The best stories are about memory,
I read The Fault in Our Stars by John Green in two settings but in the same place. On an airplane thousands of feet in the air sitting above one of the wings and wondering how fast angels can fly. In most of my reviews I spoil the story. I will not be (entirely) doing that this time, nor will I do so unless I deem the tale unworthy of your time and I wish to spare you the trouble since I was not so fortunate.
The Fault in Our Stars is quite possibly the best standalone novel I have ever read and is certainly the best book I've had the privilege to experience this year. I place it in the very prestigious position as my second favorite story and favorite non-fantasy novel, The title comes from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and it sets the perfect tone for this story written in the first person by Hazel, a sixteen year old girl in the regressive stage of lung cancer who nevertheless is required to cart around an oxygen tank because (as she so perfectly puts it ) her "lungs suck at being lungs." Her mother forces her to go to a cancer patient/survivor group where she proceeds to exercise her considerable teenage snark and wit along with her friend Isaac who is suffering from a type of cancer that required the removal of an eye.
One day Hazel catches the attention of a boy named Augustus and their romance is as breathtaking and expedient as it is completely genuine and uncontrived. Augustus has recovered from bone cancer that left him with a prosthetic leg, but did nothing to diminish his attractiveness. She can scarcely believe he's as perfect as he projects and indeed feels as though she's found his hamartia or fatal flaw when he puts a cigarette in his mouth. Hazel is of course livid that anyone who survived cancer would willingly place themselves into its way again, but Augustus never lights them using the act as a metaphor of having "the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don't give it the power to do its killing."
Both of them together have enough wit and snark to drown the world in metaphors and sarcasm with just the barest dash of bitterness for their plight. Hazel whom Augustus calls "Hazel Grace" for most of the novel feels incredibly guilty that she's allowed Augustus to fall for her as she and her family expect her cancer to return full force at any moment, and yet their relationship parallels the ever moving train of her mortality. So much so that Hazel shares with him that her favorite book is a story by the reclusive author Peter Van Houten called An Imperial Affliction, and I understood immediately that she loved this novel the way that I love FFVII.
"My favorite book, by a wide margin, was An Imperial Affliction, but I didn't like to tell people about it. Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book. And then there are books like An Imperial Affliction, which you can't tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising that affections feels like a betrayal."
Van Houten's work is very meta to the larger story at hand being
about a girl named Anna who suffers from cancer and her one-eyed mother
who grows tulips. But Hazel makes it very clear that this is NOT a
cancer book in the same way that The Fault in Our Stars is not a cancer
book. Anna grows progressively sicker and her mother falls in love with
a Dutch Tulip Man who has a great deal of money and exotic ideas about
how to treat Anna's cancer, but just when the DTM and Anna's mom are
about to possibly get married and Anna is about to start a new
treatment, the book ends right in the middle of a
Exactly. And this drives Hazel and eventually Augustus insane to not know what happened to everyone from Anna's hamster Sisyphus to Anna herself. Hazel assumes that Anna became too sick to continue to write (the assumption being that Anna's story was first person just as Hazel's is), but for Van Houten to not have finished it seems like the ultimate literary betrayal.
As terrified as Hazel was to share this joy with Augustus (and god knows I understand THAT feel) it was the best thing she could've done because they now share the obsession and the insistence that the characters deserve an ending,
The conversations of Hazel and Augustus are not typical teenage conversations, but they're not typical teenagers. Mortality flavors all of their discussions and leads to elegance such as "The tales of our exploits will survive as long as the human voice itself. And even after that, when the robots recall the human absurdities of sacrifice and compassion, they will remember us." They speak of memory and calculate how there are fourteen dead people for everyone alive and realize that remembering fourteen people isn't that difficult. We could all do that if we tried that way no one has to be forgotten. But will we then fight over who we are allowed to remember? Or will the fourteen just be added to those we can never forget? They read each other the poetry of T.S Eliot, the haunting lines of Prufrock "We have lingered in the chambers of the sea/By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown/Til human voices wake us, and we drown"," and as Augustus reads Hazel her favorite book she "fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once."
When I finished this I thought to myself How am I going to read anything else? How will I find something to match this? How can I pick up another book and not expect it to resonate with this haunting beauty, this tragedy ringed with comic teenage snark and tones that are themselves tragic in their sarcasm like whistling in the ninth circle of hell or laughing uproariously at the monster? I realized I was lost. I could think of no negative critique unless you count the fact that the two main characters have Dawson's Creek Syndrome (a term I just made up) where they're teenagers who speak as if they were philosophers, but then again Bill Watterson did the same thing with a boy and a stuff tiger. You realize the story's hamartia doesn't matter. That the fact that the plot may be cliched is unimportant and that dwelling on such trivialities is in and of itself a fatal flaw. This story is so much more than the letters and words on each page. It's the triumph of morning over night when the night grows ever longer. It's the dream of hope when you've done nothing but dine on despair. It is sad? Yes. It is heartbreaking? More so. Is it worth reading? Has anything sad and heartbreaking not been worth reading? The story of Hazel and Augusts deserves to be read just as the story of Anna, her mother, and dear hamster Sisyphus deserves an ending, and that becomes their exploit to seek out reclusive Peter Van Houten so that the characters can be properly laid to rest and remembered.
The best stories are about memory.
