any means, really. I'm sure he'd be horrified if people did that in the Anne Frank House. And (without looking) I sincerely hope that in the ten years since this book enjoyed enormous popularity and a successful screen adaptation no one has, you know, gotten it into their minds to do that. But it's certainly an aspect of the book I have mixed feelings about, and I am nothing if not an embracer of nuance in these situations.
A point of contention I heard less from Green's more vocal critics was a point he makes early on, in a slightly stuffy author's note:
This is not so much an author's note as an author's reminder of what was printed in small type a few pages ago: This book is a work of fiction. I made it up.
Neither novels nor their readers benefit from attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the fundamental assumption of our species.
I appreciate your cooperation in this matter. (from the Author's Note)
The book is dedicated to a real-life teenage cancer victim, who was a fan of Green's work, and friendly with him, Esther Earl, who died two years before the book's publication and who Green credits with pushing him to finally finish the book.
As Green himself has clarified (and rather sheepishly explained regarding the note), it was his (somewhat misguided) way of trying to make sure people realize that the character of Hazel Grace Lancaster is his fictional creation, and that the real-life teenage cancer victim (and author fan) Esther Earl is a completely different person. He was not attempting to tell Earl's story. And he's got a point (certainly, people would assume that the book's protagonist would draw from the real life person to whom the book was dedicated).
However, it's not so much Hazel that led me to wonder if Green was making a point about a real person so much as it is the book's fictional disappointing author, Peter Van Houten.
Authors writing authors is always a bit tricky. As I noted with Lianne Moriarty, is this the real-life author having a say about things? How much of this is the character and how much is the author?
Hazel ponders over telling Augustus about her favorite book:
My favorite book, by a wide margin, was An Imperial Affliction, but I didn't like to tell people about it. Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book. And then there a books like An Imperial Affliction, which you can't tell people about, books so special and real and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal. (pg 33)
But hey, writers are readers too, of course.
More tricky is when Hazel gets to meet her author idol and finally ask about her favorite book. Her questions about what happens to the characters of the book are met with disappointment:
"Nothing happens to the Dutch Tulip Man. He isn't a con man or not a con man; he's God. He's an obvious and unambiguous metaphorical representation of God, and asking what becomes of him is the intellectual equivalent of asking what becomes of the disembodied eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg in Gatsby. Do he and Anna's mom get married? We are speaking of a novel, dear child, not some historical enterprise."
"Right, but surely you must have thought about what happens to them, I mean as characters, I mean independent of their metaphorical meaning or whatever."
"They're fictitious," he said, tapping his glass again. "Nothing happens to them."
"You said you'd tell me," I insisted. I reminded myself to be assertive. I needed to keep his addled attention on my questions.
"Perhaps, but I was under the misguided impression that you were incapable of transatlantic travel. I was trying... to provide you some comfort, I suppose, which I should know better than to attempt. But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters of the novel... it's ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended." (pgs 191 and 192)
I wonder how Green reacts when he is inevitably asked what happened to the characters of all his work, but especially this one?
However, it's worth noting that while the author of the book An Imperial Affliction turns out to be a huge disappointment, this does not appear to dim Hazel's (nor Augustus's) enthusiasm for the book An Imperial Affliction itself. Which is truly making a case for death of the author?
All that aside, Green's storytelling is on point. He had teenagers and cancer patients (and teenage cancer patients) that do not fall victim to the reductive tropes of either (and both). He's telling a multi-faceted story that has meaning and weight, but no treacle. The life lessons are happenstance and they feel authentic.
Hazel and Augustus tell the story of meeting Peter Van Houten and Hazel casually drops a personal creed.
[W]e sat in the shade of a huge chestnut tree and recounted for Mom our encounter with the great Peter Van Houten. We made the story funny. You have a choice in this world, I believe, about how to tell sad stories, and we made the funny choice: Augustus, slumped in the cafe chair, pretended to be the tongue-tied, word-slurring Van Houten who could not so much as push himself out of his chair; I stood up to play a me all full of bluster and machismo, shouting, "Get up, you fat ugly old man!"
"Did you call him ugly?" Augustus asked.
"Just go with it," I told him.
"I'm naht uggy. You're the uggy one, nosetube girl."
"You're a coward!" I rumbled, and Augustus broke character to laugh.(pg 209 and 210)
Tellingly, the concept of leaving a mark is another theme of the book.
We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That's what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease.
I want to leave a mark.
But Van Houten: The marks humans leave are too often scars. You build a hideous minimall or start a coup or try to become a rock star and you think, "They'll remember me now," but (a) they don't remember you, and (b) all you leave behind are more scars. Your coup becomes a dictatorship. Your minimall becomes a lesion. (pgs 310 and 311)
The book eschews overused tropes about damn near every subject it contains, and isn't just a profoundly affecting read, it's a profoundly entertaining one, not at all an easy task for such a tragic subject.
You may think you know a story already, but it's almost always worth it to read the book to be sure (and to decide for yourself). And such a treat when the book turns out as satisfying as this one.
Notable: I've not had great experience with male authors writing for female characters in this Challenge. But adult male John Green got teenage female Hazel Grace Lancaster mostly fine save for a few passages.
Look, let me just say it: He was hot. A nonhot boy stares at you relentlessly and it is, at best, awkward and, at worst, a form of assault. But a hot boy... well. (pg 9)
This is another one of those "mixed feelings" places. This is a conundrum that has come up in YA written by women. Hot is a subjective term, obviously. If you find someone hot, that generally means you're interested in them. So it's basically saying that someone that looks interesting/she finds interesting looking at her is more appealing than someone that she doesn't. But the "assault" line made me twitch. However, this is a teenager and over-the-top thinking and generalizations would be pretty par for the course (more on that later).
Hazel watches one of Augustus's favorite movies, V For Vendetta and isn't impressed.
As the credits rolled, he said, "Pretty great, huh?"
"Pretty great," I agreed, although it wasn't, really. It was kind of a boy movie. I don't know why boys expect us to like boy movies. We don't expect them to like girl movies. (pg 35)
I must admit as someone who's a fan of the movie, I twitched a bit at it being called a boy movie. But again, it could be chalked up to teenage reductivism, which would make sense for the character.
But perhaps the most curious is when Augustus and Hazel watch the bloody historical film 300 on the plane. While Hazel dismisses it as mostly "a lot of sword-wielding to no real effect" (pg 150) she also notes that it "featured a sizable collection of shirtless and well-oiled strapping young lads, so it was not particularly difficult on the eyes" (pg 150) which to me sounds far more like a gay/bi teenage boy and less like a teenage girl attracted to guys. I'm not saying a teenage girl couldn't have that reaction to the movie, but I am saying that our culture still generally trains us to look at sexual attraction differently based on our gender alignment.
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Hazel is still keeping her distance from Augustus romantically when he announces the trip to Amsterdam and has concerns.
Then I found myself worrying that I would have to make out with him to get to Amsterdam, which is not the kind of thing you want to be thinking, because (a) It shouldn't've even been a question whether I wanted to kiss him, and (b) Kissing someone so that you can get a free trip is perilously close to full-on hooking, and I have to confess that while I did not fancy myself a particularly good person, I never thought my first real sexual action would be prostitutional. (pg 93)
I twitched at the mentions of sex work like that, but it's in no way realistic, and again, the teenage irreverence/over-the-top generalizing. Hazel and Augustus have a lot of these sorts of jokes (after seeing her childhood swing depress her as a reminder of before she got sick, she and Augustus draft a want-ad for it that involves jokes about the swing lusting after children's butts) and it is accurate to the sort of thing you blurt out at that age and then are mortified/horrified/amused by as an adult.
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"You're like a millennial Natalie Portman. Like V for Vendetta Natalie Portman. (pg 17)
This is a weird hill, but what can I say. Natalie Portman is a Millennial, having been born in 1981. The Millennial generation spans from roughly 1980 to roughly 2000 (the end of the century is too good a stopping point and the millennium is literally in the name; also, 9/11 and the end of the modern era of American prosperity, among other things, make it a good stopping point). This is the danger of throwing around generational terms without knowing what they mean, although it's considerably more forgivable from a fictional teenage character than it is from a mainstream news publication that knows better. What Augustus meant is that Hazel looked like a teenage Natalie Portman.
Final Grade: A
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