The Book Thief Post #2

I gave up as soon as I was told to pay attention down the road, then had a metaphor that hadn't happend yet explained to me, then time jumped again.

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. 

Curious

Right now I'm reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and it was my favorite book so far this year until last night. Last night I realized I don't sympathize anymore with the protagonist/narrator. You see, the narrator has autism and everything is told through his perspective which is interesting and that wasn't a problem until halfway through the book when something big was revealed.

And what I realized is I didn't feel the same about his situation as he feels. After two major revelations from his father, which were scary and horrible and all, the narrator becomes afraid of his father. And while a part of me completely understands, there is also a part of me that doesn't feel the same because I don't feel his father would ever really hurt him. He could in all plausible honesty, but I don't really feel the same fear that he would as the narrator.

The other problem - and I know this is going to sound really, really horrible - is that I don't feel like the narrator feels love. I don't feel a sense of loss other than a loss of feeling safe. I don't feel like he's being pulled between a fear of what his father is capable of and a sense of the father he's losing. I feel like he's losing a longtime roommate and not a father, and I feel like his father feels like he's losing his son. I know that the book is being true to the logical way autistic children approach life and I'm sure there is love underlying that logic but I don't feel it and so I'm only reading to see how the book concludes and not because I care what happens to the narrator. I feel at this point like no matter what happens I won't really care and I'm not rooting for a certain outcome. That's a problem because a lot of people would have put this book down by this point, I think.

I like the approach of giving a voice to autistic children and trying to understand how they navigate the world. But - but - it's really hard, and we've talked about this before, to read a whole novel where the main character isn't someone you can sympathize with. It's hard to explain because the things that happened in the part of the story I read last night are horrible and I do sympathize with his situation but (I'm a bad person) I just don't sympathize with him. He exhibits signs of loss, like when he vomits after one thing is revealed or screams after the second is revealed, but he's disconnected from those feelings and in fiction this causes me to be disconnected from them, too. If more than one person reads this blog, and I doubt it and that one person is probably going to be appalled at my reaction, but if more than one person reads this I'll probably get many angry comments about being unsympathetic to a person with a disability. But I can't help feeling frustrated.

Maybe that's the point. I'm sure often with autistic children the people around them become frustrated with the lack of emotion or the quirks or what seem like sudden outbursts. Maybe I'm meant to come out of this with more patience because I'll have learned something about how different minds think about or handle situations. And I will, and I feel like I have learned. But that doesn't make the story any more compelling. I think I'll really feel bad if more horrible things happen (I will feel bad) because he's just a kid no matter how detatched he seems to be from his emotions. But (sighhhhh) I think this could be any character and I would feel bad for him. Giving him autism wasn't enough to make him compelling.

I remember once in workshop a fellow student wrote about a character who had a stutter, and our professor asked what made this character special beyond having a stutter. And none of us could answer, because if we took away the stutter the character was bland and uninteresting. The narrator in Curious Incident is a little more fleshed out and just a tad more real but still not gripping.

Maybe I'll read the next page and all this will change. I don't know. I'm jumping the gun a little here, I do know that, but I just wanted to get out how I felt. I'll have a full report sometime this weekend.

The Debate about Art

One man's trash is another man's treasure. All agreed that's an old expression? Any naysayers? Good. Now here's a question: what if it's another man's treasure but his use for it has been fulfilled. What if another man picks up said treasure and incorporates it into his own treasure?

One of my ideas for The Orchard Boy Series is to have one storyline in each novella revolving around a character who is continued from the end of another story. A famous story (or, usually, a not-so-famous story; let's say a published story instead). I just have reservations about this. Here are my reasons:

1. Is it considered plagiarism? It's not taking someone's words and making them my own, and it's not really taking someone's idea and making it my own, but it is taking someone's character and essentially making it my own. I know a lot of people have done this - most recently I can recall March by Geraldine Brooks, which takes up the story of what Mr. March from Little Women was doing during his youth and while he was away from his family. This book won the Pulitzer Prize.

2. A lot of people have been doing this lately, so will it be like jumping on a bandwagon? The idea came to me when I was thinking about an old short story I read long ago, and how the ending to that story was ambivalent, and imagining that ending and what happened to the characters, and then re-imagining that ending to have gone in a more fantastic direction.

3. The idea will also play off of another of my favorite series - The Dark Tower Series, by Stephen King. In the first book, The Gunslinger, one of the characters dies (again) and says, as he dies, "There are other worlds than these." In a sense, he is saying he will live on in another world, in another fantasy. He can be brought back. Is it okay to play off of this idea? Maybe King would love that - the continuation of his idea. That he inspired someone's creativity.

I think it's hard to answer all of these questions, and at the same time, I think all of these questions have already been answered. Countless characters show up in other people's novels, and sometimes it turns out beautifully. I suppose it's true that there are about nineteen archetypes for a story and we just retell them, over and over, so it can't really matter anymore. There are only six real emotions (love, hate, fear, joy, grief, and surprise). It's how we decide to utilize those emotions, how we tell those stories, how we grow those characters that make them unique though they are really ubiquitous.