Three Lives Book

I refuse to give it any stars...for this reason alone:

I was assigned it in undergrad (or at least one chapter, "Melanctha") for a class about white writers and how they construct race in their fictions.

I only read maybe 20 pages of said story, and no more, and ended up writing a 15 page paper on it. I was stoned and drunk at the time, having partied the night before I realized it was due. I kept going, the smoke and booze fueling my all-nighter. And, what's more, I clearly remember praying to Jesus that I would get through it with a D or something and basically not embarrass myself completely.

The paper was about how Stein uses the repetition of words and phrases signifing colour in a literal, adjectival sense but also to denote race but also using both aspects of this at once. For example: "they (black people, that is) shouted their black curses in the air"...she is using the word to describe not only the type of language but her impression of the language and also the type of people speaking as well as the type of speech they utter. Everybody knows Stein spent quite a bit of time with Picasso, Braque and so forth, suggesting that perhaps her inspiration for describing a different character might have come from the methods of the visual arts as much as anything else. She's using her words like brushstrokes, a dab of colour here, a daub of colour there, and voila!

Interesting, no? I guess it was just some good weed.

So I hand the paper in and wait with bated breath. I get it back and not only did it pass muster but the teacher in question actually gave me an A (!) quoted it in class (!!) and said it was, in parts, brilliant (!!!) and suggested I submit it for "Best Essay" senior year.

Needless to say I was shocked and totally taken aback.

I agreed to revise it, soup it up, and so on.

PROBLEM IS....I had a terrible math score on the SAT and I couldn't test out the minumum math requirement for my grungy radical liberal arts school. I had to take intermediate math in the last semester of my senior year. I'm failing wildly, getting 40's on tests and things, and starting to sweat bullets as to how to actually get the grade and graduate, for the love of god. My teacher was this obliviously cheerful Indian dude who had no idea what I was talking about and/or how to help me and guilelessly told me anyone could master the stuff, you just have to keep studying!

I was at wit's end until I discovered that I could take what was apparantly a ridiculously easy qualifying exam. I did, it was as ridiculously easy as they'd said (I didn't even need to use a calculator) and I passed it and thus withdrew from the class with maybe three weeks left in the semester.

True to form, the teacher had no problem with letting me withdraw and actually told me I was welcome to come in and take the final test anyway, Friday morning at 9 am, just to see how I would do.

NO. THANKS. I said then and I'll say it again, I'm not waking up at 9 AM on a Friday to take a math test "for old times' sake"...

So anyway I never got around to revising my essay, or reading the rest of the book or the chapter because I was occupied with terrifying and insurmountable math business for months.

I submitted the paper anyway and didn't get the nod, which went to my very good friend Ralph who had worked his ass off on his and had actually had several computers stolen from him throughout the semester. I wasn't anything but glad for Ralph, who is now a bartender in Brooklyn.

Epilogue:

I realized after looking this over (thanks for the 'likes', guys!) that I feel totally unqualified to rate this book simply because I still have not, to this day, read anything more than what I'd written about in the paper.