The Fault In Our Stars (2012) is indisputably John’s best known work – a bestseller that got a film adaptation just two years later (the first such adaptation of any of his books, plus a second adaptation – a Hindi-language one – in 2020), a cover design so iconic both its follow-up and reprints of earlier books got the same motif, and a long-standing reputation for being a tear-jerker.
One might argue that it was inevitable this became so popular, with tragic romances being magnets for those who look for a guaranteed catharsis in fiction. There’s nothing wrong with this, but having read this book a few times, I think there’s much more that can be said about it, probably more than I’ll be able to manage. But one thing I will say from the outset – for a book about teenagers with cancer, it’s surprisingly positive.
Let’s get into more detail…and of course, this is NOT spoiler-free.
Book Overview:
Our protagonist, Hazel Grace Lancaster, is a 16-year-old who has lived with stage IV thyroid cancer for three years, but with tumours (that have spread to her lungs) kept in check by the experimental drug Phalanxifor and her breathing aided by regular extra oxygen. We open with her mother signing her up for a local support group for teens with cancer, something Hazel’s reluctant about due to the generally morose atmosphere, but agrees to go along for her parents’ sake.
Though she does find the support group a macabre combination of grim and somewhat saccharine, she does at least become friendly with another attendee with a similar attitude, Isaac, who has an eye neoplasm, and then a friend he brings along one time for support – Augustus “Gus” Waters, and there’s an immediate spark between him and Hazel, first from lingering glances, and then from the profound (at least for their age) ways they talk about various concepts. Gus himself is in remission from osteosarcoma that caused him to lose his right leg. Hazel is quick to accept the invitation from him to go to his house.
When there, they bring up the topic of reading and agree to exchange books – Gus gives Hazel a video game adaptation, and Hazel recommends An Imperial Affliction, a book her narration describes as the closest thing to her Bible – the book, written by a recluse called Peter Van Houten, depicts a girl with terminal cancer spending her remaining days campaigning for kids affected by cholera, and ends mid-sentence, implying but not outright confirming, the character’s death, and leaving a lot of plot threads dangling. After passionately discussing the enigma, Gus emails Van Houten’s assistant Lidewij Vliegenthart in order for both of them to be in correspondence with Van Houten, who suggests he could answer questions they have about the book should they be in Amsterdam where he’s currently residing. This presents a challenge for Hazel, having already made use of ‘The Genie Foundation’ (the fictional version of the Make-A-Wish Foundation) aged 13 when her outcome looked bleak. However, amidst a theatrical display, Gus reveals that he still has access to funds from the Genies to arrange a trip to Amsterdam for them both.
Hazel begins to feel a sense of misgiving after discovering the social media presence of Caroline Mathers, Gus’ ex, who resembled Hazel quite notable and died of a brain tumour some time ago. Noting the parallels, and likening herself to a ‘grenade’ who will one day explode and hurt a lot of people in the process, she determines that her and Gus’ relationship can’t go beyond friendship. Complications further abound when she has a deoxygenation attack that night due to an unchecked build-up of fluid in her lungs, and has to spend time in intensive care to have that drained. Following that, her doctors initially determine that she’s not well enough to travel to Amsterdam. This momentary bleakness does however allow Hazel and Gus to bond in a more regular fashion, increasing her affection for him more than his more theatrical personality did. Soon after, Hazel’s medical team are persuaded to OK the Amsterdam trip, though shortened and ensuring Hazel’s mother also comes along.
In Amsterdam, Gus and Hazel are treated to a dinner at a scenic restaurant at Van Houten’s expense, giving them the chance to discuss existential questions, and Hazel learns a bit more about Caroline – Gus reveals that her tumour gave her intense mood swings, leading to occasions where she was downright unpleasant, but that he also quite liked this, as it felt more authentic than the overly saccharine image of her presented postmortem.
The following day, they arrive at Van Houten’s residence, only to discover him as a disheveled alcoholic certainly not happy to see them, who corresponded with them with the feeling that they wouldn’t be able to make it to Amsterdam, and that he was completely ignorant about last night’s dinner, Lidewij having arranged it. After speaking abstractly for a while, he begins to lose his patience, unwilling to answer Hazel and Gus’ questions about An Imperial Affliction, allegedly not sparing a thought for the plot threads or characters beyond the scope of the book, before resorting to being as callous as possible about their cancer. Lidewij, appalled by this attitude, offers to take Hazel and Gus sightseeing after they leave to try and make up for it. During this, Hazel and Gus share their first kiss, and go Gus’ hotel room after to consummate.
It’s the next day when Gus informs Hazel that his cancer has returned aggressively, and in places it wasn’t before. Upon returning to America, he’s initially quite chipper, arranging an egging of Isaac’s ex’s car (she having blanked him entirely since he underwent surgery to remove his remaining eye), only to begin detesting his increasing helplessness and the thought that he’ll die without achieving anything major. This causes some friction with Hazel, given that it sounds as though he is dismissive of what they have, but reconciliation is quick. Gus also arranges a pre-funeral, wanting to hear eulogies for himself before he goes, and notably, only Hazel and Isaac are given the courtesy of being specifically asked for this role.
Gus dies eight days after the pre-funeral.
As with Caroline, Hazel feels that the well-meaning condolences flooding Gus’ social media are nevertheless shallow in their scope and there are similar emotions, as well as the general lament, at Gus’ funeral. This sentiment is echoed more harshly by Van Houten when he shows up at the funeral, much to Hazel’s consternation. He reveals however that he and Gus continued to correspond for a while, and that he’s feeling some remorse for his previous attitude. Hazel also learns that An Imperial Affliction’s protagonist was based heavily off Van Houten’s daughter, who also succumbed to cancer young.
There’s a slight improvement in circumstances when Hazel learns that her mother is training to become a social worker for bereaved families, assuaging her fears that her parents would have nothing to do with their lives once she’s gone. Following this, Hazel learns from Lidewij, who went through Van Houten’s letters, that Gus had worked on a eulogy for Hazel in his last days, and Hazel reads it, concluding that she was at least as satisfied with her choices in the end as Gus was with his.
Main Themes:
Given it’s a book where mortality is very much on the mind of its characters, it’s inevitable we’d have existential themes everywhere, even among the gallows humour adopted by the characters as a coping mechanism. When it comes to Hazel and Gus’ relationship, I sometimes wonder if there’s a philosophical discussion there that may or may not relate to distinctions between the similar philosophical schools of existentialism and absurdism. Though I’m far from an expert on all of the details of concepts in continental philosophy, I will say the distinction really comes to the forefront in a discussion of nothing more or less than scrambled eggs.
After getting up in the early hours of the morning in preparation to get to the airport for Amsterdam, Hazel muses about her breakfast. She wonders why scrambled eggs have been ghettoized as a breakfast food, and wonders if it’s restrictive. Yes, your typical morning musings. When she expresses this to Gus later, he puts a different spin on it – maybe it’s better to see scrambled eggs as so special and unique that they have to be a staple of a particular meal. Whilst neither of these views are portrayed as inherently right or wrong (it’s only scrambled eggs, after all), we’re given, in a miniature, a distinction between how these two approach life. Whereas Gus has spent a lot of time in remission and feels like he’s been given a new lease on life (punctured eventually by the knowledge that his cancer has returned), determined to make it count in a memorable way, Hazel has been resigned to the idea that she’s living on borrowed time, and feels that the best she can do is make her time as flexible as possible. The question of how someone can ‘matter’ becomes, as mentioned, something of a sticking point between them when Gus is lamenting what he feels is the worthlessness of his life in his last days, whereas Hazel is almost offended on behalf of all sentient life, given that such a thing can be fleeting, too fleeting and therefore too precious for dramatic gestures to make it more or less important.
Though it is a sticking point, it ultimately doesn’t dampen their deep love for each other, because underneath it all, they both appreciate the depths of each other that create these attitudes, even if they both tend to lean in the end towards embracing the ordinariness of things. It’s when Gus isn’t trying to be theatrical, resigned that Hazel might not be able to go to Amsterdam with him and simply helps her with selling an old, worn-out swing set online that Hazel’s narration reveals she properly fell in love with him. For Gus’ part, his very first meeting with Hazel has him fear oblivion and obscurity, and Hazel retort that ultimately such a worry is unnecessary in the grand scheme of things where all is obscure. From this point on, he is very clearly smitten.
Given how I’ve talked about John’s fondness for deconstructing the Manic Pixie Dream Girl character archetype, I have often wondered whether Gus counts as a gender-flipped version of this, an individual whose larger than life personality is stripped away to vulnerability the more you get to know him. But now I wonder whether it’s a bit more intriguing than that – after all, whilst Hazel’s interested in him from the off, she lacks the blinkered unremitting affection displayed by Pudge and Quentin to their respective love interests, hedging her bets and wanting to be cautious. From the beginning, it is he who is the most interested in her, and only becomes more so as time goes on, and they’re able to put their vulnerabilities on display to each other. In other words, you could see it as quite similar to the situations in Looking for Alaska and Paper Towns, where a quirky guy falls for a guarded girl who displays intellectual intrigue amongst her vulnerabilities, it just so happens that this one is from the girl’s perspective. When we do get to see things through Gus’ eyes, this similar level of affection is quite evident, one of my favourite lines being when Gus concludes that: ‘You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is.’ It’s a wonderful check on male egos the world over.
Furthermore, it’s only due to love that there’s a miscommunication throughout this book – her mother had been training to be a social worker for a long time, but didn’t tell Hazel because she was worried about hurting her by giving the impression that she’d already moved on. But it means the world to Hazel, because she in turn was worried that her parents would have no lives to speak after she was gone. Different perspectives, but ultimately coming from the same place.
How it’s Resonated with Me:
Whilst I don’t think that this book has affected the kind of stories I want to write as much as other books I’ve discussed, there is definitely something that this book does particularly well, which, whilst not major, is definitely worth talking about. That is, an abundance of fictional things.
You might be thinking – of course a work of fiction has a lot of fictional things in it? But compare this to Paper Towns, where the trail Margo left for Quentin was based around individuals and works that existed in real life – Woody Guthrie, Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” etc. This had its own charm, but with this book, the importance to the plot of things like An Imperial Affliction and its author, necessitated they be completely fictional. This is not only extremely freeing, but gives your fictional world (even if it’s otherwise like reality) something of an extra layer, and a potential commentary on the way works of fiction interact with the real world. On that level, it’s meta. There are even fictional elements in this book where their fictional nature doesn’t even massively matter. A band called ‘The Hectic Glow’ gets a couple of mentions, and the band doesn’t even exist. Phalanxifor is another example, and I’d argue that the fictional nature of this drug does give John more creative freedom in crafting Hazel’s situation.
In situations like this, I’d sometimes feel reluctant about introducing fictional elements to a story about rather heavy real-life topics, wondering whether I’d be better served with something thoroughly researched. But if there’s space for fictional elements because of where the focus is better spent, as with this book, I don’t think it’s an issue, and this book has also proved such a thing is not a hurdle to success. John’s author’s note at the beginning reminding readers that this book should be analyzed in a fictional way plays on this theme a bit, I think. I have come to agree with him that the idea of made-up stories (known to be made up) mattering is a foundational assumption of our species, and an important one.
Adaptation:
Here, I’ll be talking about the better known film adaptation from 2014. It’s popular, and for me, competently put together. The cast did well (I’m particularly impressed with Shailene Woodley as Hazel and Willem Dafoe as Van Houten), and, by the standards of a lot of films, a pretty loyal adaptation.
But I guess, as is inevitable for movie adaptations, a lot had to be slimmed down or cut out (compare this with the Looking for Alaska miniseries, which had time to expand on its source material). Some of the omissions include characters not integral to the plot, such as Kaitlyn, Hazel’s friend from her own school, and Gus’ adult half-sisters, who are married with their own kids but show up during Gus’ last days for physical and moral support. However, there is one major omission that straddles the line between necessary and questionable, and that is of Caroline Mathers.
I don’t know how easy it would be to feature a posthumous character in a production like this, but it has been done before, and whilst plenty of emotionally and narratively satisfying things happen without Caroline being a necessary element, I can’t help but feel the film does suffer with her absence. Not so much to make it a bad movie, far from it – all I will say, as is inevitable for us bibliophiles, the book is just far richer for her inclusion.
Conclusion:
So, I do think this book has earned its popularity, but as we come to the final installment of this series that I spontaneously decided to do to make myself more productive, I will conclude that this is still not my favourite of John Green’s works. That’ll come on Christmas Eve – join me then for a look at Turtles All The Way Down.
Toby Martin (the wastrel?) 