A question for Gentle Readers—what’s a bigger deal, the beginning of a book or the ending? I don’t mean for marketing purposes, or for writing, but some abstract sense of importance for making a book good or bad, whatever criteria you choose for that.
Hmmmm. I’ll make it a little more concrete. Think of a dozen or so books you like—not your favorite books, because you probably like both the beginning and ending of those, but books you like okay. Do any of them have a disappointing ending? Do any of them have a weak beginning?
Just looking at a few of the last books that I’ve read, I would say that The Forever War has a weak ending, and that so does The Time-Traveler’s Wife. I talked about Little Dorrit and its beginning. I think, though, that there aren’t very many books I like that have weak beginnings. There are quite a few that have endings I consider weak. That seems odd to me, because I would think that after all the buildup, if the ending isn’t great, I would be substantially disappointed. On the other hand, the odds are that by the time I get to the ending, the book has built up enough hedonic capital that it would take a spectacularly bad ending to go bankrupt. Whereas, you see, if the first fifty pages or so of a book are rotten, then (a) I am likely to just give it back to the library without finishing it, or (2) it will need to become spectacularly good to pay off the debt of hedons it owes me. I wonder, though, if that’s Just Me.
What do you think?
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.
keeping in mind that i read much less than i used to, it’s rare that i like the end of a novel and a little less rare that i dislike the start. i’m excited to read the start and so whatever and however the writer does to set things up, i soak in with enthusiasm. by the end i’ve seen and felt so many things that tying things up with a last word from a main character just kills me. i want an epilogue, unless the text is high style. then i want a little more poetry than before.
so i guess i’ve given up on liking endings, generally, so my answer is a poll-breaker.
I was going to say endings are more important, because I can generally tolerate a slow start to a book but a poor ending leaves it feeling unresolved for me. But then it occurred to me that there are a few books that I like enormously with endings that I hate. I dislike these endings so much that I have repressed them and am always surprised to find them when I re-read the book because in my mind I have changed the ending to The Way It Should Have Been.
For the kind of Comfort Books that I re-read over and over again, the opening is crucial. I want an opening that I can sink into like pulling up the covers. What feeling could be better than sinking into the rocking chair and reading “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole…”? The end, on the other hand, doesn’t matter so much — there are a few Comfort Books that I just put back on the shelf about two-thirds done most of the time.
For a new (to me) book, the beginning is important to get me to read the book at all, but the ending is pretty crucial to get me to put the book down with that “wow” feeling.
There’s also, of course, a difference between fiction and nonfiction — two of the best books I’ve read recently were nonfiction (Bill Buford’s Heat and Bob Spitz’s The Beatles: A Biography and both definitely petered out toward the end, I thought. Doesn’t matter.
For me, the most crucial bit is actually the middle. A book can start off with a roar, and end with a bang, but if the middle’s a chore, I don’t really want to read it.
Like LoTR, a classic example. When I read it for the first time, I got through the first book, and I was all excited to read the next one. I finally got it (some time went by, as I recall), and I was like, What is this crap?!? I don’t want to read about Legolas, Aragorn, Gimli, Pippin, and Merry… Who made them the heros? I want to read about the HEROS! and I put it down for a few years. When I went back and read it out of a sense of duty, and finally got through Two Towers, I was amazed by the art that Tolkein used to bring all these threads together and make a story – probably my first conscious revelation of the Craft of storytelling.
But every time I revisit Middle Earth, I always think “what is this crap?” before I remember and plough through.
But it seems to me that it shouldn’t have to be a duty.
Maybe just me.
peace
Matt
Hey, V – a propos of little (except that for me it bogged down a bit in the middle – so I guess it’s a propos of something after all…), have you read any Peter Hamilton? Specifically, I’m thinking the Reality Dysfunction and so forth? It’s a REALLY long story (six longish volumes), but it’s one where I found the beginning compelling and the ending satisfying (although some of the denoument was meh), but inasmuch as it’s 6 books… you know… I got bogged down in the middle.
Still, good stuff, and if you go for beginnings and endings as a package, it should please…
peace
Matt
I’ve never read the Peter Hamilton books; I’ll take a look at them. It seems like, if I like them, they’ll keep me busy for a while…
Thanks,
-V.
For me, it depends on the kind of book, and the kind of bad… In a book with an engaging premise, I can wade through a certain amount of clunkiness in the opening. I can make it through thick openings if they’re beautifully written. But I can’t make it through the beginning of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell, because it’s too Dickensianly thick of prose without enough charm or intriguing characters or motion in plot to have a payoff for me. (Especially with the rest of the hundreds of pages weighing down my right hand.)
Likewise with the ending, only somewhat more so. It’s harder for me to love a book if the ending lets me down, in most ways that an ending can let me down. Recent notable exception: John Crowley’s The Translator, which left some significant loose ends untied. In this case, it felt more realistic that way, on the one hand, and on the other, I just waved it a bit and remembered the most excellent beginning and middle bits. I do wish it had a better ending, but enjoyed it tremendously anyway. By contrast, Perez-Reverte’s The Flanders Panel had some unevenness in its execution, but I was willing to buy it for a while. Then when the ending hit, I resolved never to read or recommend another of his books, on account of blatant bias and bad characterization and plotting. That’s rather a damming triple-whammy.
Tangentially, funny that The Translator should come up: the household read-aloud was entranced at the beginning, thought the middle was pretty okay, and thought that the whole thing went aimless and clumsy at some point awkwardly distant from the end.