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. 

The Story and Its Writer

One autumn, over a period of about four months, I worked my way through the anthology The Story and Its Writer: Fifth Edition. It contains something like 140 short stories, plus some essays and commentary that I'm currently working through. The stories in the volume are, to any extent, the best of Western Literature with a slight mixture of authors from farther East. Of course I found most stories to be, on a personal scale, mediocre, but I don't think that diminishes their worthiness to be included in such an anthology. No one could possibly be fundamentally affected by every story in a 140-story volume. But just on a personal note, these are the stories that for some reason resonated deeply with me:

Peaches by Abe Akira
River of Names by Dorothy Allison (more than any other)
An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce
The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski
The Company of Wolves by Angela Carter
A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner
That Evening Sun by William Faulkner
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
My Kinsman, Major Molineux by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (arguably the most important)
The Rocking-Horse Winner by D. H. Lawrence
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates


The stories people thought I would love that I actually hated or felt mild distaste for:

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie
On with the Story by John Barth (I've talked about this before)
Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Lottery by Shirley Jackson
How to Become a Writer by Lorrie Moore
A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor
Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut

Right now I won't go through each one and what I loved about it. Anyone who has read most of the stories in the first category will know a lot of them deal with something supernatural or with temporal dissonance. But they do so rather cleverly. Anyway, I was just anthologizing a little myself.

P.S.  I hate Blogger's new layout.  Hate it.

Philosophy Is the Talk on the Cereal Box

Awesome lyrics from Paul Simon's wife.

What I've learned from reading The Magic Mountain is that I don't get most philosophical debate. My little mind can't wrap itself around abstract ideas when they are presented in paragraphs that go on for pages and never give any concrete examples.

At one point, the main character, Hans Castorp, has what is clearly a dream from the very onset of the scene (though I think we're supposed to think it's really happening for a time) and through the images and events of the dream I came to an understanding of how Hans Castorp felt about two other characters who were always arguing their beliefs in front of Hans Castorp (he is always referred to by his full name in the book). Two witches are ripping apart a blond-haired baby and eating him alive? I immediately understood this image (Hans Castorp is blond).

Following this scene, however, is about two - three pages of narrated explanation of how Hans Castorp feels. Maybe this is necessary for readers who can't make connections between images like I can. That's fine and I'm glad Thomas Mann was thinking of them. But what it turns into for me is a daydreaming session where I wander off into my own thoughts while simultaneously reading words that go nowhere for me.

Here's the kicker - if I didn't have the dream sequence I wouldn't know how Hans Castorp feels about the two men arguing around him. I would just be skimming a paragraph that goes over my head because it's too abstract and too grand for me to pay attention. Maybe Mann is a genius for including both so he leaves no reader behind.

Writing Philosophy

While watching Project Runway, I was yelling at one of the designers about her supposed design philosophy. Suddenly, I realized that I have a teaching philosophy but no writing philosophy. My teaching philosophy is: "We communicate through personal experiences that contain universal truths." But what is my writing philosophy? I don't know. I'm going to think hard about it, though.

Meanwhile, I'm reading Ulysses by James Joyce. It will take all week, I think.