The Fault in Our Stars is blowing up both the bestseller list and the box office these days, as hordes of (mostly) adolescent (mostly) females rush to the cineplex in order to cry their freaking eyes out. I mean, we all know how hard it is to milk pathos out of (spoiler alert) kids dying from cancer. It takes a nimble mind to feel sad about such a thing. The author, John Green, was recently profiled in the New Yorker where he comes off as a dumbed-down Malcolm Gladwell for the millennial crowd (which is a complisult). I watched one of his videos and found it cute and it gives you the impression you just learned something. And he is just so derned earnest about the whole thing, messing up his hair and everything!
Typically this would not be a book I would read. However, seeing as I am going to be teaching some of our nation's youth starting in a couple of months I figured I ought to read the book that is currently most popular among that crowd. And believe me, I began fully intending to hate this book. I have written a cynical review in my head and it is awesome and hilarious. But to tear down a book written for 14 year-old girls is not much of a task, and besides my intent in reading wasn't to point out how silly a good chunk of the book comes off to an adult but to try and understand why such a book would mean so much to a 14 year-old girl.
And I think I get it. Green's book is so successful in the teen crowd because it takes teens and teenage ridiculousness seriously. In an infamous example of teenagey things, the protagonist Hazel (a cancer kid) goes on a lengthy riff to her parents about the injustice of scrambled eggs being relegated to breakfast alone and left out of other meals. I guffawed reading this section, but then of course I'm supposed to. I am an adult. If people in their thirties talked about stuff like that it would be even more stupid than a 16 year-old doing the same (which is still stupid).
But you are supposed to be stupidly earnest and tritely philosophical when you're 16 in the hopes that you're earnestness will one day be matched with intelligence and your philosophizing backed by actual thought. In other words, in the hope that you will grow up. I never said anything quite like the scrambled eggs business when I was 16, but I could imagine thinking something like that. I do remember conversations, multiple, with a friend on the comparative merits of Dr. Pepper versus Mountain Dew, a smackdown for the ages. A few years ago while camping by a lake I was even part of a discussion (sideline to a discussion, more accurately) in which college students were asked to ponder, and I so wish I was kidding, how the difference between a log that had fallen out of the firepit for roasting 'mallows and the logs that remained within the firepit reflected certain spiritual truths about our own spiritual fervor for God. The discussion lasted for several minutes. It was one of the first times in my life I remember feeling old. I just wanted to put the blasted log back in and move on.
Another natural complaint about the book is that no teenager in America talks the way the protagonists, Hazel and Augustus, regularly do in their intellectual banter. The characters are walking thesauruses (thesauri? These whip-smart teens would probably know). This complaint is probably true. But I want to say two things on this matter: first, this book is in a certain degree aspirational. Teens want to sound this intelligent, even when they do not or cannot. Hazel and Augustus, with their high-flown phrases and dictionary vocabulary are merely articulating what teens feel in a way the teens themselves are not yet able. Besides, this complaint seems misplaced and doesn't crop up in criticisms of other types of literature. After all, how many people have ever spoken like a Jane Austen heroine? How often in your life have you given a soliloquy? There is an emotional realism to this book even if it lacks, or seems to lack, linguistic realism.
The second thing to note is that teens confronted with death, as the main characters here are, will grow up and mature differently than teens planning to coast from high school into a six year college degree, drink a ton of alcohol and play video games and move back in with mom and dad. Hazel and Augustus stare death in the face and will view life differently for that experience. People who criticize the hyper-maturity of the characters are chronologically snobbish. For centuries before we invented adolescence 100 years ago real people regularly grew up quickly when forced to do so. They went to college at age 11, served as Prime Minister at the age of 24, wrote sonnets lamenting their lack of accomplishment when they turned 23, etc. Hazel and Augustus's disease plucked them out of the normal tenor of adolescent life and they matured quicker than their peers. That makes psychological sense.
I hesitate to even call this post a book review, because I am not really reviewing the book. It was not written for me. As a book it was fine. Two and a half stars, if you must know. I have spent five hours more foolishly in my past. But it is not something I will reread and I will not be joining the throngs at the theater to sob over the death of the young, heart-rending though it is.
But again that is not the point with a book like this. For me it has helped remind me of the sublime awfulness of being a teenager. And hopefully it has given me a window into the world of the students I will be teaching in the near future. And, more importantly, a greater degree of compassion for their plight. You will get through it teenagers. It gets better. And you don't have to die to figure that out.
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