"'Swing Set Needs Home,'" I said.
"'Desperately Lonely Swing Set Needs Loving Home,'" he said.
"'Lonely, Vaguely Pedophilic Swing Set Seeks the Butts of Children,'" I said.
Having lent out both of the novels I own by him last week to people*, I figure that now is a great time to talk about John Green's books. Because why be practical about this 'reviewing' process when I could follow my impulses and be vague and obnoxious instead? Particularly since, you know. He and I are now bestest buddies in the whole wide world.
* I did that a month ago. Yes. This has taken a month to write. Writing blog stuff is hard, okay? And no. They haven't given the books back. Impatience goes here.
Note before I get too deeply into this that I'm going to be exerting a lot of effort in staying somewhat focused on the book, since I find many things about John Green fascinating. Keeping in mind that I usually am content to analyze authors from afar while enjoying their work rather than engage with them in any real sense, I find it both awesome and a bit problematic that Green is so damn accessible to his readers/fans, and I can't help but wonder how that changes the reading process. I want to draw the easy comparison (which, therefore, probably wouldn't be accurate at all) to a Letters/Rilke scenario, but on a much larger scale and through much more immediate mediums. (And also regarding non-authory things.) There's also my personal hobby horse of proclaiming popular YA fiction as important social indicators for a culture and a good way to track the trajectory of societal norms, which is something I always want to rant about... (Even if John Green is less inclined to. I forgive him though. Because we're BFFs and all.)
But, instead. Books. Let's talk about his books. Because I've read two of them and I like them a great deal. For the sake of making things slightly easier for myself, I'm going to stick with The Fault in Our Stars, since I finished that one most recently and I like it more. (Sophisticated analysis, to be found right here ladies and gents.)
That excessive preface out of the way...
I started reading The Fault in Our Stars knowing that it was about a sixteen-year-old girl, Hazel Grace Lancaster, with terminal cancer who falls in love.
Having dealt with a great deal of death recently, I picked up the book thinking it would be a good sort of catharsis. Through reading about this fictional young woman, I would discover the hidden dignity in dying. She would be brave and kind, and adored by the masses and her young love, and in the end her death would mean something Important (with a capital 'i') that would bring a tragic peace to all who had known her.
So color me surprised when I start reading and discover that Hazel wasn't someone I would be able to comfortably view through an outside perspective. Instead, she gets to tell her own story, in all of it's hormone-fueled, disillusioned, angsty glory.
To be fair, humans will be angsty whether or not it's warranted, but when someone's dying it becomes a necessity, and indeed I think that's the kind of heartbroken conflict that makes stories involving death so compelling - but only at a distance. Often the sick and dying (particularly in popular fiction) are made into characters we get to have opinions about, or are set up as foils for the protagonists to contend with as side-paths on their grand emotional journeys to self-discovery. Rarely do they get any major, independent story arc of their own unless it involves a miraculous recovery. Dying people are temporary, and as such it's very easy to dismiss experiences they have as fleeting and transient. It's difficult to get readers to invest in them because, hey, they won't be around for long anyway! Why watch them grow only to see them die shortly after this growth is achieved? What's the point?
Hazel has all of that death-darkness, but she's also a young person who is still figuring out what she thinks about life, the universe, and everything. It's a contrast that makes a shitty situation worse, because at a time that most people are filled with hope, possibility, and growth, she's met with the terrifying finality of her death, an end that's not all that far away. Which would normally make me want to feel sorry for her.
Not that I'm able to. Pity, after all, is something that we feel about someone else, not something we feel with them. By having Hazel speak for herself, Green has already pushed readers out of a fair few comfort zones, not the least of which is making us face the 'otherness' of death in the first person. As such, we don't get to glamorize Hazel or her experience. She's a kid. A very smart, mature, and witty one to be sure, but still a kid who is being drowned by water in her lungs. She manages these miserable set of circumstances with a huge amount of poise, but there are still moments of terrible short-sightedness, selfishness, and sheer human misery that are damn uncomfortable to read. Not because we want Hazel to be perfect, but because we don't want her to suffer.
So when she meets the dashing (but not literally, as he has a prosthetic leg as a testament to the cancer he was able to beat) Augustus Waters, it's fantastic to be able to see her take part in a grand romance in spite of her impending death, because she deserves to fall in love. A love made better because, much like Hazel herself, Augustus is far from perfect. Full of romantic gestures, self-sacrificing ideals, and a devotion to the dying, Hazel's knight in shining armor comes off as a co-dependent manic pixie dream boy, but one whose heart is so clearly in the right place that it's hard not to appreciate every over-the-top act of courtship he offers up to Hazel. As an example of his most effective gesture, their love story culminates with a book
Meanwhile, as they make googoo eyes at each other and be cute in general, we discover that Hazel and Augustus have very different views on what makes a life important. Hazel believes that a person should try to cause as little damage to the world as possible in the time they have, while Augustus believes that someone must do heroic, grand deeds in order to be worthy of distinction. If our protagonist described herself as a grenade, about to explode and take out everything around her in the process, Augustus would be the man who threw himself on top of her, sacrificing himself to spare the innocent villagers. (FYI - I'm not clever enough to come up with that imagery by myself. It's in the novel.)
It's all a contradiction - death residing in the young, the book within the book, books not belonging to their authors, and the ideals our two protagonists represent... Everything is at odds with itself. Yet, for all that, the story comes together so naturally and with such wit that it's an engrossing read. Plus, the book is smart. Although, admittedly, most of the subtleties and intertextuality (so many references guys - the Bible, The Great Gatsby, ancient myths, David Foster Wallace, Anne Frank... So many) flew right over my head as I just focused all of my attention on willing things to turn out okay for our heroes.
And while this isn't important to note to enjoy the book, part of Green's inspiration for the novel was a fan of his (and his brother) named Esther, a young girl who died of a form of cancer very similar to the kind Hazel is diagnosed with. So, The Fault in our Stars revolves around a dying girl living her life to the fullest, is inspired in part by a real girl who died, is about characters who are obsessed about a book without an ending while referring to so many other texts...
Does it make sense why I find all of this interesting?
That, I think, is a true testament to Green's talent. To be able to have an intricate, contradictory and skillful framework underlining a very emotional (sentimental?) story is a tough thing to manage without becoming overwrought or jarring for readers, which The Fault in our Stars avoids even in its most intellectual and heartbreaking moments.
And it is, by the way, heartbreaking. This story is populated by cancer-ridden folk, and that means that not everyone makes it to the end. The thing that makes The Fault in our Stars great is that it finds hope in the face of these dark circumstances, without glossing over the realities inherent in it's subject matter.
And for that, John Green deserves a cookie. At the very least. And a lot more people reading his books. Maybe even a pony. But reading his book would probably be enough.
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