The Guardian asked readers last week to name their favorite first lines of literary works. While it seemed a bit obvious, I'll admit that I've never purchased a book in a store -- ever -- without first reading the opening bits. Ordered online without reading first sentence, yes. In store, no. I'm sure you'll admit to the same, oui?
Yet, what I never admit to - and I'm now a bit creeped that Anna Beer is reading my mind across the channel - is that I also read the last line of a book I'm about to purchase. Not always, but often. Immediately following the first sentence. I want to know what kind of animal I'm dealing with, what sort of ride I'm in for. I'm not sure what this says about me and I'm not sure I care to know. (Control freak comes to mind, but I digress.) The good news, as far as spoilers go, is that I promptly forget the last lines as soon as I'm a few chapters into the book. But I must know...I have to know...if my heart will be broken or not. (I think here of The Children's Hospital by Chris Adrian which, it must be said, simply split me in two and I wanted none of it as soon as it became clear it would not end as I had hoped. Of course, I also read the last line of that book before I began it in earnest and clearly it did me no good. None at all.) If it seems to end in a way that intrigues me, or if it seems a hasty summation.
The weird part, though, is that I don't remember last lines. I care about them. I obsess about them in those moments just after I've finished a book. I'll even go back and re-read them a few times. Those last sentences, those last words. I hate it when writers get tired and just slap it together at the end. I don't care how good the beginning was if they just dash it off carelessly to finish it. Sometimes a poor ending can be overlooked, yes. Even forgiven. But the sense of it is never forgotten. Did it deliver or didn't it? With such a concern for endings...I'm surprised that, years or even months (weeks?) later, I don't remember the actual words used, the final sentences crafted. I only remember the general sense of things, the way I felt. The sense of heft or weight or lightness that came as a result of reading the last words on the page. Was the mystery solved? Were hearts mended? Was everything smashed open again? Things almost imperceptibly moved, but just so? Nothing gained at all?
Yet, my love of endings is tempered by an irritation with endings: by their very nature, they seem to sum with such broad strokes that they generalize rather than illuminate. Sweep rather than inspect. Authors seems always to want to pen final statements that encompass the whole of the book and the characters. All that came before and all that might come after we close the book's cover and retire it to the shelf. A bore, really, but also...necessary? I'm not sure.
I said all that to say that Anna Beer at The Guardian is now speaking of last lines. Although she dives headlong into this last-lines argument by tackling King Lear, which, well, I don't care for and so I'll side-step quietly while focusing on the broader aim of her piece. I'll also extend her metaphor further (as those in the comments of her post have done) by thinking upon the endings of novels that I've loved, not just lines spoken by characters as they die.
Of course, since I don't actually remember any of the words off-hand (with the sole exception of Celine's Death on the Installment Plan which ends with "There's no shortage of coats" and which I found to be strangely funny upon first reading -- which is awful because it is many things, none of which is funny -- and have since appropriated it for my own use as a good-bye term with friends or a way of also saying, shit happens or this is not as much fun as we had hoped or gee, i'd rather be washing my dog right now, but "there's no shortage of coats!") I've grabbed the first few books that I remember as having particularly strong finishes. After looking at the last few lines of the books I picked, I'm unhappy to report: as it turns out, a few endings are worse than I remember, and all are rather moody. While the words are better in some cases than I'd remembered, they are all quite grand in sweeping scope, veering on the very cliche endings that I like least:
Tim O'Brien's last story in The Things They Carried: "I'm young and happy. I'll never die. I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with story." (Better than I'd remembered.)
Celine's Journey to the End of the Night: "Far in the distance the tugboat whistled; its call passed the bridge, one more arch, then another, the lock, another bridge, farther and farther...It was summoning all the barges on the river, every last one, and the whole city and the sky and the countryside, and ourselves, to carry us all away, the Seine too -- and that would be the end of us." (Meh.)
Dawn Powell's The Wicked Pavilion: "The Cafe Julien was gone and a reign was over. Those who had been bound by it fell apart like straws when the bailing cord is cut and remembered each other's name and face as part of a dream that would never come back." (Eh.)
Norman Rush's Mating: "And of course what finally enrages me is that it feels highly possible to me that I have been maneuvered by a liar somewhere in all this. And the thing is that Nelson knows that you lie to me at your own peril. I will not have it. He had ample warning. What is to be done? Je viens. Why not?" (Better than I'd remembered. The ending that opens a new beginning...)
Yet, none of these endings have the same power as the beginnings of the same books. (Another post, I realize...but oh so intriguing if you think about it. I can see a weekly feature -- one line from the beginning, one line from the end, discuss! Yes? No?) Or, more to the point, they don't contain the whole of the book properly. The power of the book seems almost lessened by such generalizations at the end, such attempts to grasp all that came before in a phrase or two. I hate it.
So, instead of big, dramatic endings that are clearly forgotten (by me and 80% of the commenters on The Guardian post), I'm newly in favor of short, quippy endings, not summaries, not big statements, not, perhaps, even directly relevant:
Jeanette Winterson's The Passion: "I'm telling you stories. Trust me." (The unreliable narrator is still trying to convince otherwise. In just a few short words. Love it.)
Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep: "On the way downtown I stopped at a bar and had a couple of double Scotches. They didn't do me any good. All they did was make me think of Silver-Wig, and I never saw her again." (Yes!)
And, of course, the final line of Burrough's Factotum: "And I couldn't get it up."
Still, still. With all this, I feel certain there are better endings -- endings I really loved -- if I could just figure out which shelves they're on...
