The Fault in Our Stars

@johngreen@mastodon.social's The Fault in our Stars is the story of a 16 year old girl, Hazel, riddled with terminal cancer. The novel opens with her multiple awful treatments, dependency on an oxygen tank she must take everywhere and use even while sleeping, her depression, sarcasm, loneliness.

She meets a boy at a support group, Augustus, who's lost a leg to cancer but is now cancer free. Amid shared irony, and angst, they fall slowly, then suddenly, in love, and depart on an adventure to track down the mysterious author of her favourite novel.

Any book about terminally ill children is sure to be unbearably sad, but Green's writing is so compelling that this novel will surely wring a tear from even the hardest hearted eye. (Green explicitly wants to reject the tropes of the cancer-kid genre. I'm not widely read enough to judge whether he succeeds.)

Fault in Our Stars is cleverly a kind of reverse Romeo and Juliet, but Green has crafted a story that projects way beyond a mere teen love tragedy. Teen angst extrapolates into authentic existential angst when the teen is terminally ill, bringing into sharp focus the real problem with existence and mortality. "What's the meaning of life?" isn't a well-formulated question, but "what do I do with this life I've found myself in?" is, or better: "how do I make this life meaningful?" What does meaningful even mean? Does fame for important achievements entail meaning? Does meaning have to be public? Is being remembered by loved ones enough? What about when they die?

These questions are explicit in Hazel and Gus's banterings, but the people and places they encounter on their adventures raise related ones. If I achieve something great, and then waste the rest of my life, is it still meaningful? Can my life have meaning if I don't know it before I die? Is having a meaningful death the same as having a meaningful life?

Alas, there are many questions. Are there any definitive answers? Of course not, but there are some pretty good proposals which, in lieu of other more fantastical ones given by religion or other metaphysics, could help some of us face the yawning chasm of the void mortality confronts us with.

Green is as erudite as Borges, but with pomposity swapped out for emotional warmth. I liked this a lot, even if I'm not sure I can bear to read more of his work; I'm still recovering from the acute melancholy I underwent from "Anthropocene Reviewed" and haven't managed to steel myself yet for "Turtles all the way down".

PostScript: There's a movie adaptation of this novel. As always, movie-then-book would be the way to go.

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.