Good books with bad endings?

A few months ago, Joan Acocella posted to The New Yorker's website a blog post lamenting the disappointing endings of otherwise (and nevertheless) classic works of literature. Notwithstanding her ludicrous assertion that "Our country's greatest novel" is Huckleberry Finn--obviously Acocella has never read The Great Gatsby--she raises an interesting question about the effect of an unworthy ending on the value of a novel as a whole. She singles out Huckleberry Finn, David Copperfield, Wuthering Heights, and Song of the Lark for particular scorn, with special focus on the first of these, averring that the endings are not worthy of the body of writing they conclude.

One of Acocella's most astute points is to distinguish between endings that are "inartistic" and those that are simply disappointing. No one wants Islands in the Stream to end the way it does, but it's hard to argue that Hemingway crafts a masterful ending for the story of Thomas Hudson. David Copperfield's happily-ever-after, at least in Acocella's opinion, induces the reader to "Die of boredom." It is the latter category of ending that incurs Acocella's wrath because she feels they are "A betrayal of what came before."

One notable weakness in Acocella's article is that she doesn't embrace the question of "What might have been." The books she names are major, even seminal works by household-name authors. They have stood the test of time, bad endings and all. If they had been given endings commensurate to their erstwhile grandeur, what then? Would there be a new category of super-book where excellent beginnings and middles are completed by excellent endings?

Thus we have the fundamental problem with Acocella's mode of analysis. It's impossible to divorce the ending of a book from the novel as a whole. The quality of a book encompasses the value of all its constituent parts. There's nothing wrong with criticizing the end of a book--or any other part for that matter--but the creation of a sub-class of novel, the Great Book With a Really Bad Ending, is going too far.

On a separate but related note, a long-overdue congratulations to Louise Erdrich '76 for winning the 2012 National Book Award for Fiction for her novel The Round House. That makes two Dartmouth alumna to be honored with a National Book Award in the last five years (Annette Gordon-Reed '81 received the Nonfiction award in 2008 for The Hemingses of Monticello, which I had the great privilege to help work on when I was an editorial intern). Way to go!