Great Endings: Closing Lines of Great Novels. - book reviews

edited by Georgianne Ensign /HarperCollins, 1995, pp.276, $17.50

reviewed by STEVEN G. KELLMAN Literary Srene Editor, USA Today and Ashoel Smith Professor of Comparative Literature, The University of Texas at San Antonio

Great endings do not guarantee great novels. If readers abandon ship before the port is reached, it does not matter how adroitly the captain drops anchor. With a book that keeps the reader turning pages until no more print remains, the conclusion is its immediate legacy, what the author leaves you with beyond the closing cover

Great Endings is a logical culmination of what Georgianne Ensign initiated with her earlier volume, Great Beginnings, an anthology of narrative commencements. However, opening lines of novels are designed to need no antecedent. One can encounter "Once upon a time. . ." as if present at the Creation, innocent of history. To savor "The rest is silence" though, the reader already must have experienced the clamor that is Hamlet. Because great endings are not self-sufficient, but grow directly out of beginnings and middles, Ensign prefaces some selections from more than 300 famous novels with a brief account of what led up to those emphatic lines.

Great Endings promotes itself "as a valuable writer's guide, a comprehensive reading list, and, of course, as pure literary entertainment." The entertainment is not only in the--often familiar--passages themselves, but in reading them and guessing what the attribution will be. Omitting works by Cervantes, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and other early masters, Ensign concentrates on novels since the early 19th century. Despite the contributions of Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, and Leo Tolstoy, she claims that Jane Austen "more than any other writer shaped the novel as we know it today." Whoever is responsible, that shape is dependent on a satisfying conclusion. In the film "Cinema Paradiso," Giuseppe Tornatore offers a montage of famous movie kisses; Ensign eliminates all exertion but that of culmination. Reading her collection is like encountering a bowl of mixed nuts from which someone has sifted everything but cashews and macadamias.

Ensign organizes her novel endings according to not quite airtight categories: Some end happily ever after (The Golden Bowl, Far from the Madding Crowd), some with hope (A Tale of Two Cities, Sophie's Choice); others with despair (The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises). Some conclude with death (Rabbit at Rest, Death Comes for the Archbishop); others with irony (Madame Bovary, Molloy); still others with surprise (Catch-22, The Blithedale Romance).

In Sister Carrie and Lord Jim, the hero reappears; in Vanity Fair and Ragtime, it is the theme; while in Uncle Tom's Cabin and Goodbye, Mr. Chips, the title is reiterated at the end. The Tin Drum and Billy Budd conclude with poetry, while War and Peace and Moby-Dick offer epilogues, and David Copperfield and The Way of All Flesh finish up in the voice of the author.

It surely is possible to find a novel that closes with a hopeful epilogue, by restating its theme, in poetry, in the voice of the author. It would not be The Mystery of Edwin Drood, though, left unfinished at Dickens, death.

At the end of Great Endings, the voice of the editor enters to explain the appeal of her subject--"the end of the novel in its completeness and closure gives us a feeling, however brief, of control, of evil vanquished and righteousness restored." Tomorrow is another novel.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Society for the Advancement of Education
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group