I didn’t like The Fault in Our Stars.
Minority opinion, I know, but the book’s enduring popularity and large fan-following has always baffled me, particularly since the story so viciously mocks what seems to be its prime demographic: the healthy, the abled, the physically untroubled. As much as I admire John Green’s attempts to humanize illness, the story, ironically, seems to exploit the main characters’ conditions to add “poignancy” to their words, as if they wouldn’t have as much depth without the life-threatening conditions, and reeks of laziness and inaccuracy in its subject matter.
Granted, I am merely a part-time professional sick person. I have a condition known as Loeys-Dietz syndrome, meaning I am more susceptible than the average person to developing aneurysms and have a chronic need to undergo heart surgery to postpone the inevitability of death. That said, compared to the complexities and trials of cancer, I’m skipping through a field of lilies.
But, as someone who’s been in and out of hospitals throughout her life, I found that this story rang very hollow. Brief moments of sharp honesty at Support Group shine through, only to be swept aside for rambling musing from our leads about the inability for the healthy to understand the dying and trite commentary on mortality. For a story supposedly about death and dying, it felt very detached from the subject.
Hazel Lancaster, a terminal cancer patient and the book’s protagonist, can politely be described as judgmental. Accurately, she can be described as bull-headed. Like her love interest, Augustus Waters, she is restricted by her own philosophy, so set in her worldview and assessment of those around her that she comes across as more arrogant than insightful.
She openly mocks how people choose to mourn, declaring any expression of grief that does not conform to her worldview to be condescending without realizing how condescending she herself is being. Augustus, for his part, alternately exists as a straw man to back up Hazel’s points and a smug, self-congratulating author voice box spouting one-liners about as revolutionary as bathroom-wall scribblings.
None of these flaws would be so bad if either character matured from this point, but the narrative constantly rewards both Hazel and Gus’s unfettered soapboxing, echoing their ever-so-quotable quotes and supporting their philosophical “revelations” through contrived plot bunnies, like Hazel’s notion that pain and joy are independent from one another.
Which is wrong. Pain and joy can be experienced independently from each other, but exist on a metric like hot and cold. You don’t need to experience fire to understand ice, but you do need the concept of heat to technically define cold, the absence of heat.
This tendency to misrepresent arguments for the sake of proving a point is prevalent throughout both the book and the movie. At best they provide minor thematic hiccups like the one above. At worst they undermine the entire concept of the story. The whole premise of a transcendental Infinity collapses in on itself when you realize that Infinity and Oblivion, the book’s two favorite buzzwords, fundamentally cannot coexist under the atheistic existentialist theory the story’s philosophy is based on.
And ultimately this is the greatest failing of John Green’s storytelling. He fails to remember the mortality of his characters, preferring to wax philosophical about death and highlight the “arrogance” of those who care not to. For a book that tries to instill empathy and compassion, it relies heavily on elitism and judgment to make its point. Take it from someone who’s been on both sides: the dying have no more right to judge the living than anyone else.