Inevitable Death

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green


As I have said before, I like to read Young Adult Fiction when I want a fast book read. Young Adult Fiction quickly establishes its characters and the plot; and keeps everything moving swiftly to the end. It is as if the Young Adult Fiction Authors had all taken an intensive fiction writing course in The Works of Ernest Hemingway or Ellen Gilchrist. Keep the language simple but effective and spell it properly (::cough Twitter::)

This novel is narrated by Hazel who is fourteen or sixteen (let us say fifteen then) and has Stage IV cancer in her lungs. Her breathing is assisted by her faithful oxygen pump and later at night by a BiPAP. But even with assistance, most of her energy is spent on actually making herself breath and feeling the effects of not being successful at that.
I can commiserate with Hazel and appreciate Mr. Green's description of her breathing problems because I once had severe anemia combined with high altitude sickness. I never appreciated my body's ability to perform involuntary but perfunctory body maintenance requirements until I had to consciously supervise my own breathing, or not breathe and suffocate. It was an unpleasant memory to review as I read this book.

Hazel devotes her life to breathing with mechanical assistance while she awaits for her cancer to figure out how to defeat an experimental drug that has managed to corral her lung tumors from running free through the rest of her lungs and her body. When Hazel is able to distract some of her attention to other things; she takes a course or two at a community college, goes to Young Adult's Cancer Therapy Sessions, and re-reads a book called An Imperial Affliction by Peter Van Houten which is about a girl dying of cancer.

Hazel really loves An Imperial Affliction because she thinks that the author got dying young of cancer right. Hazel appears to be able to overcome the discomfort that an accurate description of her sisyphus struggles just to live that the book evokes. She is a better woman than me, I don't like to read about Hazel's struggles to breathe.

Hazel's favorite "dying of cancer" book ends abruptly with an ellipse... Hazel wants to know what happened to the book's heroine. Hazel accepts the fact that the heroine probably died of her cancer, but Hazel wants to know what happened to her family and friends after her death. Hazel wants for her favorite character what Hazel cannot have for herself. How does the World go on without Her in it? What happens after Death? It is not a question of Heaven or Hell or Nothingness Void or Karma or whatever has been speculated by the Living about Death. Hazel wants to be the Dead speculating about the Living after her removal from the World of the Living that she knows exists because she was involved in it briefly.

That is another reason why I like well-written Young Adult Fiction, it does deal with some big issues and concepts. Just as we all did as Young Adults between our fervid and hopeless crushes on our Love Objects.

And Hazel does acquire a boyfriend from her Young Adults Dying of Cancer meetings. He is tall and broad shouldered and beautiful in that androgynous way of young men before all that testosterone kicks in and kills and thickens and coarsens the beauty when they hit their mid-twenties. The boyfriend also is minus a leg lost to Bone Cancer. So the two have a lot in common, maybe more than Romeo and Juliet (that was such a sex only thing).

Hazel wins her new boyfriend over to admiration of An Imperial Affliction and the two of them decide after their letters and E mails don't do it; to visit the author and find out what happened to the other characters in the book, and also to find out why Mr. Van Houten never wrote a sequel to the book nor any other book.

Mr. Van Houten left for the Netherlands (nice pun) after his book was published and much like J. D. Salinger after Catcher in the Rye, Mr. Van Houten has disappeared into self-induced anonymity. At this point in the book, I pictured Mr. Van Houten keeping up his health in Amsterdam by keeping his eyes clear from glaucoma with his weed medications and swimming the canals to keep his body healthy and always using a condom (pay attention Young Adults!).

Hazel does find Mr. Van Houten and she does find out What some of the Living Do after their Dead have Gone, but not in a direct or comforting way.

When the Dead Travel, they aren't allowed to Look Back, as Orpheus discovered.