The Fault in Our Stars

Published last year in hardback, this best-selling American novel raised huge interest even before publication and is now out in paperback. It concerns the growing love affair between a fiercely intelligent teenage boy and girl both suffering from terminal cancer. Victorian novelists used to write about dying children because there were so many of them. Today child death is a rarity at least in the developed world, yet more and more of them are once again cropping up in contemporary teenage fiction. At worst, such novels trade in mawkishness, with young death used as emotional shorthand for arousing readers’ attention quickly and easily. At best, stories with this plot encourage readers to face up to eternal questions about the very meaning of the life so many of us now take for granted until the arrival of old age. Which category does this novel fall into?

The answer seems a bit of both. The Fault in Our Stars is indeed an accomplished piece of writing. Teenagers Hazel and Gus swap wry observations about their conditions in dialogue that remains always fresh and unpredictable. The sexual tension in their relationship is sensitively dealt with, and the trip they make to Amsterdam together is beautifully described. There they visit a reclusive, alcoholic writer whose novel initially served to bring the young couple together. Their meeting with him turns into a disaster when Hazel pushes him too hard to answer some of the questions about his work which she had become obsessed by. His reply in unforgivably cruel, but the young people come out stronger for it.

If only the novel had ended there. But as in so many American films, the last section proves increasingly redundant and finally sentimental. Gus dies, Hazel mourns, and the parents concerned repeatedly cry, hug and tell their daughter how much they love her. The alcoholic writer is an unlikely presence at the funeral in search of expiation and Hazel just about lives on while experiencing anguished expressions of love for Gus both from herself and from everyone else who knew him. It is frankly a relief to finish a novel that begins so promisingly, sparkling even in the most daunting of circumstances before finally sinking under the weight of its determination to end on a ringingly positive note while making sure that absolutely no emotional stone is left unturned.