No Hollywood End in Sight
JA
December 17
First off, a warning – there are spoilers ahead. If you are not one of those people who flip to the last page of a book to read it first then Back. Away. Slowly. Now.
I will even give you a generous berth of space in which to do so.
Alternatively, if you have already read The Riders, The Boat and Liar, and watched the last episode of The Sopranos (or just don’t care how they end), please proceed.
Okay, if you’re still with me, then here it is. A while ago, I did a small spiel in favour of the rather unpopular second person point of view. Open endings probably don’t suffer from the same amount of backlash, but still I’m sure that in the entire history of the world, there have been more than a few times in which people were tempted to hurl their newly bought hardbacks across the room in frustration upon close. There is, floating around the nimbus, a kind of belief in the ‘author’s promise’ – the reader agrees to buy a book and read it to the end, and the novelist promises to give them one. Even if you don’t always want everything tied up in a neat little bow, there is still a little bit of shock (oh, it ends there), a bit of disbelief (is there another page?) that indicates a reflex of this expectation.
Many, I know, were endlessly irritated by the conclusion of Tim Winton’s The Riders, a haunting yet driven story of one man’s mad chase around Europe in search of answers from his missing wife. I remember discussing the book with someone when I was still midway through and warning them not to give away the ending because I really wanted to know what happened to Jennifer. She smiled and, with a knowing twinkle in her eye, promised she wouldn’t. More fool me, because, as those of you who’ve read it will know, we never find out.
At the time, I remember being taken aback – my mind itched with the question, but what actually happened? But, slowly, my irritation faded and I came to realise that the story was all the more powerful to me because of its ambiguity. More than that, it lingered. Unlike a neatly drawn close, I couldn’t just put the book down and forget about it. Rather I turned it over and over in my head, searching my memory for any likely red herrings, reinterpreting this scene and that. Did he really see her at the Tuileries, or was that just a symptom of Scully’s crazed desperation? Did Irma in fact know her, or was she just a mirror of Scully’s own possible dark, needing future and tortured pursuit?
That’s another thing about open endings – they seem to make you reflect much more about your assumptions as a reader. Whatever you believe about Jennifer’s motivations for leaving, it’s probably more of a projection of your own logic and reasoning than anything else.
Consider, for example, the controversial ending of The Sopranos, with Tony sitting in a diner surrounded by his family – Meadow is just heading towards him, the possible hit-man suddenly reappears from the toilets and then the screen goes abruptly and definitively black. An article by Tim Goodman in the San Francisco Chronicle had this to say:
Our glimpse into the lives of the Soprano family ended in that instant. But the implication is that life for Tony Soprano goes on, and we'll all just have to guess at the end. Conviction or innocence? Mistrial? He gets hit by a bus or has a heart attack? Who knows? We'll never know. And it's better that way … The perfect element to the final scene – other than scaring the bejesus out of most of the country and prompting calls to local cable companies – is that we don't know what happens. There is no answer. But at the same time, Tony has his family around him – and The Sopranos has always been a show about families.
I also recently finished Justine Larbalestier Liar, an open ending of a different kind. Here we are told precisely what happens and precisely how, only not before our trust as a reader is completely shredded. Thus we don’t know if anything Micah, the liar of the title, says is true. We are again left picking at loose threads and sieving for details. For me this book touched on something even more resonant – cunningly demonstrating how any narrative is nothing more than a series of engineered truths, and how much of our own hopes and desire we project onto what we’re told.
Some might argue that this is a cowardly way to end a story, but I’d say otherwise, especially when it is done right. I love the knife-twisting effect here, the way it gets to you like a good book should. Also, there is something about open endings that seem truer to life. Nam Le, whose short stories ‘Tehran Calling’ and ‘Cartegena’ also leave the reading hanging, touched on this in an interview with Sophie Cunningham in the March edition of Meanjin.
[I]f you do lay down certain tracks or threads then it’s absolutely untrue to form to think that all of these tracks are going to come to some sort of conclusion at the same time. That’s just not the way art works, let alone the way life works. So it seems it might be overly contrived to do it that way … You want to leave the story in that ripe and fertile zone—not of ambiguity and certainly not of purposeful obfuscation—but in a place where it does justice to the complexity and the richness of the character, the situation and the place.
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