B Grades

Today would be a good day to continue my long-defunct series on why I give certain grades to the novels I read.  I believe I'm up to 'B' now.  Since I just gave a wonderful novel a grade of 'B' rather than what it would have scored had it ended better, maybe it's a good day to reflect on 'B' novels in general.

It's funny, because in movies a B-movie would be regarded as at once a failure and a success.  B-movies fall into that one and only awesome category of "so bad it's good."  It isn't quite so in my literary estimation.  'B' books are ones that are brilliantly written in some way or another but fall just shy of perfection.

'B' is for 'but.'  In other words, "this book is amazing, but...."  For instance, Paul Bowles's novel The Sheltering Sky is a beautiful depiction of the philosophy of life and fate, but I've often felt there was a missed opportunity with the character of Tunner.  I feel like he just disappears from the novel, and while I know that was Bowles's intention, I was left unsatisfied.  Remember, these grades are highly personal, so though I can step back and examine Bowles's motivations for the choices he made in the story, I still have a nagging feeling there could have been a different choice that would have been more satisfying.

That doesn't even mean I wouldn't give an 'A' grade to a book where something is left wholly unexplained.  I think The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides is extremely brilliant, and it gets a hearty 'A' even though there is a feeling that the reader (and the collective narrator) will never truly understand what led these girls to their decisions.  It's underlying, and the reader can infer, but I didn't finish the book feeling in any way dissatisfied with the events within.

'B' is for 'box.'  Because the books that earn a 'B' grade go in a box.  They don't go on my bookshelf because that's reserved for 'A' books, books on writing, journals, writing files, and miscellaneous items.  The 'B' books go in a box because for some reason I can't let them go but I may not know why.  Maybe, like Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, I will slowly realize it meant more to me than I originally thought.

'B' is, then, for 'back again.'  These are the books that seem to fester somewhere in the back of my mind, and it may be because they have flaws that I wish to examine.  Very few books are presented perfectly, and any author worth her salt would say there is always room for revision, even eighty-five years down the line (though not revision from some prescriptive bullshit editors who co-wrote a certain 'on writing' book).  These also may be the books that truly inspire, because where there are flaws there are opportunities for new writers to examine the other possiblities, what could have happened had the story taken the other fork in the road.  Tunner becomes a new character, with a new name, but his story is carried forward.  Tunner is 'back again.'

In the book I just finished, 1Q84, one of the main characters (Tengo) is a writer.  He ghost-writes a novel with a seventeen-year-old girl and then decides to continue the story in his own new novel, fleshing out the world the seventeen-year-old presented and putting new characters into it.  Tengo must have felt the original novel fell short of something, or at least that there was opportunity for exploration.  Is there a good 'B'-word for 'exploration'?

Yes.  'B' is for 'beyond.'  Beyond these characters and this particular story there is room to build.  'B' is also for 'building.'  The story, like the mansion from Rose Red, isn't finished and may keep 'building' itself if only in the imaginations of those who have entered.