Visit to Peter Van Houten

The visit to Peter Van Houten's Amsterdam row house at Vondelstraat 158 was the culmination of Hazel Grace Lancaster's years-long obsession with the unfinished novel An Imperial Affliction. She and Augustus Waters had traveled across the Atlantic on his Wish from the Genie Foundation, believing that the reclusive author would finally answer the questions that had haunted her since she first read the book: whether Anna's mother married the Dutch Tulip Man, whether the Dutch Tulip Man was a con man, and what became of Sisyphus the Hamster. The meeting, however, became one of the most painful and disillusioning experiences of Hazel's life, exposing the gulf between the idealized author she had constructed and the broken man he had become.

The Arrival and First Impressions

Hazel and Augustus arrived at the white row house on a spring morning, the air filled with elm seeds that looked like pale confetti. Hazel wore Chuck Taylors, dark jeans, and a T-shirt printed with Magritte's Ceci n'est pas une pipe, a deliberate echo of the novel's protagonist, Anna. Loud rap music thumped from inside. When Augustus knocked, the door was opened by a potbellied man in baby-blue pajamas with thin hair, sagging jowls, and a week-old beard: Peter Van Houten. He squinted at them, slammed the door shut, and shouted for his assistant, Lidewij Vliegenthart, calling the teenagers "adolescent apparitions" and insisting that his offer to meet had been "rhetorical" and "symbolic." Lidewij, however, forced him to honor the invitation. Inside, the living room was sterile and empty except for a steel-and-leather couch and chair, and two large black garbage bags behind the couch—eighteen years' worth of unopened fan mail. Van Houten explained that Hazel's own letters had never been read; hers were the first missives he had replied to, and "look where that got me."

The Author's Cruelty and Evasion

Van Houten was already drinking Scotch before ten in the morning, and he grew more intoxicated and belligerent as the meeting progressed. He mocked Augustus's speechlessness, called Hazel's questions "childish whims," and refused to answer them directly. When Hazel pressed him about the Dutch Tulip Man, he declared that the character was not a con man or not a con man but "God"—"an obvious and unambiguous metaphorical representation of God"—and that asking what became of him was "the intellectual equivalent of asking what becomes of the disembodied eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg in Gatsby." He insisted that the characters had no life outside the scratches on the page and that he could no more tell her what happened to them than he could tell her what became of Proust's Narrator or Huckleberry Finn. When Hazel demanded he make something up, he refused, telling her to stop cursing in his house. The cruelty escalated: Van Houten told Hazel that she was "a side effect of an evolutionary process that cares little for individual lives" and "a failed experiment in mutation." He accused her of being "arrested" as a sick child who believed there was life after a novel ended, and claimed that her very existence depended on the pity she said she did not want.

Hazel's Confrontation and the Collapse of the Dream

Hazel, far from being cowed, stood her ground. She stepped toward Van Houten and said, "Listen, douchepants, you're not going to tell me anything about disease I don't already know. I need one and only one thing from you before I walk out of your life forever: WHAT HAPPENS TO ANNA'S MOTHER?" When he still refused, she reached down and smacked the swollen hand holding his Scotch glass, splashing the drink across his face and sending the glass spinning to shatter on the hardwood floor. Van Houten remained calm, asking Lidewij for a martini. Lidewij, who had been increasingly horrified, shouted "I RESIGN!" and burst into tears. Augustus, seeing that nothing more could be gained, took Hazel's arm and pulled her away toward the door. As they left, Van Houten ranted about the ingratitude of contemporary teenagers and the death of polite society, while Lidewij shouted back at him in rapid-fire Dutch.

Aftermath and the Letter from the Dead

Outside, Hazel cried for the first time since the swing set. Augustus held her and promised to write her an epilogue himself, better than anything "that drunk could write." Lidewij chased after them, apologized profusely, and took them to the Anne Frank House. The visit to Van Houten's home was a shattering of the fantasy that the author could provide closure, but it also revealed the depth of Augustus's love and loyalty. Months later, after Augustus's death, Hazel discovered that he had written a long letter to Van Houten in his final days, asking the author to write a eulogy for her. In that letter, which Hazel eventually read, Augustus wrote that Hazel "walks lightly upon the earth" and that the real heroes are not the people doing things but the people noticing things. The letter ended with the words: "I do, Augustus. I do." Van Houten, having read the letter, told Lidewij to send it to Hazel and said he had nothing to add. The visit to Van Houten thus became not the source of answers about a fictional world, but the occasion for a deeper understanding of the real one—and of the boy who loved her.