I've just finished this novel, and I have so many contradictory and perhaps "sharp" or critical (as in finding fault) things to say about this book - which I basically enjoyed and would recommend.
The first thing I have to say is that I am sad. I probably didn't cry as much as some readers, but I imagine that was because I was in a public place about 75% of the time I was reading the book. I would guess that not crying did not help me to be less sad. There were certain sentences in the book that immediately made me want to cry.
I found myself feeling uncomfortable with the unbearable pain of losing a young person to cancer being transformed into an entertainment. Eventually, I realized that I had my own experience with this phenomenon, and perhaps my critical attitude had to do in part with how much I minded having my faded pain unearthed and freshened.
There is something weird about how we respond to the death of young people. I noticed it when I was in high school and the president of the senior class killed himself. Someone said, breathlessly, "I sat at his lunch table," as if physical proximity to someone who died not that long after was in some way significant. I think I thought at the time that there was something callous and insincere about this reaction and perhaps it was only that it was wonder and stupefaction rather than real grief. Death is so other; so strange and unlike our other experiences.
The book begins with an odd disclaimer. Green reminds the reader that the book is a work of fiction and that too much and nothing literal/real/thinly veiled should be read into it.
The first thing I have to say is that I am sad. I probably didn't cry as much as some readers, but I imagine that was because I was in a public place about 75% of the time I was reading the book. I would guess that not crying did not help me to be less sad. There were certain sentences in the book that immediately made me want to cry.
I found myself feeling uncomfortable with the unbearable pain of losing a young person to cancer being transformed into an entertainment. Eventually, I realized that I had my own experience with this phenomenon, and perhaps my critical attitude had to do in part with how much I minded having my faded pain unearthed and freshened.
There is something weird about how we respond to the death of young people. I noticed it when I was in high school and the president of the senior class killed himself. Someone said, breathlessly, "I sat at his lunch table," as if physical proximity to someone who died not that long after was in some way significant. I think I thought at the time that there was something callous and insincere about this reaction and perhaps it was only that it was wonder and stupefaction rather than real grief. Death is so other; so strange and unlike our other experiences.
The book begins with an odd disclaimer. Green reminds the reader that the book is a work of fiction and that too much and nothing literal/real/thinly veiled should be read into it.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
This is not so much an author's note as an author's reminder of what was printed in small type a few pages ago: This book is a work of fiction. I made it up.
Neither novels nor their readers benefit from attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species.
I appreciate your cooperation in this matter.
After the book concludes, there is a acknowledgemwnt of many people that includes the family of Esther Earl, the young woman to whom the book is dedicated, and who has presumably died of cancer.
As you can see from the very fact I mentioned this, I really did not "get it." To me, it's patently obvious that readers may be passionately interested in the facts that lie inside a story and that academic criticism holds that those increase our understanding and appreciation of the story. This is the first book I've read by John Green and I find myself wondering if all of his books are written in this style, which I see as a highly entertaining mashup of low colloquialisms and high diction. I usually love that kind of stuff, and it's a very big part of why I enjoyed this book and why I recommend it. But the whole thing about the author's note makes me nervous.
The flavor of the novel first appears in the second paragraph:
Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying.
The book goes in for a lot of criticism of the empty comfort that is offered to cancer patients (the support group leader who soberly intones, "We are literally in the heart of Jesus," while that cannot be true). And there is a great deal of discussion of the search for meaning for dying people who do not believe in heaven or are not sure that they believe in heaven.
Hazel is a sixteen year-old cancer patient; at her mother's insistence, she very reluctantly attends a cancer support group meeting. While there, she meets someone new, a young man who has had "a touch" of osteocarcinoma.
She is intrigued by him, and he is also very impressed by her. They grow close in painful and sometimes absurd circumstances.
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