The Doors drone in the background of my mind as I write this, my foolish friend. I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about the beginning of novels and stories. Certainly a strong beginning is essential when you’re trying to hook an agent or a publisher—and maybe, someday, a reader!—and reel them into your narrative. So those, I’ve been practicing.
Perhaps just as important from the reader point of view—prospective agents and publishers will never know about this—is a powerful ending. Sometimes I read a book and think the author was just too exhausted by the end to give it much thought, but a book that peters out doesn’t seem worth the reader’s effort to get there. Recently, I read an interview of author and teacher Charles Baxter that touched on the topic of endings.
The interviewer had had trouble placing a story that ended with a fatal car crash that killed the protagonists. Finally, he listened to advice to change it, and it was immediately published. Baxter explained that you can’t have an accident like that at the end of a story, because it doesn’t look accidental. “It looks as if the author put it there.” And all the text preceding it, which led the reader to be interested in—even care about—the characters now appears to be simply manipulation. At the beginning of a story, an accident looks like an accident; at the end, the reader thinks, “the damn author set up this accident so that he could get away from the typewriter and get a cup of coffee,” Baxter said.
He also said he thought people would have the same reaction if the device was used in a movie, and I thought of Robert Altman’s A Wedding (user comments run the gamut)—thankfully saved by the fact that the bridal couple, though the stars of “their day,” were just two in a well-populated Altmanesque cast. Late-in-the-game manipulation prompted a few objections to Ian McEwan’s otherwise acclaimed novel Atonement.
A sentence from The Guardian’s review of that book applies well in this context: “Who can grant atonement to the novelist, whose God-like capacity to create and rework the world means that there is no higher authority to whom appeal can be made?” Create, rework, and destroy, too, for that matter. What Baxter might say is that the writer should work in a way that makes appeal unnecessary. And, in the case of Atonement, the fault lines are mapped with such geological precision that the cataclysm does not feel random, like a car crash, but perhaps more like a huckster’s bait-and-switch.
Critics today consider The Great Gatsby one of the finest books of the 20th Century. The power of its bittersweet ending is one reason why:
Gatsby believed in the green light (at the end of Daisy’s dock), the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.