NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS

A month or two back I was (de)crying false advertising. A publicity blurb for James Wood’s How Fiction Works promised an answer to why the endings of novels so often disappoint. No such answer appeared in the book.

I’m pleased to report though, that I’ve found Wood’s last word on the matter. Here’s an excerpt that starts at the end of the Ethan Hawke-Julie Delpy film Before Sunset:

Whether these lovers have indeed found each other just in time is the open question of the film’s ending, as it is the open question of the last, luminous paragraph of Chekhov’s "Lady with a Little Dog".

It is one of those endings that reformulates everything that has gone before, giving it a final power it had not possessed before its ending. This is rare in art, surely; unsuccessful endings are the norm. You
could say, as a rule, that the novel, for instance, is a form that doesn’t want to end, and that generally contorts itself into unnatural closure. How often we feel of long novels especially, that their last 50 or so pages are mechanical and overwrought, that the rhythm of the book is speeding up as it reaches home. Even great novels have disappointing endings, like War and Peace and The Portrait of a Lady, in which the novelist seems to admit to us that, having attempted to make his novel almost continuous with life, he cannot really wrench it away from that continuity by bringing it to a close. There is an interesting analogy with psychoanalysis, which "slows down" the treatment of the analysand so that analysis often takes years and years; but then, after so many years, the analysand often finds the termination of treatment a bruising affront to continuity.

Of course, the basic conundrum that attends any organic process is that in one’s beginning is one’s ending: the entire length of a novel or symphony can be said to be a kind of drawn-out ending…

(skip erudite musings on how great composers have dealt with endings)

 …Perfect endings, whether of the open Chekhovian kind, or of the positive and closed kind, are rare and to be cherished. One of the most beautiful last lines must occur in To the Lighthouse: "Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision." For that is what we want to be able to say at the close of every novel. Lily has finished her painting; and Woolf has now finished her open and fluid novel, which we, as readers, have helped to quot;paint".In this case, we have all indeed had our vision.

If realism, "lifeness" is the goal, seems to me the best way to end a novel is either in mid-sentence…or by following each character to their deaths.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 7th, 2008 at 10:33 AM and is filed under James Wood. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.