I don’t read many Young Adult (YA) novels, but if they are this good, I need to read more! Am glad my book club chose this book because otherwise, I may not have read it, particularly given its subject matter of teenaged romance of cancer sufferers.
Hazel Grace is 16, and a cancer survivor – for the time being. She is very ill, needing to carry around an oxygen tank at all times amongst many other struggles, but she is bright, feisty, original, and resolutely set against being determined solely by her cancer. She runs us through all the cheesy (her word) cancer cliches –
“I was living with cancer not dying of it […]
I mustn’t let it kill me before it kills me”
That’s your battle. And you’ll keep fighting […] you’ll…live your best life today”
and introduces the uninitiated reader to concepts like ‘cancer perks’ – gifts and treats given to children with cancer. The novel shares how a cancer patient like Hazel may feel herself a ‘grenade’ in the lives of those she loves most, knowing she will bring them great sorrow when she dies – and for her, it is likely to quite soon. Despite her loving parents assuring her that her presence brings them much more happiness than the sorrow of her losing her will, she still feels she is the “alpha and omega” of her parents’ suffering. She is an unusual girl, precocious of course, but quite endearingly so, and singularly addicted to the ironic, such as in the shirt she chooses to wear when meeting her idol author:
“The shirt was a screen print of a famous Surrealist artwork by Rene Magritte in which he drew a pipe and then beneath it wrote in cursive Ceci n’est pas une pipe. (“This is not a pipe.”)
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Hazel is both mature for her age, and also a typical teenager in some ways; she can be typically teenaged world-weary and cynical, but there is a particular bite to her cynicism because it is also her way of dealing with and defence against a tsunami of suffering and vulnerability. In her Support Group which she does not particularly enjoy, Hazel
listened to Patrick recount for the thousandth time his depressingly miserable life story – how he had cancer in his balls and they thought he was going to die but he didn’t die and now here he is, a full-grown adult in a church basement in the 137th nicest city in America, divorced, addicted to video games, mostly friendless, eking out a meagre living by exploiting his cancertastic past, slowly working his way towards a master’s degree that will not improve his career prospects, waiting, as we all do, for the sword of Damocles to give him the relief that he escaped all those many years ago when cancer took both his nuts but spared what only the most generous soul would call his life.
p4-5
And yet, Hazel manages to remain just this side of ‘bitchiness’ – managing not to be too mean, even when she is at her worst.
It is clear Hazel is well read (a passionate reader in fact) and witty. She falls for 17 year old Augustus Waters who is the friend of a friend in that Support Group, who himself was also a cancer survivor and knows that language and lingo very well. Hazel and Augustus are extremely compatible personalities, hitting it off at once, and have shared interests, particularly books, and share the ones they love best at their first meeting. Hazel loves one book above all others, An Imperial Affliction, which she identifies closely with. It turns out the author retired to Amsterdam, and never intends to write a sequel. Augustus manages to make contact with his author, and to arrange a trip for them, at the author’s invitation, to Amsterdam to meet him and listen to the untold end of his novel.
This is a charming read, extremely true to form of teenagers’ interactions – well, of intelligent and self-aware teenagers anyway – often brief, often jokey and pithy, oscillating between flippant and intense, self-conscious, self-absorbed, touching in some ways because so exposed and so innocent for all their attempted worldliness. There are many wonderful moments and sentences in the novel which vividly conveyed the sentiment while never lapsing into sentimentality, like Hazel going to a funeral and observing
There were maybe eighty chairs set up in the room, and it was two-thirds full but felt one-third empty.
p268
However, I do have one major criticism of this otherwise excellent novel – Hazel’s voice and Augustus’ start to become pretty similar – they seem to think/say the same kinds of things, with the same wit, and same takes….and yet according to themselves, they are so very different people. But rapidly, Augustus seems to be turning into Hazel – by the end, it is difficult to make out any different really, in their voices. Augustus started out as nowhere near as eloquent as Hazel, but he ends up sounding exactly like her. Actually, many voices in the novel end up sounding like Hazel – this for instance:
I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased towards consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed.
p223
This sounds exactly like something Hazel would think, but it is apparently spoken by her father, who says he is a biochemistry major, “not a literature guy”. It is not the idea which is improbably from her father, it is the way it is put, the sentence construction, which sounds like Hazel’s. Ah well. It does not compromise reading enjoyment too much. And for most part, this writing is so good, that even if there may be this small niggle, the rest is well worth anyone’s time, young and old adults alike. An author who paces his story well, and can evoke powerful emotion without every lapsing into the maudlin.
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