If you have not read The Fault in Our Stars yet, be aware that there is some level of spoilage that will occur in this reaction. It is not a review, perse, but merely an essay of sorts that attempts to wrestles with one of the issues brought up by the story. If you would like to proceed with reading the novel with no spoilers, do not read this reaction. I offer this disclaimer in deference to those like myself who like to enter a book without the preconceptions many reviews foist upon us.
This book, I have heard, is beautiful. That it made readers cry. That they can’t wait to read it again. That it is John Green at his best.
It surely made me cry, and in the midst of those tears choke out an uncomfortable guffaw of laughter at the inescapable humor of adolescence.
But beautiful? Somehow this description seems odd.
Yes, it is beautifully written; there are sentences and whole passages that I copied over into my commonplace book (yes, a relic from a time before owning personal copies of books was ubiquitous). But as a whole, how can a book that makes us cry at the tragedy of cancer taking the lives of young people before they have had time to live as long as so many of us be called beautiful?
Is it the tragedy that is beautiful? The suffering? The love that Hazel and Augustus create? What is it we are in fact calling beautiful, and more important, why?
Even if you, as a reader, defend the notion that the beautiful part of The Fault in Our Stars is the romance of Hazel and Augustus, you are perpetuating the idea that tragic, suffering love is beautiful.
Was it beautiful when Augustus thought Hazel was going to die in the ICU and the only way he could see was to sneak in for a mere ten minutes?
Is it beautiful to be denied access to the one you love when their life is in jeopardy?
Was it beautiful when Hazel found Augustus in a pool of his own urine and she couldn’t do anything about it because the effort of moving him and removing the soiled sheets was beyond what her lungs could grant her strength to do?
Is it beautiful to stand by and watch helplessly while someone else tends to the person you love?
These are scenes of love at some of their ugliest moments. They are tragic moments that make us cry.
They are moments most of us will never face.
Till Death Do Us Part is a clause in the marriage vow that only the about 50% of marriages that persist will ever face. These days, only 59% of people in the US will get married, leaving a vague total of 29% of the population in successful marriages. Of that 29%, there is only a grand total of approximately 15% of the entire population that will survive their spouse. 15% of the entire population of the United States that makes it to Death Do Us Part.
Augustus and Hazel, at sixteen and seventeen years old, make it to Death Do Us Part.
To say this book is beautiful is to perpetuate the construction of celebrated sorrow and suffering. We are a culture, a world, that mourns, and we believe we do that beautifully. So in saying this book is beautiful, are we really saying it makes us mourn beautifully for Augustus and Hazel?
Because that is a selfish beauty. That is a beauty that treats this book like a reflective surface that merely serves to show us how we look when we suffer vicariously through fictional characters. Yes, it’s a work of fiction, but it is a work of fiction drawn from the uncomfortable truths of tragedy.
Love is genuinely beautiful. And Augustus doesn’t see, until he is faced with the inescapable promise of death, that that beauty, the beauty of honest and earnest love, is worth the charade of what we believe is beautiful sorrow. There is no beauty in leaving someone you love behind by choice. Monica shows us that by leaving Isaac. There is no beauty in that, only cowardice.
Sorrow, or suffering, isn’t beautiful. The world isn’t made any more beautiful for having experienced it. Hazel knows this when she rightly says the taste of broccoli in no way effects the taste of chocolate. But, the sadness left in the wake of loss that comes hand in hand with sorrow and suffering reminds us that there is beauty in the rest of the world. That there is beauty in the content of the scar that is left behind.
We cling to sorrow and mourning because it is the sequel we want but will never get. We mourn because no matter how beautiful the rest of our story is, it is the next story, the story that happens after the one we cherished has ended.
No one is ever taken from us at the right time; it is always the wrong time to lose people we love.
I thought I would want to read this book in the peaceful glow of early morning sunrise reflecting off fresh snow. But I began reading around eleven pm and simply could not stop. This is a story that refuses to pause. Hazel does not get to pause; Augustus does not get to pause. The short episode of their truncated love story is the pause they receive together in the midst of the crushing shadow of terminal illness.
The world is broken; the world has faults. But so do the stars. And they are beautiful.
No comments:
Post a Comment