The Fault in Our Stars

I put off The Fault in Our Stars for years because the premise sounds like a machine built to make you cry: two teenagers, cancer, a love story. John Green published it in 2012, and when I finally sat down with it I was surprised by how much of the first half is a comedy about a support group, and how little the book is interested in being inspirational. What it wants to argue about is endings. Everything else, including the romance, serves that argument. This summary covers the whole plot, the ending included, because the ending is where the book is actually heading.

Hazel Grace Lancaster is sixteen, has thyroid cancer that has spread to her lungs, and carries a portable oxygen tank with her everywhere. Her parents make her go to a cancer support group in the basement of a church. She does not go because she believes in it. She goes because her mother is frightened that Hazel will die without ever having lived, and there is nothing else to offer. That detail does more work than any speech in the novel: the person dragging her there is not in denial about the dying, she is in denial about the living.

The basement with the heart of Jesus

The support group meets in a circle of folding chairs beneath a poster of a literal human heart of Jesus, and is led by a former patient named Patrick, who offers slogans that Hazel takes apart in her head before bed. She is not a comfortable narrator. She is sardonic, a little superior, and aware that her own situation is bad enough that she has no right to complain about anything else. Green gives her a voice that argues with itself.

Then Augustus Waters arrives. He is seventeen, he lost a leg above the knee to osteosarcoma, he is in remission, and he turns up mostly to support his friend Isaac, who has eye cancer and is waiting on surgery that will take what is left of his sight. Gus talks like a person who has never once been told no: charming, theatrical, certain that his life will mean something. He and Hazel argue about a cigarette he keeps tucked behind his ear, never lit. His theory is that holding the thing that can kill you, without letting it do anything, is how you take away its power. Hazel thinks the whole display is a metaphor he is performing for an audience. Both of them turn out to be half right, which is the kind of joke Green enjoys.

They agree to read each other's favorite books. He hands her a video game tie-in novel called The Price of Dawn. She hands him An Imperial Affliction, the one book she has read so often she can recite pieces of it, a slim novel about a girl named Anna who has cancer and dies. The catch is that An Imperial Affliction stops in the middle of a sentence. No wrap up, no account of Anna's mother, no word on the Dutch tulip man who keeps appearing in the margins of Anna's life. Gus finishes it furious, convinced the author cheated. Hazel explains that Peter Van Houten, the writer, retreated to Amsterdam after the book came out and has answered nothing since.

A novel that stops mid-sentence

The email phase of the relationship is the best courtship writing in the book. They message at all hours, trading jokes, arguments, and long analyses of a novel neither of them can let go of, and the friendship tips into something else without either of them announcing it. Gus, in the meantime, has tracked down Van Houten's assistant, Lidewij, and through her has opened a correspondence. Van Houten writes back, briefly and badly, and says he can only answer Hazel's questions in person. He refuses to answer them in writing.

What Hazel wants is small and enormous at once: she wants to know what happened after Anna died, because the people left behind are the ones who have to keep going, and no story ever tells you about them. Gus wants her question answered, and he also wants the trip. Through the Genie Foundation, the book's version of a wish charity, he uses his one cancer wish to buy tickets for the two of them to go to Amsterdam. Hazel resists, because she has built her whole life around the idea that she should not give anyone something worth losing, and Gus refuses to accept that arrangement. He calls her on it: her policy of keeping people at a distance is not generosity, it is a way of controlling who gets to be hurt.

Amsterdam, and the morning after

Amsterdam is short, bright, and the last uncomplicated section of the book. They arrive in a canal hotel, take a boat tour, and walk through a city that Green clearly loves writing about. The set piece is the Anne Frank House, where Hazel has to climb the stairs slowly with her oxygen and where, somewhere between the floors, she and Gus kiss for the first time while tourists applaud at the top of the stairwell. It is a ridiculous scene and it works. That night they sleep together, tell each other they are in love, and behave like two people who have decided that the time they have is the time they have.

The next day Gus tells her the news: the cancer is back, and it is everywhere. Not a setback to be treated but a finished fact. From here the book changes color. Gus's health declines over weeks and lands him in the ICU for a stretch. Hazel, who has spent the whole novel managing other people's terror, now has to watch a boy who was better at being sick than she was stop being good at it. Their arguments about the future, which used to be flirtation, turn into the thing they were always about: who will be left, and what they owe each other.

Peter Van Houten does not answer the question

The meeting with Van Houten happens in the middle of the trip and it is the ugliest sequence in the book. His house is dark, his manners are worse, and he is drunk. He refuses to discuss the novel at all. Instead he asks Hazel how much she weighs, asks whether she and Augustus have had sex, and tells her, in effect, that her questions are trivial and so is she. He is cruel about her body, cruel about her optimism, and then he ends the meeting.

The brilliance of the scene is what it costs Hazel. She came to Amsterdam for a man who wrote the only book that ever described her own situation accurately, and the man turns out to be a wretch. Lidewij, the assistant, confesses that she arranged the meeting herself because Van Houten would never have done it, resigns on the spot, and spends the rest of the day trying to repair an afternoon that cannot quite be repaired. Hazel's fury at Van Houten is not really about the insults. It is about discovering that the person who owed her an answer is not going to give one, and that this is not a flaw in her understanding of the book, it is just what happened.

The pre-funeral

Back in Indianapolis the decline accelerates. Gus moves from hospital to home, and he starts arranging his own death with the same organizing energy he brought to everything else. He holds a pre-funeral in his church while he is still alive. Friends and family stand up and say what he has meant to them. Isaac comes, blind now and angrier than he was at the start of the book, having lost his sight and the girlfriend who would not stay for it, and the eulogies are the one place where his rage gets to be something other than noise. Hazel gives one too. The scene is strange to read because Gus is sitting there receiving his own eulogies, laughing and crying and grading them, and because everyone in the room knows exactly how this ends.

It is also the moment where Green's engineering is most visible. He has assembled a room full of teenagers who are either dying or already damaged by dying, and he asks them to perform gratitude. It works. I do not think it works honestly every time. The pre-funeral lands because of the character work done before it, not because the idea of a living funeral is automatically moving, and readers who distrust being moved on schedule will feel the strings.

The second eulogy

Gus dies shortly after. Van Houten turns up at his funeral, sober for once, and apologizes to Hazel. She is not interested. The apology does not restore anything, and Green is careful not to let it: the man who ruined the Amsterdam afternoon arrives too late to do anything about it, and the novel refuses to hand Hazel a repaired version of the meeting she wanted.

What arrives instead is the second eulogy. Gus had written one for Hazel, and Lidewij finds it among Van Houten's papers and gets it to her. In it, Gus tells her that getting hurt in this world is unavoidable, that you do not get to choose whether you get wounded, but that you do get to choose who hurts you, and he chose her. He says he is happy with his choices and hopes she likes hers. The book closes with Hazel saying that she does.

That is a quiet way to end a novel this loud, and it is the right one. Hazel spent the whole book insisting that a story should tell you what happens afterward, and when she finally gets a message from the dead it is not information about Anna's mother or the Dutch tulip man. It is an answer to a different question, the one she was actually asking: whether any of this was worth it.

The argument about how stories end

The unfinished manuscript is the spine of the novel. Hazel's obsession with An Imperial Affliction is an obsession with fairness: if you have to die young, you should at least get to see the record corrected, the people you leave behind accounted for, the consequences written down. She believes the universe owes an explanation. Gus, for most of the book, believes it owes nothing, that oblivion comes for everyone and pretending otherwise is vanity.

Green set the title from Cassius's line in Julius Caesar about the fault not being in our stars but in ourselves, then wrote the whole novel on the flipped version. Hazel would very much like the fault to be in the stars, because fate is easier to argue with than chance. The book's answer is unsentimental: nobody is owed an ending, and the people who keep going are not getting a consolation prize either, they are just getting the rest of the story. The novel takes its own advice by refusing to skip ahead past the funeral. It gives you the aftermath in full, which is exactly what Hazel wanted from Van Houten and what he would not provide.

What drags, and who it is not for

The fair complaint about John Green is that you can hear him in every character. Hazel, Gus, Isaac, Patrick, Van Houten at his most venomous: all of them talk like the same extremely well-read essayist, and the adults are no exception. Once you notice it you cannot stop. The quip density is relentless in the opening third, and the jokes arrive in threes, so that a chapter can feel like a performance of wit rather than a conversation. Readers who want naturalistic teenage speech, or who prefer their narrators unaware of how clever they are, will find this grating by chapter five.

There is also the matter of engineering. Green stacks the deck: two beautiful doomed teenagers, a blind friend, a recluse author who is a monster, a wish foundation, a city made for romance. The tears are earned by character, but the situation is arranged. Some readers will feel manipulated, and they are not wrong exactly, they are just responding to a book that admits it is building something.

And Hazel's philosophical asides can become lectures. Her thoughts on suffering, on how dying girls in novels are always improved by dying, on what we are owed, are smart, but they arrive as finished arguments from a sixteen-year-old. The voice is a little too formed.

What the book does better than almost anything else is hold humor and dread in the same paragraph without letting either one win. It is not for readers who want to be left alone with their grief, or for anyone allergic to sentiment delivered at full volume. For everyone else it earns its ending, and its ending is not a trick: the second eulogy lands because the whole novel has been a conversation about what the dead owe the living, and Gus finally pays up.