Quick Review: The Fault in Our Stars

Today in Quick Review, John Green's quirky, contemporary story of friendship between two kids with cancer. There are spoilers! But if you've read the book, I encourage you to take a look at my thoughts and tell me what YOU thought. Another note: I somewhat smashed my self-imposed 600-word limit. It's not, like, Dostoyevsky-long, but it's a bit longer than usual. And of course, please check out my post On Reviews (just below the banner up there) for more detail on how and why I write these reviews.

All right, let's do this thang.

Summary from Goodreads: Diagnosed with Stage IV thyroid cancer at 12, Hazel was prepared to die until, at 14, a medical miracle shrunk the tumours in her lungs... for now.

Two years post-miracle, sixteen-year-old Hazel is post-everything else, too; post-high school, post-friends and post-normalcy. And even though she could live for a long time (whatever that means), Hazel lives tethered to an oxygen tank, the tumours tenuously kept at bay with a constant chemical assault.

Enter Augustus Waters. A match made at cancer kid support group, Augustus is gorgeous, in remission, and shockingly to her, interested in Hazel. Being with Augustus is both an unexpected destination and a long-needed journey, pushing Hazel to re-examine how sickness and health, life and death, will define her and the legacy that everyone leaves behind.

This is probably one of the most difficult reviews I’ve written. There’s a lot in this story that I struggled with, both as a writer and a reader, and I’m still thinking about the statements this book makes--about disease, about life and death, about friendship and romance and legacy--and how I feel about them.

I talked about this with a friend, and the word she used to describe this story, which I agreed with, was manipulative. It is manipulative as, to a degree, all stories are. All writers want the readers to feel certain things and must manipulate us to get to that point. Here, though, I felt the manipulation was so strong, with the inherent emotional baggage of cancer, with the overly-precocious and insightful main characters, that it was difficult for me to focus on anything but what exactly John Green was trying to say about these big ideas.

I read a lot of reviews when I set out to write my own. It’s helpful to see what other people, people whose opinions I respect, have to say and compare their thoughts to my own. I share a lot of their positive remarks--the story is sensitively told, with feeling and humor--as well as the criticisms--the trademark John Green characters, the improbable language, the quirky outcasts.

Still, I find it hard to put a finger on the discomfort I feel. There were several things I found improbable. Anything to do with reclusive author Peter Van Houten seemed so abnormally cartoonish that I couldn’t take anything he said (or Green was saying, through him) seriously. I couldn’t understand the move to Amsterdam, which seemed less a real city than a fantasyland populated by the world’s most charming citizens (cab driver, waiter, boat passengers, guy on train, Anne Frank House tourists, flight attendants…). Gus and Hazel’s manner of speaking (which seemed to spread to even the most ancillary characters) felt isolating and pretentious rather than smart and brave.

I know the language is one of the biggest criticisms his books face, and my issue is not so much that these kids sound like hyper-intelligent thirty-year-olds (because I know there are some kids that talk like that), but that, at its core, it is defensive to layer your every word with black humor or witticisms or allusions. It's putting distance between you and whoever is listening to you and although I find it quite apt that Hazel, especially, would use her language as a barrier to keep people away, it irritated me that she and Augustus never, not even once, had a conversation that wasn't wrapped up in something else. Even her "eulogy" and her description of her time and love with Augustus as "a forever within the numbered days" is a beautiful, smart sentiment, but still somewhat a cop-out (I mean, she's even witty when she calls 911? Really?).

And that, ultimately, was what disappointed me the most while reading. In the moments that should have felt big and real--for both the characters and the readers--there was just some other element that pushed a little too hard. The scene where Hazel and Gus drink champagne could have been simple and beautiful but for the crazily over-attentive waiter who reminds them that they are “drinking the stars.” The interaction with the clearly mentally ill Van Houten could have had the same gravitas without Gus and Hazel (acutely aware of what illness can do to a person's mental state) screaming that he’s a douchebag. For all the beauty of their relationship, Hazel and Gus never once had a real conversation or a fight or some interaction where neither of them made a joke or used language to pull away. They never once, in simple, plain language, consciously addressed what I felt was both the truest and the most universal theme of the story: that everything we love will some day cease to exist.

It's that theme that resonated most strongly for me as I read the book. It's something that, on its face, seems tragic, and yet it's something that every person can relate to--how wonderful it is to fall in love and how terrifying it is to lose it and how, ultimately, the great parts will always, always outweigh the sad parts. I get that. The tragedy in this story isn't that kids get cancer or that Gus dies or that, probably very soon, Hazel will also die. It's that we're all going to face these choices--the only difference is that Hazel and Gus lived so close to their own mortality that it amplified the magnitude of their decisions.

Where things got muddled, for me, and where I ultimately felt manipulated, was that each new layer added to the story--the trip to Amsterdam, the crazy author, Gus lying about his cancer coming back, the author showing up at Gus's funeral/hiding in Hazel's car/having his own tragic past, Gus's final letter to the author--all these things combined just felt like conscious decisions to heighten the tragedy of Hazel and Gus's relationship, when a simpler story with less improbable twists and turns* would have been just as, if not more, effective.

I know this book has a lot of ardent supporters, and if its glowing reviews are any indication, it'll be an award contender for sure. And I agree that it's beautifully-written, sensitive, and smart and that John Green is one helluva talented writer. But I still can't shake that feeling of manipulation, of stretching things just a bit too much for me to believe. This book stuck with me, gave me a lot to think about--as a writer, a reader, and a human being. Did I like the book? Did I enjoy the story? Maybe not so much, but I did come away with a greater appreciation for life, for love, for friendship, for my own choices and that, at least, is something I can be grateful for.


*and yes, an alcoholic, mentally-deranged author scanning American newspapers for obituaries, flying halfway around the world, attending the funeral of a boy he met once, and breaking into the car of a teenage girl just to play her rap music and tell her about his dead daughter is pretty close to the definition of "improbable"