the fault, dear brutus, is in our stars (book #2)

The Fault in Our Stars - John Green

please pay specific attention to the cheery blurb from jodi piccoult.

My Goodreads Review:

i need to write this now, when the book is still raw, before i forget the minutiae and the emotion as i get suckered into another text. there will probably be spoilers, i fear. i've never been good at self-censoring, particularly in book reviews. read at your own risk.

first, in full disclosure: i was a little disappointed in the pre-ordering of this novel. yes, i dreamt of yetis and hanklerfishes, but moreover, i dreamt that i'd actually get to read the book on its release date. or thereabouts. instead, three days later, the book arrived, to the wrong address, and with no additional signatures to ease the blow of such a monumental disappointment.

alas, there's an old adage about beggars and choosers that i'm conveniently forgetting here.

still, i decided not to let that pepper my review negatively. it is, after all, not john green's novel's fault that it couldn't arrive in a timely fashion with multiple autographs.

right?

i pre-ordered TFiOS solely based on the simple pretext that i happen to enjoy the way john green crafts intelligent teenagers. yes, i find him formulaic, or, more specifically, that, like shakespeare he has types and blueprints that he constantly reimagines for his own purposes (eclectically named teenager - usually male, but here, finally, like pixar, female, road trip in search of some deep-rooted universal truth, highly literary in scope and reference, crude humor at times usually involving urine, the all-encompassing power of teen love, girl with weird colored nail polish, etc, etc) but i also find him enjoyable. he writes the way i wish people talked. his characters love the way i wish love felt.

so, to say that i was surprised to be reading a book about terminal cancer within the opening pages is a bit of the old understatement.

maybe i should have been tipped off by the praise from jodi piccoult that this book wasn't necessarily going to be light and fluffy.

not that green favors fluff, but that, generally, there's hope and happiness somewhere towards the end of it all.

death lingers here, a bad feeling you can never quite shake off. it's everywhere. in your face. behind each word, each action. it's both imminent and remote, which gives a sort of claustrophobic and tragic aura, even in the funny moments.

and there are funny moments here. most of the cancer perks, particularly ones involving augustus's driver's license, are incredibly funny. it's all the typical quick-witted snark and banter of a john green novel, just with the omnipresent threat that these could be the last words this character says.

in terms of dealing with life and death, the philosophical bent of the text works well; these aren't kids to pity but to fall in love with. and that's pretty special.

my chief complaints are this:

1. i saw very easily where we were headed here and it pissed me off immensely. i'm not sure what the intended purpose of the finality of the story was, but, to me, it spoke to the inherent unfairness of life and to the simple fact that one man's oblivion is another man's infinity. it's beautiful in theory but in reality it sucks as a bitter pill to have to swallow.

2. the fake epigraph. this immediately bristled. i'm a recent convert to the altar of gatsby and i felt that the made-up epigraph spoke to a much more subtle and subversive motif in that text. here, when one of the character inevitably brings up gatsby, i sort of wanted to groan, sigh disgustedly, and spit out, "what a load of horse crap, eh, kid?"

3. and, while we're on that subject, let's talk about peter van houten, the pickled author of said fake quote. we had potential here for salinger-esque greatness, but what we got was sad, hollowed out banality. of course he has a tragic connection to his own staggering work of genius, of course he can't give the children what they need/want from him, and of course he cannot possibly make better a situation that is only, by its inherent definition, getting worse. so what's the point? his addition felt extraneous and incomplete, and, worse, it only served to point out the cruelness of both hazel's and gus's lives. and maybe life in general. he wasn't a beacon of hope. he wasn't even a beacon of inspiration. he was a mediocre man posing as this literary genius but nothing about him seemed to merit such acclaim. i just didn't get him.

4. the weak understanding of the term "hamartia" - look, i get it. john green is very smart. and he writes characters that are also very smart (it's one of the reasons i read him - for, as improbable as they are, i hope for a future filled with more kids who memorize william carlos williams for fun). so it's incredibly disappointing to see them espouse a definition of hamartia that is far more over-simplified than it should be (and echoed later by the superfluous peter van houten in the same simplistic vein). hamartia, in the classic aristotelian understanding, is meant to be more than merely "fatal flaw" as it gets defined here. it is a mistake or wrongdoing brought about in some capacity by said flaw (i.e. when hamlet, in an out-of-character act of rashness, stabs a decorative wall hanging and murders polonius. yes, it is a minor complaint, but, if green is going to insist on creating such preciously insightful teenagers, please make sure they are thorough in their understanding of literary terminology.

still, for me, this is solidly 4 stars. i laughed, i cried, i cried a little harder. and maybe there's something to say about confronting the fragility of life once in awhile to actually remember how to live.

i just wouldn't want to do it every day.