The Fault in Our Stars

This is a very sad book. I probably wouldn’t have picked this up if I’d known how sad it would be, although you know from the first pages that the story involves young people who’ve been diagnosed with cancer. What I like about the book is that it isn’t a story that gives itself over to one single perspective on life. The main character is dealing with many kinds of loss, and although she sometimes feels pain, despair, anger, fear, and nihilism, Hazel doesn’t make one of these responses into an avatar. If she did, you could say she was justified. Her doctors haven’t given her hope that she’ll recover. So the novel could have used one of these perspectives as a direct challenge to religious or non-religious ways of making meaning out of the experience of life. She has good grounds to challenge them on! But instead of telling a story to challenge certain ideas or perspectives, the story is told in a personal way. The health and relational challenges she experiences are the heart of the story. And those experiences do challenge ideas and perspectives, just in a naturalistic way. For example, she worries throughout the book about her parents. She feels guilty that so much of their time and attention and resources go toward her care. She knows that seeing her pain hurts them—her dad easily sheds the most tears in the book. And she both looks forward to her own death, when she’ll no longer be a burden to her parents, and she worries that her death might be destructive to them individually and as a couple. Fear could be the central avatar of her character or the central concern of the novel, but it isn’t. The focus is on the narrative, which made the experience for me as a reader more painful, and more worthwhile. That said, prospective readers might want to consider when to pick up a story that has this subject.

The shelving of this book, whether on the virtual, digital bookstore shelves or the ever-decreasing lengths of wooden shelves, puts this book into a box that limits it in ways it doesn't deserve.

Good stories help you see. They help you see things in yourself. They let you see things in your friends and family and the society and world around you. That's true regardless of the age of the characters or the subject matter.

Truth cuts through the categories to connect to you where you are. That's what this book does. It's a work of fiction that tells truths.

I'm older than the audience the marketing folks at the publisher undoubtedly intended it. I'm much older than the main characters in this book. I'm older than the average reader of John Green's books. Hell, I'm older than the author himself.

But, as I listened to this book, driving home from having visited my parents, as their health gradually fails, I couldn't help but feel the resonance this book strikes.

Read it.

Full review on Reader's Dialogue: readersdialogue.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-fault-in-our-stars.html

Hazel and Augustus are both really likable characters. Yes, they're weird. But in the best way possible, in a way that takes a horrible thing like terminal cancer and makes it secondary to the life they're living now, to the pressing, important issues that completely overshadow cancer - like what happens to the hamster in An Imperial Affliction. Because how could Hazel die without knowing that? By the way - Sisyphus as a name for a hamster? Brilliant. But seriously - if not for the constant reminder of Hazel's tubes and Augustus's leg, I might have forgotten at some points that these are sick teens. Which is kind of the point.

Right from the start, it's obvious that Hazel is frustrated at how the cancer took hold of her life and dominates every move she makes, and every decision her family makes. So when she begins living a life where cancer is peripheral, when she lets herself love and doesn't worry - too much - about how having cancer fits with having a boyfriend, it changes everything. Her mother is happy about it - though why she pulled Hazel out of school when she just wants her to continue having normal interactions with people is beyond me. That's not a criticism of the author. To the contrary, I think it sounds perfectly realistic, and it made me think about how people react to illness. Hazel's mom is so afraid of things that she reacts that way, but when Hazel starts changing things, her mom does too.

For me, there were two parts to the book. The first, more obvious, part is the exploration of how people deal with illness and death. There's a large enough cast of characters besides Hazel and Augustus's families that we get to see more than a few reactions. And the book is just peppered with pithy comments and observations about life, about death, about humanity's place in the universe.

But the other part that I connected to just as much is the exploration of what a book is, what a novelist is. Green prefaces the novel with a note about how everything in the novel is made up and readers shouldn't try to search for facts in it. And then Hazel is obsessed with finding out what happens to the characters after the end of An Imperial Affliction. And the way that turns out seems to be a comment on the essence of novels and novelists, following from this preface. I love how Hazel's quest to find out the ending turns out. It winds up affecting both parts of the book, the exploration of novels as well as the exploration of death and dying.

With all its serious subject matter, The Fault in Our Stars manages to be - not exactly fun, but close to it. Definitely it has some laugh-out-loud moments. And some teary ones, but they're balanced. It's a beautiful love story, in the larger sense of love.