Let's imagine a young man of about nineteen—a sophomore in college—who's deeply lonely, drinking too much, certain he's a monster, and yet uncertain what sort of monster he might be: a sociopath, a narcissist, an alcoholic, a schizophrenic.
I didn't like the Guest either, partly because Alex seemed oddly bad at being a flexible liar who hops from mark to mark—there were so many scenes where she seemed overwhelmed by things that should have been old hat to her. I don't think this is irrelevant to the problems with the ending though! Her story just kind of stops because there's nothing in her that presents a certain conclusion as the fate she'll successfully avoid or succumb to.
One thing I wonder after reading this is the degree to which people writing novels now have their narrative instincts shaped by movies, which can use a certain kind of dissolving ending to great effect. It's probably more important to a movie to end on an incredible, indelible image than tie the narrative together. But books cannot do that, because books (graphic novels aside) are not made of images.
I think we are basically on the same page wrt this book. If Alex was actually going to have a chance at some kind of good ending, she'd have had to be portrayed a bit differently. I think in fact Alex isn't a particularly good con artist. She's just a girl who's trying some stuff out. But if the book allowed us to realize that, then she would almost NEED to have the kind of happy ending that it refused to give us.
Juxtaposing those endings makes for a compelling read, while supporting your point that writing with a moral vision is not only a valid artistic choice, but maybe even the better one. Traditionally, marriage was THE way to end a story. I remember Mark Twain's ending from Tom Sawyer: "When one writes a novel about grown people, he knows exactly where to stop--that is, with a marriage, but when he writes of juveniles he must stop where he best can." Marriage works really well as an ending device, even just from a craft perspective.
I still think ending with a marriage is a good choice and maybe should be the default ;) Definitely what we ought to do if no other ending presents itself
I like that this post blends your short "tales" style with a thesis about literature--which seems related (yet distinct) from the theme of the 4 versions of the tale themselves! Really love how your fiction + essays are both evolving here.
Thank youuuuu! Yes I've realized it's good to have the thesis in order to get people to feel engaged by the fiction. That little extra bit of tension added by "but what is she trying to say" really adds more propulsion
Great post. I prefer a novel with justice and thus a sense of moral vision. That said, sometimes the protagonist does not deserve anything other than an ambiguous fate. I liked The Guest, first because unlike so many other books it got The Hamptons right, and second because i found Alex to be both admirable and annoying, So I don't thinks she deserved a definitive ending.
It reminds me of the two ending of Great Expectations. In Dickens' original ending Pip and Estella do not get together. He revised it because he knew that would eb unpopular. Pip does not deserve the woman of his dreams.
I really like this essay, which offers the skeleton of a story with four different endings, and reflects on which ones work better and why. It’s a great format, and I would love to read more in this vein. I think a lot about the relationship between aesthetics and morality: we judge stories on moral grounds while also feeling uncomfortable about doing so. We claim that we don’t want stories to be moral vehicles, yet we often reject those with ugly stereotypes or bad moral lessons. (But we sometimes like them, even for that very reason.) I don’t think there’s a solution to this tension; it’s in the nature of storytelling.
In this essay, I think I disagree very slightly with your analysis. I think each of these versions does have a “moral vision,” insofar as the premise you set up is a painful moral provocation, but that they differ in how it is resolved. To me, each of the resolutions has the potential to be a moving, satisfying narrative. (You do justice to each type of ending, even the ones you personally don’t like.) I agree with your point that when a certain type of ending becomes faddish, it gets boring. If it’s true that the type of moral resolution you’re recommending is currently under-appreciated, that’s a good reason for writers to use it. But I wonder whether the type of ending you’re complaining about is actually local to a specific current of New York / LA literary fiction, rather than being broadly hegemonic.
My takeaway from your essay is that how you end a story has a moral as well as an aesthetic valence, and you need to be intentional about it, committing (if only provisionally) to an implicit moral vision.
Just learned "rusticated" is a word. On its face, sounds really violent.
Your piece made me think about the Nathaniel P. ending (even) more. I agree it's a great one. It makes sense, without being predictable. It doesn't overtly idealize or villainize Nate (if what he wanted was the hot popular girl who was so into his writing, he would've stayed with Elise). Throughout the novel, he's trying to figure out what he actually wants in a woman in terms of looks, smarts, popularity, and agreeability. He ultimately seems to find it in Greer (maybe they break up, who knows). Along the way, he hurts a lot of women. But then again, they'd also hurt him, especially in his younger years. Everyone's just trying to find happiness (Hannah's own dating history is described as littered with very good-looking guys who don't treat her well).
I'm wondering what a bad ending would've looked like. Nate, having typed up a break-up email, his index finger hovering over the Enter key, while he reminisces about his parents' cold marriage, and then... the end?
Yeah basically. A bad ending would be something like...ten years later he is on a first date and he sees her at the restaurant with her new husband and kid and thinks "She got fat". SUCH A FUN AGE, by Kiley Reid, has an ending a bit like that, and it's also feels like a failure
I honestly thought the ending of Nathaniel P. was the "bad ending" for him—that he admitted to himself that he had a lot of professed values that he actually wanted nowhere near his own life, so he married a woman who was more successful than him but who he could despise a little. His bad ending is being married to her, raising children with her, etc, for the rest of his life.
edit: sorry I was thinking about the term "bad ending" like in a video game, not the sense naomi was using lol. my comment is irrelevant but i will leave it for posterity.
What is the "moral vision" of Musil's "Man Without Qualities"? Beckett's "The Unnamable"? Joyce's "Ulysses"? Stein's "Making of Americans"? Moral vision was something theorized and practiced by ninetenth-century authors starting with Balzac and continuing on through Zola and Dickens.
Asking for morals, moral clarity, "moral vision" is asking a question that only makes sense for a part of the history of fiction. Outside that tradition, the question does not mix with the conditions, meanings, and possibilities of literature -- or, to put it the other way around, it's an unequal conversation, with art responding and politics interrogating. It is this framing problem, not a lack of "moral vision," that makes it impossible to decide which of these alternative endings is optimal.
"Let's imagine a young man of about nineteen—a sophomore in college—who's deeply lonely, drinking too much, certain he's a monster, and yet uncertain what sort of monster he might be: a sociopath, a narcissist, an alcoholic, a schizophrenic. He doesn't know! But he's pretty certain he's unfit for human society.
However, another option does present itself. Perhaps he's merely an alien because of his first-generation college student status. His dad was an HVAC repair-man; his mom was a home health aide. The kid went to a nice school, a Catholic school. His parents earned money. "
This person just needs to read Steppenwolf. And todays contemporary novelists certainly aren't hitting the depths of human psychology our past masters did.
Right? It didn't really make sense that they didn't! What you're gonna break up so he can do an MFA? Its just silly. That's the kind of thing people say they'll do but then during the summer they get back together and do long distance for a year and end up married
Exactly. And the whole arc of the story bends that way. It’s a love story! They’re meant for each other! (I also thought “Succession” should have ended with Kendall getting his shit together and the siblings realising they loved each other and all pulling together to save the company. In both cases, the most satisfying ending that the story is actually naturally building towards ends up being the ‘brave’ choice that the writers can’t quite bring themselves to pull off. Everything has to be a bummer.)
Totally bananas while also being so *right*! I almost dared to hope for it, after that scene in the kitchen where they make Kendall drink the disgusting smoothie and then crown him. It would have felt genuinely transgressive, and had me jumping off the sofa punching the air. Ah well…
Great article! At the risk of some mild spoilers for a quite old show, this is why I was incredibly annoyed by the ending of the second season of Master of None. Stop insisting that the failure to commit to an ending is some kind of elevated choice…it just seems like a kind of aesthetic cowardice
I like the first story the best. I feel Andrew’s loneliness and resentment, the fact that he’s been abandoned by the people who are supposed to help him. That comes out due to his anger that he’s held onto which leads to him getting kicked out of the party. There is a moral vision, it’s just not explicitly stated and it forces the reader to interpret things, which I prefer.
What makes you think that "no one" actually cares in most instances? You describe this very confidently, as if you have solid information about whether people respond with empathy and actually reach out to troubled young people.
Kanakia writes, "the third version of story (where the guy from the housing office intervenes extramurally and helps Andrew) [isn't a cop-out]. Because the truth is...people often do intervene. They often do help other people. That's something that happens, and it really isn’t that unusual."
Later, in the footnote, she writes, "Of course there’s also very valid reasons for ignoring folks who are in distress...That’s exactly why people generally don’t respond to emails like the one sent by Andrew."
So, the thesis is, people reaching out to vulnerable people in distress isn't an "unusual" act. Yet, those staffing bureaucratic systems designed to help vulnerable people, particularly in universities, "generally" don't.
Which, y'know. Tracks.
Like, my uni expelled five different students who sought mental health help while I was in undergrad. And those are just the students I, personally, knew! Everyone knew the onsite mental health counseling was trash. Purely lawyer-mandated CYA programs to protect KSU from lawsuits.
I could add less personal evidence (studies, stats) if you're interested. But, y'know, most trying to get, like...literally any kind of help in a bureaucracy? Have experienced this bs firsthand.
As Lucy said, my experience (which is not at all uncommon) is that people whose job it is to help you...they usually don't. Because...it's just their job, and most people are bad at their jobs and find reasons to avoid doing them.
Whereas other random people, often DO help you, precisely because there is no obligation to do so, so they can pick and choose, and they can feel good about themselves if they intervene. Like, if you email a guy at the mental health center, then you're basically making more work for him. But if you reach out to, say, a cafeteria worker, then maybe they'll help, just because they feel sorry for you, and they think, wow, if I don't do something then nobody will. And that's what my story is about!
I didn't like the Guest either, partly because Alex seemed oddly bad at being a flexible liar who hops from mark to mark—there were so many scenes where she seemed overwhelmed by things that should have been old hat to her. I don't think this is irrelevant to the problems with the ending though! Her story just kind of stops because there's nothing in her that presents a certain conclusion as the fate she'll successfully avoid or succumb to.
One thing I wonder after reading this is the degree to which people writing novels now have their narrative instincts shaped by movies, which can use a certain kind of dissolving ending to great effect. It's probably more important to a movie to end on an incredible, indelible image than tie the narrative together. But books cannot do that, because books (graphic novels aside) are not made of images.
I think we are basically on the same page wrt this book. If Alex was actually going to have a chance at some kind of good ending, she'd have had to be portrayed a bit differently. I think in fact Alex isn't a particularly good con artist. She's just a girl who's trying some stuff out. But if the book allowed us to realize that, then she would almost NEED to have the kind of happy ending that it refused to give us.
Juxtaposing those endings makes for a compelling read, while supporting your point that writing with a moral vision is not only a valid artistic choice, but maybe even the better one. Traditionally, marriage was THE way to end a story. I remember Mark Twain's ending from Tom Sawyer: "When one writes a novel about grown people, he knows exactly where to stop--that is, with a marriage, but when he writes of juveniles he must stop where he best can." Marriage works really well as an ending device, even just from a craft perspective.
I still think ending with a marriage is a good choice and maybe should be the default ;) Definitely what we ought to do if no other ending presents itself
I like that this post blends your short "tales" style with a thesis about literature--which seems related (yet distinct) from the theme of the 4 versions of the tale themselves! Really love how your fiction + essays are both evolving here.
Thank youuuuu! Yes I've realized it's good to have the thesis in order to get people to feel engaged by the fiction. That little extra bit of tension added by "but what is she trying to say" really adds more propulsion
Great post. I prefer a novel with justice and thus a sense of moral vision. That said, sometimes the protagonist does not deserve anything other than an ambiguous fate. I liked The Guest, first because unlike so many other books it got The Hamptons right, and second because i found Alex to be both admirable and annoying, So I don't thinks she deserved a definitive ending.
It reminds me of the two ending of Great Expectations. In Dickens' original ending Pip and Estella do not get together. He revised it because he knew that would eb unpopular. Pip does not deserve the woman of his dreams.
This is great to think about! Thank you.
I really like this essay, which offers the skeleton of a story with four different endings, and reflects on which ones work better and why. It’s a great format, and I would love to read more in this vein. I think a lot about the relationship between aesthetics and morality: we judge stories on moral grounds while also feeling uncomfortable about doing so. We claim that we don’t want stories to be moral vehicles, yet we often reject those with ugly stereotypes or bad moral lessons. (But we sometimes like them, even for that very reason.) I don’t think there’s a solution to this tension; it’s in the nature of storytelling.
In this essay, I think I disagree very slightly with your analysis. I think each of these versions does have a “moral vision,” insofar as the premise you set up is a painful moral provocation, but that they differ in how it is resolved. To me, each of the resolutions has the potential to be a moving, satisfying narrative. (You do justice to each type of ending, even the ones you personally don’t like.) I agree with your point that when a certain type of ending becomes faddish, it gets boring. If it’s true that the type of moral resolution you’re recommending is currently under-appreciated, that’s a good reason for writers to use it. But I wonder whether the type of ending you’re complaining about is actually local to a specific current of New York / LA literary fiction, rather than being broadly hegemonic.
My takeaway from your essay is that how you end a story has a moral as well as an aesthetic valence, and you need to be intentional about it, committing (if only provisionally) to an implicit moral vision.
Just learned "rusticated" is a word. On its face, sounds really violent.
Your piece made me think about the Nathaniel P. ending (even) more. I agree it's a great one. It makes sense, without being predictable. It doesn't overtly idealize or villainize Nate (if what he wanted was the hot popular girl who was so into his writing, he would've stayed with Elise). Throughout the novel, he's trying to figure out what he actually wants in a woman in terms of looks, smarts, popularity, and agreeability. He ultimately seems to find it in Greer (maybe they break up, who knows). Along the way, he hurts a lot of women. But then again, they'd also hurt him, especially in his younger years. Everyone's just trying to find happiness (Hannah's own dating history is described as littered with very good-looking guys who don't treat her well).
I'm wondering what a bad ending would've looked like. Nate, having typed up a break-up email, his index finger hovering over the Enter key, while he reminisces about his parents' cold marriage, and then... the end?
Yeah basically. A bad ending would be something like...ten years later he is on a first date and he sees her at the restaurant with her new husband and kid and thinks "She got fat". SUCH A FUN AGE, by Kiley Reid, has an ending a bit like that, and it's also feels like a failure
I honestly thought the ending of Nathaniel P. was the "bad ending" for him—that he admitted to himself that he had a lot of professed values that he actually wanted nowhere near his own life, so he married a woman who was more successful than him but who he could despise a little. His bad ending is being married to her, raising children with her, etc, for the rest of his life.
edit: sorry I was thinking about the term "bad ending" like in a video game, not the sense naomi was using lol. my comment is irrelevant but i will leave it for posterity.
It's definitely bad in that...maybe they won't be happy. But it's about as good as that guy was gonna get ;)
greer going to write a banger viral divorce essay about her "litbro" ex husband down the line i feel…
On a somewhat related note, I would love to know Jason's ending. Is he going to wander lonely forever?
Just some questions about "moral vision."
What is the "moral vision" of Musil's "Man Without Qualities"? Beckett's "The Unnamable"? Joyce's "Ulysses"? Stein's "Making of Americans"? Moral vision was something theorized and practiced by ninetenth-century authors starting with Balzac and continuing on through Zola and Dickens.
Asking for morals, moral clarity, "moral vision" is asking a question that only makes sense for a part of the history of fiction. Outside that tradition, the question does not mix with the conditions, meanings, and possibilities of literature -- or, to put it the other way around, it's an unequal conversation, with art responding and politics interrogating. It is this framing problem, not a lack of "moral vision," that makes it impossible to decide which of these alternative endings is optimal.
"Let's imagine a young man of about nineteen—a sophomore in college—who's deeply lonely, drinking too much, certain he's a monster, and yet uncertain what sort of monster he might be: a sociopath, a narcissist, an alcoholic, a schizophrenic. He doesn't know! But he's pretty certain he's unfit for human society.
However, another option does present itself. Perhaps he's merely an alien because of his first-generation college student status. His dad was an HVAC repair-man; his mom was a home health aide. The kid went to a nice school, a Catholic school. His parents earned money. "
This person just needs to read Steppenwolf. And todays contemporary novelists certainly aren't hitting the depths of human psychology our past masters did.
This is interesting. What does DEI have to do with any of it though.
“Normal People” would 100% have been better if they’d got together.
Right? It didn't really make sense that they didn't! What you're gonna break up so he can do an MFA? Its just silly. That's the kind of thing people say they'll do but then during the summer they get back together and do long distance for a year and end up married
Exactly. And the whole arc of the story bends that way. It’s a love story! They’re meant for each other! (I also thought “Succession” should have ended with Kendall getting his shit together and the siblings realising they loved each other and all pulling together to save the company. In both cases, the most satisfying ending that the story is actually naturally building towards ends up being the ‘brave’ choice that the writers can’t quite bring themselves to pull off. Everything has to be a bummer.)
Oh my god that would have been an incredible ending for succession. Can you imagine? What a bananas ending
Totally bananas while also being so *right*! I almost dared to hope for it, after that scene in the kitchen where they make Kendall drink the disgusting smoothie and then crown him. It would have felt genuinely transgressive, and had me jumping off the sofa punching the air. Ah well…
Great article! At the risk of some mild spoilers for a quite old show, this is why I was incredibly annoyed by the ending of the second season of Master of None. Stop insisting that the failure to commit to an ending is some kind of elevated choice…it just seems like a kind of aesthetic cowardice
This names something I've been grumpy about for a while. Thank you.
I like the first story the best. I feel Andrew’s loneliness and resentment, the fact that he’s been abandoned by the people who are supposed to help him. That comes out due to his anger that he’s held onto which leads to him getting kicked out of the party. There is a moral vision, it’s just not explicitly stated and it forces the reader to interpret things, which I prefer.
Interesting article.
I wrote TDBTC with its moral vision foremost in my mind.
What makes you think that "no one" actually cares in most instances? You describe this very confidently, as if you have solid information about whether people respond with empathy and actually reach out to troubled young people.
???
That's not what she wrote, tho. Nor implied?
Kanakia writes, "the third version of story (where the guy from the housing office intervenes extramurally and helps Andrew) [isn't a cop-out]. Because the truth is...people often do intervene. They often do help other people. That's something that happens, and it really isn’t that unusual."
Later, in the footnote, she writes, "Of course there’s also very valid reasons for ignoring folks who are in distress...That’s exactly why people generally don’t respond to emails like the one sent by Andrew."
So, the thesis is, people reaching out to vulnerable people in distress isn't an "unusual" act. Yet, those staffing bureaucratic systems designed to help vulnerable people, particularly in universities, "generally" don't.
Which, y'know. Tracks.
Like, my uni expelled five different students who sought mental health help while I was in undergrad. And those are just the students I, personally, knew! Everyone knew the onsite mental health counseling was trash. Purely lawyer-mandated CYA programs to protect KSU from lawsuits.
I could add less personal evidence (studies, stats) if you're interested. But, y'know, most trying to get, like...literally any kind of help in a bureaucracy? Have experienced this bs firsthand.
As Lucy said, my experience (which is not at all uncommon) is that people whose job it is to help you...they usually don't. Because...it's just their job, and most people are bad at their jobs and find reasons to avoid doing them.
Whereas other random people, often DO help you, precisely because there is no obligation to do so, so they can pick and choose, and they can feel good about themselves if they intervene. Like, if you email a guy at the mental health center, then you're basically making more work for him. But if you reach out to, say, a cafeteria worker, then maybe they'll help, just because they feel sorry for you, and they think, wow, if I don't do something then nobody will. And that's what my story is about!
You may well be right.
The people I knew in human services did want to help, but they eventually left.
Burn-out is the norm.