I’ve always preferred novels’ endings, like good Scotch, served neat. No loose threads. No choices given the unsuspecting reader who thought all that was taken care of. I decided this some years ago when John Fowles wrote two endings to The French Lieutenant’s Woman, telling the reader to decide which to pick.
I detested that because if the novelist is successful, the reader should step into the created world and be immersed in it through the end, which is part of the seamless whole. Think of Aristotle’s story arc: a beginning, middle, and end.
This brings me to Sarah Canary by Karen Joy Fowler. I read that book because I love Fowler’s novel, We are All Completely beside Ourselves. The latter is a bittersweet story with big themes and a clear conclusion. Sarah Canary has great characters and is a page-turner right up until…it isn’t. It ends with a mystifying sleight of hand piece of magic realism. To me, a mystifying ending is no ending. And no ending makes hash of the story arc.
To quote Forrest Gump, “That’s all I have to say about that.”
What is your favorite, or least favorite ending to a novel?
The End