The final stretch

OK, I think I know where I'm going with the last 50 or 60 pages of this novel, before I go back and fill in all the stuff I forgot to include. I'm going with this time-honored literary formula:

1) Anti-climactic near-catastrophe, followed by...

2) Peculiar, rather depressing sex act, giving way to...

3) Deeply sentimental expression of personal generosity, which results in...

4) Replacement of expected denoument with much-diminished, but closely related and somehow, ultimately, superior denoument.

The thing about the ending is, it can't be what you were thinking it was going to be, but it has to be something. Is this going to be the right thing? I don't know. In the end, it might be the only thing. Anyway, it's a thing, and when I write it, I'll have declared draft 1 complete.

Thingward ho!

I Thought Of An Ending I Like

Okay, a quick addendum to the recent post on endings: I thought of one I like, and which might actually be my favorite ending of anything ever. It's the ending of a movie: Broken Flowers, the 2005 Jim Jarmusch flick starring Bill Murray. I'm going to describe it now, so if you haven't seen this movie but plan to, proceed with caution.

Bill Murray plays an aging lothario who gets an anonymous letter from a former lover, telling him they have a son together, and the son might be coming to see him. So, to prepare, Murray's character, Don Johnston, goes on a road trip, visiting all his old lovers, trying to figure out which one sent the letter. The road trip makes up the bulk of the movie.

Long story short, he doesn't figure it out, and when he gets back, he meets a kid at the bus station whom he thinks must be the son. He tries to befriend him, but ends up freaking him out: turns out it isn't the son, just a stranger. And in the final scene, as the freaked-out non-son runs off, a car goes by bearing two passengers who are around the same age as the son would be, and who are wearing the same clothes. And Don just watches the car go by in slow motion until it's gone.

The message: from now on, every kid he sees for the rest of his life will briefly seem like his son.

Why's this a perfect ending? For one thing, it's weird and somewhat cryptic, but not obscure. It also doesn't spell anything out: instead it leaves a metaphorical clue. Finally, it doesn't shut down the movie; rather, it opens it up. It gives the character a future. It shows you exactly how far Don's soul-searching has brought him, and shows you (and him) the consequences of what he has (and hasn't) found.

It's brief, simple, and artfully arresting. It makes demands on the imagination, but doesn't lord it over you. It allows the viewer to make the connection, lets you have the epiphany rather than simply showing you someone else having it.

Somehow I have to figure out how to do this in writing.

Endings. What are they supposed to be, exactly?

So here's an open question to the readers of this blog. When it comes to endings, what the hell do you want? I ask this because "lousy ending" is perhaps the number one book review complaint. "Promising, but he wrote himself into a corner." "Good book, but the ending was a letdown." I can't tell you how many reviews of my work make criticisms like these. The "wrote himself into a corner" one really rankles, as it suggests that the writer is incompetent--that he doesn't know how to end a book. In my case, when I got that one, I was enraged: I ended the book in question precisely the way I wanted to, and was perfectly satisfied--at the time anyway.

Personally, I am rarely disappointed by a book's ending. Almost never, in fact. If I like a book all the way through, I almost always like the way it ends, too, unless the writer tries some audacious and/or desperate thing that falls flat (I'm sure we can all name a few examples of those). Books that just kind of stop are perfectly OK with me. So are epilogues that describe the future, or flashbacks, or unrequited affairs, or unsolved mysteries.

Ultimately, I don't care what a book is about. All I really care about is the experience of reading it--of the writer's frame of reference to the world, of her way of seeing. Of course I am attracted by certain subjects--crime, artistic endeavor, intense cogitation in narrative--but ultimately it doesn't matter. What's important is the human fabric of the book: the voice, the characters, the way one thought flows into another. I like texture and nuance. I like odd juxtapositions and interesting problems.

I wonder if people who desire certain kinds of endings, or have particular expectations for what an ending should do, are people who care too much what books are about. Could that be the problem? Or is it something else? Because honestly, I have never read a review in which the reviewer suggests alternate endings that would work better. They never say what they want! They only say they were disappointed.

Is it "closure" people want? I hope not. Resolution? The pieces fitting together? High drama? Secrets revealed? Lyrical flights? Somebody help me out here. I honestly believe that many good books cannot have satisfying endings--that some of the best books just simply can't be ended. There is nothing wrong wtih this. Some stories need to be this way. David Foster Wallace wrote a lot of them--that's one of the reasons I liked him.

When you don't like the ending of a book--putting aside big, dramatic blunders--what is it exactly that you don't like?

A Nasty Ending

I've posted about Ruth Rendell before--I've read almost all of her thrillers, police procedurals, and pseudonomous quasi-literary books (which she writes under the name Barbara Vine). Of all her books, the Vine ones are the most impressive, the procedurals the most exciting, and I loved the last Vine book, The Minotaur, a restrained gothic about a big scary house full of weirdos.

Her latest, which I got from Amazon.co.uk (it's not out here yet) is called The Water's Lovely. At first I was very excited about this novel, as it contains several details germane to our personal lives--a house, like the one we're buying, that has been divided into two apartments; a house, like the one we're leaving, that someone was murdered in; and a bathroom that contains the exact same Bonnard print that ours does. And the opening pages are quite exciting.

But the book disappoints. The mystery (did what's-her-name really kill that dude in the tub?) isn't very mysterious, the intersecting story lines are static and not terribly interesting, and the characters are awful.

Let me clarify this, because Rendell is sometimes superb at writing about unappealing people. Her best books, like The Minotaur, are populated by fully articulated characters, their peculiarities part of a pattern, their often unpredictable actions driven by powerful and complex motivations. But sometimes she seems to be phoning it in, and you get the baser part of her soul--she is prone to overdosing on the vain, the vulgar, the low-class, and the greedy, their shallow thoughts flatly stamped onto the page.

For the life of me, I don't know what she gets out of it. Somebody good enough to write Anna's Book or Road Rage (a terrific procedural--see the B-List sidebar) is willing to give us a lame menagerie like the one in The Water's Lovely? The worst part is that, in the end, (spoiler alert--here, I'll print it in white so you have to select the text to read it) all the people you hate the most end up getting happily married to one another, and the only two people you like get killed by a tsunami on the last page. I think this is the worst ending I've ever seen from her.

That said, she's disappointed me before, then come roaring back with something great. Perhaps these little thrillers have a purpose--the discharge of excess misanthropy, maybe, freeing the author to give her real characters the humanity they deserve. Meanwhile, I don't recommend this new book--though I have to admit, I did read to the end.

EDIT: Hey, P.S., this is our 100th post!