The Fault in our Stars

I wish John Green's publishers would get smart and market his books for adults as well as "young adults" (YA).  He's a terrific writer for readers of any age who love coming-of-age stories, even tragic ones. Green's teens are frighteningly smart, serious, intellectual, witty, and good. They take risks not for the sake of mindless entertainment, but for moral reasons.They suffer, and they face their suffering head-on, defining themselves by the struggle.


The suffering in this case is caused by illness. Sixteen-year-old Hazel, her oxygen tank practically a body part, knows that her cancer will kill her; she just doesn't know when. Her social life consists mostly of support group meetings; one of her friends there has just lost his second eye, and he's one of the lucky ones. When a good-looking new guy limps into the group--he lost a leg to osteosarcoma-- Hazel resists the immediate attraction; she's determined not to cause him the kind of pain she sees her parents face as they wait for her to die. (Unlike most YA parents, the ones Green gives his kids are always loving and supportive--even appreciated by their kids most of the time.)


Of course Hazel and Gus fall in love. Green takes adolescent love very seriously, another thing I appreciate about him. How they help each other through the mine fields of their lives is a touching story told with both gut-punching realism and gallows humor. If I hadn't known so many kids like Hazel and Gus, kids overflowing with intellectual curiosity, passionate dreams, and heroic moral courage, not to mention brilliant, caustic repartee, I might think the characters and dialogue are overdone. But Hazel and Gus and their parents are as real to me as my own family, except that we haven't had to face anything like this. If and when we do, I'll return to this story to remind myself that it's possible to live fully even when you're dying.


In one of my favorite scenes, Hazel and her parents are picnicking in a park. "I was just trying to notice everything," Hazel says, "the light on the ruined Ruins, this little kid who could barely walk discovering a stick at the corner of the playground, my indefatigable mother zigzagging mustard across her turkey sandwich, my dad patting his handheld in his pocket and resisting the urge to check it, a guy throwing a Frisbee that his dog kept running under and catching and returning to him. Who am I to say that these things might not be forever?...All I know of heaven and all I know of death is in this park: an elegant universe teeming with ruined ruins and screaming children."


The passage took me back to Thornton Wilder's play Our Town, when Emily gets to re-visit her life after she has died. She watches the quotidian life of her family and asks, "Do any human beings ever appreciate life while they live it--every, every minute?" It's the point of many great works of literature, one that bears countless repetitions, and Green's moving story is a worthy reiteration.