The Fault in Our Stars

Augustus is the novel’s other main character, a 17-year-old former basketball star who has lost his lower leg to bone cancer. Augustus has a native optimism and a humorous, carefree outlook that counterbalances Hazel’s more guarded pessimism. He loves video games, adventure novels, and action movies, and maintains a more active social life than Hazel. Augustus is curious, passionate, and intellectual; he strongly desires to make his mark on the world by doing something heroic and grand. Unlike Hazel, Augustus seizes pleasure where he finds it, undeterred by the potential future pain he might cause himself or others. 

Van Houten is the author of Hazel’s favorite book, An Imperial Affliction, a novel about Anna, a teenage girl with leukemia. The novel was inspired by Van Houten’s own daughter, who died of leukemia at the age of eight. An American descended from a wealthy Dutch family, Van Houten left the United States and hasn’t written anything in the ten years since An Imperial Affliction was published. An abrasive, alcoholic shell of a man who has never recovered from the death of his daughter and the end of his marriage, he lives on his inheritance in Amsterdam. He is an erudite and brilliant person; his conversation is as densely literary and philosophical as it is cynical and heartless. By the end of the novel, his correspondence with Augustus prompts him to make some apologetic gestures toward Hazel, but his future after the book ends—appropriately—is left in doubt.