The Fault in Our Stars

Hazel, Hazel’s mother, and Augustus land in the Netherlands. They marvel at seeing the Old World, where most of the buildings date back to the 17th century; Hazel thinks “how wonderfully strange it would be to live in a place where everything [has] been built by the dead” (156). Hazel sleeps off her jet lag in the hotel room until it is time for dinner. Peter Van Houten’s assistant has made reservations for Hazel and Augustus at Oranjee, a fancy restaurant. Hazel puts on a new dress, and Augustus wears a suit and tie. At the restaurant, they are served champagne and amazing food. Hazel revels in the experience of being a teenage girl who dresses up to go to a romantic dinner with a hot guy. Some of the other diners toast Hazel and Augustus in Dutch, and someone translates the toast as “the beautiful couple is beautiful” (164). 

After dinner, Hazel and Augustus walk around the city and stop on a park bench to talk. Hazel is surprised to learn that Augustus believes in an afterlife, and he tells her he fears oblivion because he wants his life to serve a greater good. They talk about his girlfriend Caroline Mathers, who died, and how her brain tumor made her moody, vindictive, and angry at the world. After seeing her, Augustus decided during his own chemotherapy “to feel really hopeful. Not about survival specifically, [but] about just being able to marvel at it all” (174). The outing is a moment of joy and excitement for both of them. For this evening, they aren’t cancer kids, but just kids, enjoying the romance and possibility of youth, thrilled to be with each other and confident that tomorrow, their questions will be answered. 

Hazel wakes up really early, excited about the meeting with Peter Van Houten. She dresses in an outfit inspired by Anna, the heroine of An Imperial Affliction: jeans, Chuck Taylors, and a shirt with René Magritte’s famous pipe painting on it. They arrive at Van Houten’s house, and he answers the door in pajamas; he is drinking Scotch first thing in the morning, and his manners are extremely rude. He deflects Hazel’s questions about the novel with a long philosophical discourse about how “some infinities are bigger than other infinities” (188). When she presses him about what happens to the characters in the novel after it ends, he replies brutally that the characters don’t exist outside the marks on the page and that her questions are tiresome.“‘I regret that I cannot indulge your childish whims, but I refuse to pity you in the manner to which you are well accustomed,’” he says. “‘Like all sick children, you say you don’t want pity, but your very existence depends upon it’” (192). He goes so far as to wonder why people give sick children food, water, and expensive treatments, knowing they are unlikely to live. Hazel becomes angry at this point, not at his ruthless remarks about sick children, but because he assumes she hasn’t thought the same things herself. She curses at Van Houten and knocks the drink out of his hand before Augustus pulls her out the door, trying to comfort her by saying he’ll write the sequel to the novel himself. 

Lidewij, Van Houten’s assistant, is horrified by his behavior and quits on the spot. She follows Hazel and Augustus out the door and offers to show them something of Amsterdam. They drive to the Anne Frank House. There are no elevators inside, so Hazel has to climb a huge number of steep stairs, which is very difficult given the condition of her lungs. They watch films of Otto Frank, Anne’s father and the only member of the family to survive the war, and Hazel thinks again about the pain of parents who lose their children. Augustus wishes he and Hazel could become a vigilante duo, pursuing Nazis and other villains all over the world; Hazel kisses him in the middle of the museum. When they get back to the hotel, Hazel’s mom is still out touring the city. After watching him double over in pain on the elevator, Hazel returns with Augustus to his room, where they have sex for the first time. 

The next morning, Hazel and Augustus tell Hazel’s mom “the funny version” of their meeting with Peter Van Houten, making him out to be an old drunk fool (209). Hazel’s mom departs after this, saying ominously that she knows the kids need to talk. Augustus sits down and tells a suddenly worried Hazel that just before she went into the ICU the last time, he felt a pain in his hip and went in for a PET scan to detect a possible recurrence of his bone cancer. The scan showed that his cancer has spread to his chest, hips, and liver; he is dangerously sick, sicker than she is. He began palliative chemo but gave it up to take the Amsterdam trip with Hazel. This was the cause of the fight that Hazel and her mom overheard when they came to pick him up to go to the airport.

Hazel realizes that she was wrong to try to stop Augustus from falling in love with her: “Only now that I [love] a grenade [do] I understand the foolishness of trying to save others from my impending fragmentation. I [can’t] unlove Augustus Waters. And I [don’t] want to” (213). Augustus reflects bitterly that, though he is someone who wants to fight for a noble cause, the battle of his life will actually be against cancer—against tumors that are, after all, part of his own body; they are “made of me as surely as my brain and my heart are made of me” (216).Hazel tries to be comforting and optimistic, but her efforts fall flat; they resort, ultimately, to gallows humor and then to making out.