Over the summer, my coffee table was littered with collections of short stories. My Mother asked, “James, why do you like short stories?”, to which I paused long enough to fool her into anticipating a genuine, thoughtful response, before I replied, “because I can reach the ending before you have to refill the bowl of M&Ms”.
I’ve thought a bit more about the question, and my answer is really still the same. Although it is curious to note the infatuation we have with first lines: “A screaming comes across the sky”, wrote Thomas Pynchon at the start of Gravity’s Rainbow; or how about, “I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man”, from Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground. Though I quote both these openings, I’ve read neither of the books, nor do I immediately intend to. And for that reason, amongst others, I will never know the endings that bookend those… books (is that a pun, or just odd wording?).
Sometimes from boredom, others distraction, and other times just genuine contempt for the story, we fail to reach the end. And it is a shame, in the sense that what good is a book if we don’t know the ending, all the way to the last period (or question mark, if maybe it’s a philosophical novel). Imagine the loss of one who reads all of Gatsby, yet falls short before being “borne back ceaselessly into the past”?
This idea permeates across the board. At sporting events, for all the excitement leading up to the game- people standing in a parking lot at 6 am with enough hot dogs and beer to ruin your digestive system for the whole offseason, they finally shuffle into the stadium and sit there happily until about five minutes left in the game, the gravitation of that beautifully open onramp to the 5 just beckons so strong. You imagine your Chevy Suburban just barreling down the parking structure like a fullback, shooting for that entrance to an open freeway, you’re so focused on the idea that you don’t notice the actual fullback who’s actually barreling down the field below- isn’t that what you came for, to see a man run down the field with the ball?! Isn’t that what football is all about?
Well- I was at a game a couple years ago, it was a freezing November night, UCLA was playing USC and the game was an absolute snooze until the 4th quarter, each team started to score some touchdowns and things were picking up, but the girl I was with had retreated into her blanket at about half time, and at this point she just couldn’t take it any longer, she kept tugging at my sleeve and so with thirty seconds left in the game, I agreed to get up and head for the parking lot. And as we’re walking through the tunnel to leave our seats, we hear this huge eruption of cheers and applause, incomparable to anything that’s gone on earlier in the game, so I ran back through the tunnel to where I could see the field, and down there, the two teams had left the sidelines and entered into the middle of the field and were fighting, just smacking each other with helmets and fans were screaming at each other and the announcer came on the PA system and started warning students not to run onto the field unless they wanted to get tazed by the security guards, and I thought, man- what little is known by those restless fans who’re cruising down the 5 right now. What an obscure worldview they must have by missing this event- they thought the game was all about a bunch of large guys in shiny Capri pants running up and down a grid, they had no idea that what really happened was a reenactment of 300.
But in retrospect, you think, man, what even was the worth of the first three hours of that game? What really gave it meaning was that brawl, that’s where the punch line is. And in that sense- and there aren’t many parallels- but in that sense, football is kind of like books. I’ve heard it said that the mark of a good novel is if a reader can start anywhere in the text and immediately get going, and I figure there’s no greater way to test that than to jump to very end first. From time to time, I’ll take a book off my shelf and read a couple pages until my mind starts to wander off in some direction, but the other day I picked some up but just read the last sentences, and I present to you these endings, along with what I’ve concluded about the entire stories that came before:
The end of Jim Thompson’s pulp thriller Texas by the Tail ends: “Or maybe two, who knows…?”. Ah-Ha! What a puzzler, wrap your mind around that, or maybe two, who knows, ellipses, question mark. The End. By logical deduction, my suspicion is that, despite the intrigue, it was likely one.
Next book: Charles Willeford’s pulp novel Cockfighter- mind you, my Mima sent me her entire collection of paperbacks a couple years ago after I expressed interest, so most of my books are about prostitutes and murderers in the 40s. But I won’t make unnecessary assumptions about Cockfighter, which ends, “Then, squaring my shoulders, I crossed the empty pit to get my goddamned medal”. This book is likely told from the first person perspective of the chicken, who, after a tough trial to rise again to the top, akin to Mark Walberg in The Fighter, finally gets his technique down, and that’s why he wins the cockfighting medal.
Jack Kerouac’s classic On The Road ends, “I think of Neal Cassidy, I even think of Old Neal Cassidy the father we never found, I think of Neal Cassidy, I think of Neal Cassidy”. Judging by this passage, I assume it reveals that the road is really a circular track, and we’ve been going around it for the past 400 pages listening to this rather annoying man speak in a circular fashion to mirror the nature of the road. Very clever. I’m glad I read the last sentence.
The Enlightened Voltaire scribbled at the end of Candide, “Excellently observed. But we must cultivate our garden”. Now, either this is a metaphorical aphorism, meaning that man must exercise his reasoning and intellectual capabilities in order to move past some of the hindrances of political and religious dogma, or, perhaps, it just means we should cultivate our garden. Either way, it’s a great piece of advice from what I imagine is a great piece of literature.
I’ve never traveled to the Yucatan, but John L. Stephens has, and he even wrote a book about it called Incidents of Travels in the Yucatan, and it ends with this line, “how beautiful is the world; it is a pity that I must die”. If ever there was a book which only required one to read the last sentence, this should be it. Clearly, the pages must be full of incidents of travels in the Yucatan that make him feel, at the end, as though the world is so beautiful that death would be unfortunate. Then again, that’s just my interpretation.
Carl Hiaasen’s novel Hoot, and yes, it is a Newberry Honor Book, ends “Guess I’ll have to come back another day and try again. That’s what a real Florida boy would do”. I could go on with hypotheses, but my three most reasonable suggestions are- he’s trying to teach an alligator how to sit still on his back porch; he’s trying to trick his senile grandmother into reworking her will so he gets the Buick station wagon for his sixteenth birthday; or this book is the autobiography of Elian Gonzales.
And finally, I flipped to the back of James Thurber’s Further Fables for our Time, where it reads, “All men should strive to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.” Well, I don’t know what you’re running from, or to, but if you’re like most people, it’s probably an on ramp. Otherwise, stick around to the end of things. You may just find something unexpected. So we beat on, wrote Fitzgerald. So we beat on.
