first round knock-outs
because i am a graduate student at the end of his quarter and thus, inextricably, his wits, this is gonna be simple. in the words of rob gordon: “i’m feeling kinda basic today. top five side ones, track ones…”
my hometown paper used to highlight favorite opening lines of literature in its sunday book section. my hometown paper also used to have a sunday book section. so for those of us not lucky enough to have a book section, i did find a lovely post with 30 great opening lines from literature, including a favorite of mine from then we came to the end by joshua ferris:
“We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen.”
though it is no doubt coincidental, some of my favorite first lines come from some of my favorite books. while you ponder the nature of the relationship between a work’s first volley and its cumulative worth, allow me to share a few lines that had me at “hello.”
the intuitionist, colson whitehead
“It’s a new elevator, freshly pressed to the rails, and it’s not built to fall this fast.”
jesus’ son, denis johnson
“A salesman who shared his liquor and steered while sleeping…A Cherokee filled with bourbon…A VW no more than a bubble of hashish fumes, captained by a college student…And a family from Marshalltown who head-onned and killed forever a man driving west out of Bethany, Missouri…”
underworld, don delillo
“He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.”
the zero, jess walter
“They burst into the sky, every bird in creation, angry and agitated, awakened by the same primary thought, erupting in a white feathered cloudburst, anxious and graceful, angling in ever-tightening circles towards the ground, drifting close enough to touch, and then close enough to see that it wasn’t a flock of birds at all—it was paper.”
the crying of lot 49, thomas pynchon
“One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Mass came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.”
also: a bonus #6 for my poets:
leaves of grass, walt whitman
“One’s-self I sing, a simple separate person,
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.”
and, finally, in the spirit of barry: reader, top five opening line crimes perpetuated by literary giants in the 19th & 20th centuries. go. sub-question: is it in fact unfair to criticize an otherwise good book for its terrible beginning, is it better to bust out or flail away?
Tags: colson whitehead, denis johnson, don delillo, jess walter, joshua ferris, thomas pynchon, walt whitman
Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller:
I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.
Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee:
For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well.
I Dream of Microwaves, by Imad Rahman:
I was trying to get my mind off drinking by pouring hot coffee on my arm when I got a letter out of the blue from an old girlfriend, Eileen. There was a one-way Greyhound ticket to Ohio and a handwritten note.
“Good news,” it said. “I am through with big dicks and henceforth thinking constantly of you.”
Praise, by Andrew McGahan:
Things started with Cynthia in October.
All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren:
To get there you follow Highway 58, going northeast out of the city, and it is a good highway and new. Or was new, that day we went up it. You look up the highway and it is straight for miles, coming at you, black and slick and tarry-shining against the white of the slab, and the heat dazzles up from the white slab so that only the black line is clear, coming at you with the whine of the tires, and if you don’t quit staring at that line and don’t take a few deep breaths and slap yourself hard on the back of the neck you’ll hypnotize yourself and you’ll come to just at the moment when the right front wheel hooks over into the black dirt shoulder off the slab, and you’ll try to jerk her back on but you can’t because the slab is high like a curb, and maybe you’ll try to reach out and turn off the ignition just as she starts the dive. But you won’t make it, of course.
I immediately thought of that Disgrace line. How great is that? Pretty goddamn great.
I’ll never forget how excited I was the first time I read Tropic of Cancer.
Call me Ishmael. —–Melville, Moby Dick
Venus Drive, Sam Lipsyte
“You could touch for a couple of bucks. The window of the booth went up and you stuck out the bills. They might tell you not to pinch, but I was a stroke type anyway. Some guys, I guess they want to leave a mark. Me, I just like the feel.”
Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
“All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.”
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson
“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”
Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.
Franz Kafka, The Trial
When he is sick, every man wants his mother; if she’s not around, other women must do.
Philip Roth, The Anatomy Lesson
It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.
Paul Auster, City of Glass
They threw me off the hay truck about noon.
James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice
The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard.
Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.
Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversation?”
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.
Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going. When the woman, her name is Violet, went to the funeral to see the girl and to cut her dead face they threw her to the floor and out of the church. She ran, then, through all that snow, and when she got back to her apartment she took the birds from their cages and set them out the windows to freeze or fly, including the parrot that said, “I love you.”
Toni Morrison, Jazz
Standing amid the tan, excited post-Christmas crowd at the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, Rabbit Angstrom has a funny sudden feeling that what he has come to meet, what’s floating in unseen about to land, is not his son Nelson and daughter-in-law Pru and their two children but something more ominous and intimately his: his own death, shaped vaguely like an airplane.
John Updike, Rabbit at Rest
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler.
Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of unrequited love.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
I’ve mentioned this here before, but Joshua Ferris’s title is a nod to one of my favorite opening lines, from Don DeLillo’s first novel, Americana:
Then we came to the end of another dull and lurid year.
“I was born twice.” Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
[...] we think words are the bee’s knees. We’re obsessed with opening lines. And last lines. Hell, second lines. It’s only a matter of time before [...]