The Random Yak

If I’m not careful, this could turn into a feature.  (Only in all likelihood, he’d want to write it, and then we’d all be in trouble.)

Last night, while discussing fiction with The Random Spouse and Yak the Younger, the Younger made an interesting comment.

“The problem isn’t that there aren’t good books being published, it’s that all the good books being published seem to have really terrible endings.”

He was referring to something I’ve started calling “Winston Syndrome” – for the unfortunate volleyball companion from the Tom Hanks movie Castaway.  (Note: it took me months to realize that isn’t a title, it’s a descriptive instruction for what we should do with the film.  Consider yourself warned.)

If you haven’t seen the film, and care about spoilers…don’t click.  I’ll see the rest of you after the jump.

My big problem with Castaway, and YtY’s issue with recent fiction, is that you spend hours (or days, depending on your free time and reading schedule) getting to know a set of characters, following their adventures, and pulling for them to win … only to have the author pull the rug out from under you in the last sentence.  Or paragraph.  Or thirty-second scene where the man finally gets home to the woman he loves, whose memory sustained him through years of solitary misery…only to find she doesn’t love him anymore.

SHENANIGANS!

Not only is this an unspeakably poor ending to an otherwise moderately interesting story (or at least one that had plenty of potential, if flawed execution) … it’s absolutely horrific when the film dragged on twice as long as it needed to in order to torture protagonist and viewer almost beyond the bounds of reason.  In fact, the only reason I stuck it out at all (since we watched it on the home TV and not in theaters) was to see the guy get back to his girl at the end.  He had to. There was no other reason for the film to exist.

Only, when the hours of my life I will never get back finally came to an end … it turned out I was wrong.  There was no reason for the film to exist at all.  Except, perhaps, to take away two and a half hours of my life that I’ll never get back.  (And, possibly, to inspire a blog post that will do fractionally less damage to you.  But I digress.)

The same can be said of a startling amount of fiction.  Now, people have been writing bad fiction since fiction began, and possibly even before.  It’s been around at least since the time of Cain (Abel? No idea.  He must be hiding under a rock somewhere.) and we all know enough to avoid it most of the time.

My problem, and YtYs problem too, is the fiction that sneaks in under the guise of decent fiction – the book that’s actually entertaining enough to be worth the read – and either fizzles out on the last page, hangs a startlingly unpleasant U-turn in the closing paragraph, or concludes with Zeus riding a poorly painted washbucket cloud suspended from the plot by shoelaces.  In other words… decent fiction that makes you wish you actually had stopped reading two paragraphs from the end, because “the door is O-” is better than the rainbow-sparkle-unicorn wielding a chainsaw on the far side of it.  To kill the hero with.  And his kitten.  And his girlfriend.  Just before the bit that reads “the end.”

In fact, thinking over the problem after Yak the Younger’s comment last night, I finally realized why my reading has veered so far into history and biography (with a liberal splash of what some bookstores have started calling “true life adventure”) and away from fiction.

A Night to Remember is just as dramatic as your average novel … and I knew at the beginning that the ship would sink at the end.

Don’t get me wrong.  I don’t mind an occasional novel that eschews the traditional “happy ending” for something interesting, or for a main character who learns a lesson as well as getting the girl.  But if I’m going to invest the time in reading fiction, don’t spend 350 pages setting up the hero’s mighty journey “through heck and back,” fighting off aliens, the CIA and some dude with a really bad head cold to save his wife and fourteen dalmatian puppies, enable him to overcome all odds … and then have the wife and puppies flattened by a runaway Zamboni on page 351.  Not only will I not appreciate the wasted minutes I’ll never get back, I’ll be likely to say something I regret.  And then you’ve not only cost me 4 hours, I’ve had to put a dollar in the cuss jar too.

Worse, it teaches kids there’s not any point in reading.  Why spend the time to care about a character who’s going to spend the rest of her miserable life even more miserable than she was in the Introduction?  Better to read the introduction and go play World of Warcraft.

Seriously…all the endings don’t have to be happy ones (though if you look at classic movies you might notice it actually worked out pretty well that way most of the time) but there’s nothing clever in setting up a happy ending and then yanking it away in a final sentence that reeks so badly we’ll have to coin a new term to describe it.

My vote goes to “fimus ex machina” – dung from the machine.