The all-important second sentence: An interrogatory
As everyone knows, the most important piece of any novel is the second sentence.
People go on and on about opening lines and closing lines – call me Ishmael and beating ceaselessly into the past – but really, it’s the second line that really makes or breaks a novel.
Or maybe it isn’t. But here’s a quiz, for your idle or interactive enjoyment. See if you can identify the books and authors of the following second sentences. I think it’s pretty hard, though some might be obvious. There are some curveballs, but most of these are pretty mainstream.
I’ll post the answers later today.
1 – You could feel it: Something terrible was about to happen.
2 – He had successfully avoided meeting his landlady on the staircase.
3 – Buford had come along about noon and when he left at sundown, the boy, Tarwater, had never returned from the still.
4 – In single file they eased around the orange I-beam sculpture and moved toward the dormitories.
5 – “But you’ll have to be up with the lark,” she added.
6 — Ideally bald, sun-tanned and clean shaven, he began rather impressively with that great brown dome of his, tortoise-shell glasses (masking an infantile absence of eyebrows), apish upper lip, thick neck and strong-man torso in a tightish tweed coat, but ended, somewhat disappointingly, in a pair of spindly legs (now flanneled and crossed) and frail-looking, almost feminine feet.
7 — He lunged for the nearest painting he could see, a Caravaggio.
8 — He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt.
9 – The father, who, though bespattered from head to foot, had made good
his case, was, in pursuance of this triumph, appointed to keep her: it
was not so much that the mother’s character had been more absolutely
damaged as that the brilliancy of a lady’s complexion (and this lady’s,
in court, was immensely remarked) might be more regarded as showing the
spots.
10 – It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.
11 – A few vultures looked down from the roof with shabby indifference: he wasn’t carrion yet.
12 – He was throwing stones at howling urchins from Devils Row who were circling madly about the heap and pelting at him.
13 – There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France.
14 – Although I am fifteen feet ahead of him, anyone watching us from the cottonhouse can see Jewel’s frayed and broken straw hat a full head above my own.
15 – But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.
16 – And you put your hand in my hand and said, You aren’t very old, as if that settled it.
17 – Legs, shouts.
18 – The whistle blew again – a shrill, prolonged noise followed by three short blasts of ear-splitting violence: a violence without purpose that remained without effect.
19 – My posture is consciously congruent to the shape of my hard chair.
20 – Their estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park, in the centre of their property, where, for many generations, they had lived in so respectable a manner as to engage the general good opinions of their surrounding acquaintance.
A round up of first lines: http://hubpages.com/author/Teresa+McGurk/topics/books-and-writing/literature/570/hot
I’ll admit that I usually remember the first ones the best, though I’ll often read the whole dang paragraph for some mind-catching idea or phrase. So I’d vote for the whole paragraph being important and work-breaking.
I’m pretty sure #2 is Knut Hamsun’s Hunger (although apparently in a different translation than the one I own – the wording doesn’t sound exactly as I remember it) and #15 is Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March.
17 is Updike Rabbit Run
13 is A Tale of Two Cities.
6 is Pnin, I think.
3: Wise Blood
4: White Noise
5: To the Lighthouse
10: Gravity’s Rainbow
14: As I Lay Dying
Great post Shawn. I’m with Amaris on the whole paragraph making the impression more than the individual sentences. Here are the ones I know (or think I know):
20: Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
9: What Maisie Knew, Henry James
I knew #9 had to be Henry James! A) Because I had to take a break in the middle of the sentence, and B) because Shawn is a freak.
that sentence is simply spectacular
#2 is Crime and Punishment
#8 Blood Meridian
#16 Gilead
SPOILER — answers below…
(just so everyone knows — i was just joking about the second sentence thing. Obviously, it’s the third sentence that reigns over all.)
1 – The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen
2 – Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
3 – The Violent Bear it Away, Flannery O’Connor
4 – White Noise, Don DeLillo
5 – To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
6 – Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov
7 – The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown
8 – Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
9 – What Maisie Knew, Henry James
10 – Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
11 – The Power and The Glory, Graham Greene
12 – Maggie: Girl of the Streets, Stephen Crane
13 – A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
14 – As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
15 ¬ – The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow
16 – Gilead, Marilynn Robinson
17 – Rabbit, Run, John Updike
18 – The Voyeur, Alain Robbe-Grillet
19 – Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
20 – Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
Damn, I got my O’Connors confused.
What a fun post. You should do more of this sort of quizzing–make it a series. I swear I knew all of those seconds. All of them.