As part of our ongoing BookEnds community, the alumni group has started inviting authors to speak on different craft topics every other month. Fellow Daisy Alpert Florin reflects on our first invited author’s lecture, Rebecca Makkai’s “Closing Time: Chronological Shifts at the Story’s End.”
As writers, we are taught to give a lot of thought to beginnings, to grab our reader with a compelling opening sentence, paragraph, page. We tend to place less emphasis on endings— although, as award-winning novelist Rebecca Makkai pointed out in her recent talk to the BookEnds alumni group, the ending of a novel or story is often where we find meaning.
The end of a piece, Makkai said, can be a moment of great opportunity when you, the writer, can break rules—including ones you’ve set for yourself—and experiment with dramatic shifts in tone, point of view or pacing. In her talk, Makkai focused on endings as they relate to time. Our relationship to time is heightened when we reach the end of a story or a novel, she said. We might be casting our mind back to what we’ve just read, soaking up our last moments in the world the author has created and also imagining what might come next, not just for the characters but for ourselves.
Makkai discussed different story and novel endings that experiment with time, dividing them into three categories: those that stay in the present, those that revisit the past and those that look ahead to the future. These temporal shifts are not necessarily connected to verb tense, although they can be; it’s more a question of where the energy lies, if it’s backward-looking or forward-looking, if it stays in the present moment or is some combination. The ending of a novel might flash back to a time earlier in the story, or even to a time before the story began as in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. An author might choose to end on a moment of reflection, as in The Catcher in the Rye, or in a “freeze frame” moment like Rick Moody does at the end of The Ice Storm. Many novels end by imagining characters at some point in the distant future using a technique called prolepsis, as in Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys. A writer might also create an ending that combines time periods. At the end of his short story “Joseph,” for example, Etgar Keret describes the moment just before a suicide bombing and simultaneously projects into the future to let us know who will be killed. The combination of present with future adds to the pathos of the story’s ending.
I decided to parse the ending of one of the novels that most influenced my own recent work—Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence—which ends with what Makkai would call a directed open ending, one in which a future outcome is strongly suggested but not explicitly described. In the last chapter, Wharton zips forward in time nearly thirty years, summing up decades of protagonist Newland’s life, those he has lived without his erstwhile lover Ellen—their relationship the central focus of the story—in just a few pages. By moving forward in this way, Wharton is telling us how life without Ellen has felt to Newland, colorless and drab; it is only when he has occasion to see her again that Wharton returns to scene level pacing. In the novel’s last scene, Newland, on a trip to Paris, sits for a long time on a bench beneath Ellen’s window. He sees a servant close Ellen’s shutters and, “as if it had been the signal he waited for, Newland Archer got up slowly and walked back alone to his hotel.”
We don’t know for certain that he will never see Ellen again, but there is a strong suggestion that he won’t. It should be a disappointment. After the journey Wharton has taken us on, we desperately want Newland to reunite with the woman he loves, and as modern readers, we believe in the possibility of second acts. So why is the ending so satisfying? Because Wharton remains true to her characters and the world she has created. A novel about duty, honor and sacrifice could have no other ending.
Makkai concluded her talk by encouraging us to look closely at endings, both as readers and as writers, and ask ourselves what they are doing in relation to time and with what effect. She also acknowledged that while the possibilities are endless, you’re never locked in. “Let go of the idea that there are right or wrong decisions, right or wrong choices,” she said. “You don’t need to try everything. You just pick something and you see.”
Daisy Alpert Florin was a BookEnds fellow in 2019-2020. Her personal essays have appeared online in Full Grown People, Motherwell Magazine and Under the Gum Tree, among other publications. Her essay “Crash” was listed as a notable essay in The Best American Essays 2016. Her novel My Last Innocent Year is represented by Margaret Riley King at William Morris Endeavor.