A Tidy End
I know how in hindsight it’s easy to say I saw the end coming, that I was anticipating it the whole time, that I wasn’t surprised at all, but when I say that I knew how Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl would end, I really mean it.
More surprising to me was despite my intuitive knowing, I was still deeply satisfied (though disturbed) when it was finished, like the final click confirming that indeed the door was locked. It’s over.
But I was bewildered by how uneasy I felt at the end of Udall’s The Lonely Polygamist, a book that sets readers up for all kinds of wild imaginings, but ends quite practically, and it got me thinking about how books end. So I composed a short list of my favorite endings, the ones that make me shake my head and say, “Oh you.”
1. The Agatha Christie — The go-to ending of most mysteries. Each word is a clue, every scene is a hint, and so by the end of the book readers are expected to have some kind of theory of who the killer is, or who stole the painting, but it doesn’t matter, we’re wrong.
2. The Arrival — Arrival endings are always a feather dropped from some high place, drifting back and forth, until landing, maybe not where you thought or wanted, but just there.
3. The Clean Sweep — When that last chapter appears too short and the author pulls a A Visit From the Goon Squad on you.
4. The What-Just-Happened-Who-Can-I-Call? — R.L Stine’s Goosebumps books used to do this to me every time, when I was 12, but now, it’s more prone to happen when I think I’m smarter than the writer (and I’m not).
These are just my top four ways for books to end. I’m sure there are more, what’s yours?
I’m so glad someone else felt this way about the ending of Gone Girl. I was afraid I was the only one.
You’re not the only one. I was impressed by how far it all went, but I knew.
I’m always impressed when a novel or a story only has one ending, an ending you know (plot-wise) right from the start, like in historical fiction, but the author pulls it off in such a way that it isn’t anti-climactic.
I’ll have to take some time to think of some examples…
I know exactly what you mean.
My favorite endings are the ones that I thought I could predict by the middle of the book but then ended up opposite of how I would have liked/written it–without a major plot twist–and yet, I am satisfied with the ending. I felt this way at the end of Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins.
Asa, I thought of Beautiful Ruins as a Clean Sweep but didn’t want to give away the ending too much. Such a satisfying end.