The Fault In Our Stars: A Pretentious Review(ish thing)
(I don't write about books very often, so bear with me.)
"His sisters were there with their banker husbands and three kids, all boys, who ran up to me and chanted who are you who are you who are you who are you, running circles around the entryway like lung capacity was a renewable resource."
This sentence, inconsequential as it may seem, was the point where John Green's novel The Fault In Our Stars hit me like a ton of bricks. I was sitting at my kitchen table, reading over breakfast like I do almost every morning. I opened my mouth to laugh, jell-covered forkful of pancake halfway to my mouth, and suddenly I was crying like a baby. And I don't mean that as a turn of phrase, I was crying literally like a baby, the kind of crying that is all shaking and squealing and convulsing and wailing where the tears take a good full minute or so to start rolling down your face and time and everything just disappears for a while, the kind of crying that legal adults are only supposed to cry at their parents' or children's funerals, the kind of crying that you never, ever, EVER want anyone to see you cry.
Certainly, some of this comes from the fact that the subject matter hits a vein of my personal experience. But mostly, it's the pure, unadulterated literary magic that John Green weaves so magically.
Yes, the sixteen-year-old narrator of and multiple other characters in The Fault In Our Stars have cancer. And yes, their cancers are enough of a driving force to say that this is a book about cancer. But this is not a Book About Cancer. What makes Stars so beautiful is what has made all of Green's work so wonderful: it is a book about people. I can think of few authors who can put real, true, fascinating characters on the page in real, true, touching interaction quite the way John Green can--and, particularly, young people. Young people whose relationships with their parents, while containing teenage rebellion, are not exclusively made up of slammed doors and shouts of "I HATE YOU!" Young people who fall in love that is not quite the same as older, wiser, adult love but is still true love. Young people who can't quite admit that they don't know everything about life but who still have thoughts and opinions that are interesting and worthwhile. The only thing that makes Green's characters at all unbelievable is their serious book intelligence, but it's just as easy to allow that sixteen-year-old hazel has memorized the entirety of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" as it is to allow that fourteen-year-old Juliet uses words like "wherefore" and "apace" (the latter of which, coincidentally, is also a favorite of Hazel's) when talking to herself.
Green's incessantly witty way with words is, of course, just as present as always. Stars is irreverantly laugh-out-loud funny, exactly what one would expect from the writer who responded to winning an Edgar award by making a video about all the goofy things that can be done with a bust of Edgar Allen Poe (watch it here). But it's also full of some great new quality, some glittering charm I've never quite noticed in Looking For Alaska or And Abundance of Katherines. Stars charms its way right into you so adorably, so subtly that the moments you feel it are not the moments you would expect. This is not a Nicholas Sparks novel. It is not building you up with romantic joy that obviously leads to getting dropped off of the emotional cliff of a barely pre-funeral wedding. This is the closest thing to the real emotional journey of loving someone who is very sick that I have ever come across. Accordingly, the moments that kill are not the moments you'd expect to kill. They are sudden, unexpected bursts of humanity, like the three little boys who dance their circles around Hazel.
Every one of John Green's stories has changed my life a little. And none quite like The Fault In Our Stars.
