The Fault in Our Stars, a tenderly wrought young adult novel by John Green, felt perfect to me. Disarming like a crooked smile and chock full of some very gorgeous writing. Things happen, of course. International travel. A sex scene. A death. But this story lingers in those moments in between major plot points, when life does its thing, perhaps less cinematically but with more grit. Everything boils down to color and texture, and this story and its characters has both in spades.
Two sick kids falling in love seems a premise ripe for all sorts of maudlin, saccharine crap, but the story is one of the best I’ve read. I oftentimes feel sheepish about my affinity for young adult fiction, but stories intended for a younger audience feel more truthful and brave. The truth is often simple. As children we embrace certain truths–about ourselves, the world–that we persist in forgetting as adults. Forget and/or forsake or just complicate into oblivion. Writers of young adult literature don’t waste their optimism on adults, who are perhaps too hardened for it to truly penetrate. That is itself a pessimistic judgement made by a true adult.
Though The Fault in Our Stars centers on two kids with cancer, the book doesn’t dwell on the question, why is it that kids get terminally sick? Why is it that some stories end mid-sentence with absolutely no resolution? What is this life? Certainly these questions hover always in the background, especially when Hazel’s lungs flare up and as Augustus begins to slip away.
“The world is not a wish granting factory,” Augustus reminds Hazel–and Green confronts this fact by showing all the ways we cope with being human. He gives us a cancer kid support group in a church–“the Literal Heart of Jesus”– that aims to fill those black holes left by questioning the universe and its mysterious ways. Green gives us Augustus’s parents, who cling to platitudes like–Without Pain, How Could We Know Joy–embroidered on throw pillows. He gives us an alcoholic writer who rages in protest to life’s injustice by lashing out, by withholding.
While Green presents a host of possibilities and responses to life and the end of life, he lingers of course longest on Hazel and Augustus, the beating heart of this luminous and wise story. Love is always the answer, but not in the way you might think. Love doesn’t arrest the march of time and it doesn’t make a sick person well, but it does provide its own kinds of loopholes. Even a brief time full of humor and tenderness and vulnerability like what Hazel and Augustus share can be experienced as an infinity. Love directed toward something specific like another person makes life feel realer than real and bigger than even death. Green frames that beautifully through Hazel’s voice.
That’s a secret we forget as adults–we get lost in the tangle of experience, in everyday drudgery and commuting and the outrageous price of gas. We begin to know too much to be fearless, and then we begin to fear too much to love, and that is is our hamartia. That is why and how people become hard and doubtful and lonely.
Not long ago I read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, a portrait of Didion’s struggle following the sudden death of her beloved husband. It was excruciating to read: a chronicle of one woman’s refusal to relinquish control over every damn detail–who willfully resisted surrendering gracefully to grief and life’s natural order. It’s a portrait of control out of control right down to her sentence construction. Short and terse, her sentences are sharp angles that aim to defy life’s sloppy corners.
Didion lost the love of her life–a love that spanned decades dense with memories of every kind. Yet I can not describe the book as a story of a great love. Rather, The Year of Magical Thinking is a story of great fear of drowning in the unknown. I struggled to sympathize with Didion, mainly because I saw too much of myself in her. Like Didion, I predict and control because I fear what I don’t and can’t know. Externally, I am a “cool customer,” but inside very often I am roiling, reeling, gripping. Always searching.
What both The Fault in Our Stars and The Year of Magical Thinking taught me, albeit in opposite ways, is that pain does, in fact, demand to be felt, and grief does, in fact, reveal us. We can resist it. We can try to make the mystery of it all into a puzzle to be solved, but it is unsolvable. There will always be so much I don’t understand about so much that I want so desperately to understand. For example, how do we escape this labyrinth (that is, how should we live)? Which is the central question author Green explores in an earlier novel, Searching For Alaska, to which The Fault in our Stars is a kind of answer.
How are we to reckon with “the universe’s need to make and unmake all that is possible?”
We believe: in small infinities and in “The Great Perhaps” even as we slog through the labyrinth. We surround ourselves with others who believe in those things too, who have the courage to align their lives with what Green calls radical hope. We do as Hazel does after losing Augustus, as Miles does after losing Alaska, which is to revel in the gift of all we have right now and surrender to love’s boundlessness within our small circle of existence.
culdesacs 