C Grades

The widest category of all. I would conjecture seventy-or-so percent of all books fall into a 'C' category. And you know, it's not even really about mediocrity. I mean, it is, on one level, but it's also about 'c'ompare and 'c'ontrast.

'C'omparing one book to another is something one of my former professors hated. I guess he's right if you take the point of view of yet another professor (though I dropped the second's class after one appalling day) that no two authors can tell the same story unless they plagiarize. During college, I read for professor #1's class One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende. It is very, very difficult not to 'c'ompare these two novels. They both deal with generations of a particular family in South America, and both are magical realism. The bad thing is, Garcia Marquez's book is a pioneer of the genre. Allende's book, while good at times itself, doesn't revolutionize the genre and, furthermore, didn't really wow me otherwise, either. Allende of course would cite Garcia Marquez as one of her influences, and sometimes it's hard to shake the ghost of that influence. I give Allende credit for telling the story only she could tell - but in the wake of Solitude it's just not that special.

'C'ontrasting, to me, is the heart of literary criticism. How does one book contrast to another? How, to follow the idea of professor #2, did each author bring his own aesthetic to his particular telling of the old story? According to Stephen King, there are something like nineteen archetypes for stories, and I believe there are others who would argue that down to about six. Maybe those archetypes correspond to the six major emotions: disgust (or hate), happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and surprise (boy, four of those are terrible emotions and surprise is a coin toss - so we have a one-in-six chance of experiencing happiness in this world?). Anyway, how can a new novel make a reader respond with one of these emotions in a new way? This is how new novels 'c'ontrast to other novels.

And the unfortunate thing about Allende, for me, is that she didn't make me respond to these emotions in a new way. You know, thinking it through, I think the most important emotion may be surprise. I want to be surprised at how a book makes me feel. I think when I give a book a grade of 'C', it's because it failed to surprise me in any way, good or bad. Failing books surprise me in a bad way, by either confusing or insulting me. Passing books surprise me in a good way, by focusing on the subject in a way I wouldn't have previously thought to do so. 'C' or 'low-pass' books just make me go, "Oh, yeah, I guess."

One book that surprised me in a good way is Lauren Slater's Lying. It's a memoir. But guess what she does? She lies. The important part, though, is that she admits that for a long, long time, she believed everything she recounts to have been the truth and was shocked to learn it was all false. Because of my own obsession with false memories, I found this book to be a refreshing take on how we perceive the world, what 'the truth' means, and what makes us who we are. Abe Akira's short story Peaches does something similar, although many fiction anthologies include his story because the narrator isn't sure how to sort the truth from the fiction.

When I was in grad school, I had to take a memoir class and it ended up being incredibly enlightening. On one of the first days, our professor stood at the chalkboard and had us come up with categories memoirs often go in, i.e. stories of illness, stories of childhood trauma, stories of divorce, etc. What we discovered was there are very few original stories, even in real life. And even though each person's story, as tired as the subject matter is, should be riveting because it's so personal, it just plain isn't always that interesting.

I have a hard time giving 'C' grades to any story about the Holocaust. I know I should, but it just seems like such a monumental amount of anger, fear, and sadness it's hard to not be surprised at every turn. I'm also afraid of reinforcing what my students said about the events of the Holocaust not being all that bad. But, isn't every story of anger, fear, and sadness monumental? I don't know, but I'm able give 'C' grades out like 'c'andy as long as it's not about the Holocaust.

'C' is for 'C'ommonplace. How fast did I read it? How much did I remember? Why wasn't I more engaged? Who would I recommend this book to? If the answers are fast, because nothing was new, no one and everyone, then I know it's a 'C' book. It's a shrug-of-the-shoulders. It's a see-for-yourself. It's an I-could-do-better. I guess they're as good as any other way to pass the time.