I don't have to waste a paragraph disclaiming what a nice guy John Green is. Because when you're a good writer, people don't have to tell other people how nice you are. I complement author's personalities the way people compliment that awkward prom date in the movies: only when there's nothing else to say.
I've never met John Green. John Green could be a real jerk, but it would be okay, because he's a tidy, witty, snarky writer, and in the grand scheme of things, personality isn't that big of a factor when you're a writer. Writers are sitting alone in cafes all over the world, typing out imaginary conversations between imaginary people and crying when figments of their imagination die, all of which requires very little personality.
The Fault in Our Stars is a cancer-patient-meets-cripple love story. I feel like there are a lot of these, but I couldn't actually tell you the title of another one. It's an archetype.
(I also feel like there are a lot of fictional cripples, and I could tell you excatly who they are. All the best people in the world are cripples. It's my motto. Peeta Mellark, Mathew Crawley, Hiccup in How to Train Your Dragon.)
For a premise crawling in stereotypes,
Fault does its best to be very anti-stereotypical. There's no bucketlist-ing. No one starts a cancer charity. But John Green is like Shakespeare.
John Green
is Shakespeare,
the way James Dashner books are actually Psych: in this dramatic, metaphorical way that I felt was fitting for a review about such a dramatically metaphorical book. It's not meant to be a form of praise
or an insult, if you're the kind of person that hates reading Shakespeare.
Were Romeo and Juliet alive, they would not be speaking to each other in iambic petameter. They both only have the brainpower to commit suicide at age fourteen and probably wouldn't know what iambic petameter is. But they're Shakespeare characters, and therefore have been infused with Shakespeare. As improbable as it might be, their uneducated nurses and servents know how to speak in philosophical spouts of poetry, too. Because they're Shakespeare characters.
Shakespeare isn't writing the way people speak. He's using these characters as vehicles to get
his ideas and
his words across, not theirs. Of course he had to. His stories weren't original. His writing, and not the stories he was writing about, were what made the plays worthwhile.
John Green's characters are like Shakespeare's. They're vehicles. They're pretty interesting vehicles. But that's what they are. I know people like these characters exist and I appreciate it. But the probablitiy of a seventeen-year-old boy sitting down, opening his mouth, and saying, "I fear oblivion like the proverbial blind man who's afraid of the dark," is slight.
And the probability of the sixteen-year-old girl sitting beside him saying, "There was a time before organisms experienced conciousness and there will be time after," is slight.
I wish sometimes I lived in a world where stewardesses either did or didn't permit metaphors onto airplanes and told you so. Where we all had great debates about whether or not "the breakfastization gives the scrambled egg a certain sacrality," or if that's "buying into the cross-stitched sentiments of your parents' throw pillows". Where my teenage friends and I discussed paradoxes that 19th century philosophers came up with. I would really like to live where ever this is, actually. But I don't.
I know every author has a specific style. No book is completely realistic. An author taints a story to the way their head sees things. John Green has a way of doing it excessively and it's noticable, like the way Shakespeare characters sound like Shakespeare wrote them. Does this mean the literal story is not worth reading, or the characters are uninteresting? Does it mean I didn't stay up until one AM reading this book? Does it mean I didn't cry at the dramatically metaphorical ending? Is Shakespeare a bad writer?
If I heard someone on the street speaking in iambic pentameter or discussing the Tortoise Paradox, I would be able to pick up pretty fast whose writing I had stumbled into. But I don't mind knowing the way these writers write. Because
when (always) they stylize their works, they both are shown to have a talent that so many writers don't have:
A good writer can describe things in a way you've never thought of before. But a
great writer can describe things in a way you've always thought about your whole life and never realized before. A good writer has a way of taking a story we've heard before and turning it into something new. But a
great writer has a way of taking a story we've heard before and turning it into something familiar.
This is the difference between nice guys and the ones that have every right to be jerks. And if it means that the profound words I have tacked onto my wall came out of the character of an airplane stewardess, or a fifteen year old boy as he played video games, then by all means.
"Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than the stories and people we're quoting."
-John Green
