On my walk this morning (ahem! yeah, I am preening myself, after making it around only 2 blocks--the first walk in a long time) I was ruminating on books, as usual, and their endings, more particularly. I have read lots of books in the last month. Several were cliff hangers, leaving me saying aloud, "Oh, dear." When it is a book from a series, (like the beloved Jury series, by Martha Grimes, for instance) I am sanguine; all will be revealed in the next book, right? However, (you may not want to read further since I am about to sound off like a snarky Philistine) when the novel is Art, or Poetic, and most esp. if the author is a college professor, then the ending is too often artfully ambiguous and just leaves me wondering. Frankly I don't read books to be left wondering--that is what my life is about, after all, so who needs the ambiguity?
Take the novel Yellowcake, by Ann Cummins, as an example of the artful novel with the--to me, anyway--artfully ambiguous ending. That novel, about the ravages suffered by uranium millworkers, Navaho and Anglo, was quite admirable. Cummins' writing shone on every page. I exclaimed about her skill to whoever would listen. I became immersed in the lives of her well-drawn characters and caught up in wondering what would become of them. For a short time I lived within that novel and liked it a huge deal. Until the ending, when I was left asking myself 'did anyone ever find what happened to Sam--and what did, anyway?' And 'did Ryland manage to hang on a few more years, spending them contentedly with Rosy?'
I was having an email conversation with a friend about "Black Orpheus," which I have not seen in years, in which I said, "I recall it as being disjointed, almost dream-like and incomplete. That is, no nicely tied up ending." (Would have to watch it again to see my memory serves.) Today, after my walk, I read an email from her in which she said she often prefers an open-ended movie, while her mother "HATES them, in fact likes them to go on five minutes beyond the happy ending so she can be SURE it was a happy ending. (Let us not speak of movies with no happy ending.)"
Her comment was so obviously serendipidous that I added it to my ruminating pot and let it stew a bit. So, what about happy endings and unhappy ones? After thinking it over, I think I can say that I am not one who requires a happy ending in order to like a film or a book. I don't like unhappy endings (take "Evira Madigan," for instance) but I see that they have impact and are fitting, inevitable, for some plots. Here is the thing, when I said "Oh, dear," about those three books I think it was that were cliff hangers, in every case something unpleasant had occurred at the end. But I still had hope, if the book was one of a series. (After all the author hadn't killed off the main character, right?) About Yellowcake I can only hope that she writes a sequel. Doesn't leave me wondering.
The way I would score Happy Ending: a 10. Unhappy Ending: say an 8. No Ending: 0.
3 comments:
Zero seems pretty harsh! I find it interesting that you have such a taste for odd-ball ambiguous foreign films, but don't care for any artful ambiguity in written fiction. Why do you think that is? Is it something about the visual medium that makes it okay?
Jen: Hee hee. You know me--pretty harsh! I have given more thought to why I disliked that ending to Yellowcake. Without rereading the entire book, I would say that I reacted to that ending because the rest of the book was solid--not ambiguous. There was certainly the element of feeling that maybe it was just me who didn't know exactly what happened. Because I needed it spelled out--but maybe others did not. I wanted a definitive ending, not to be left guessing--and oh, yeah, hoping.
As for my liking odd-ball ambiguous foreign films, that is probably, a) because they are foreign and b) because the experience is much shorter and less is invested. (But I don't know if that is really true about b)--just what comes to mind as a possible explanation.)
oh! if you are just talking about the one book then I get it -- I thought you were talking about "arty" fiction in general.
What do you suppose it is about "being foreign" that makes that kind of ambiguity palatable to you? Is it because it is less immediately relatable to your here and now dare I say it quotidian existence? Since it's already Other it's okay for it to be Freaky and Ambiguous too? (I'm just curious -- I don't mean to turn this into the inquisition.)
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