And it’s true, in a lifetime of nonfinishing I have learned that the practice [of not finishing a book] can be its own way of reading, even a way of admiring the book I seem to be spurning. Sometimes I am so intoxicated by the beauty and the intelligence of a novel that I must set it aside. The charge it delivers is so inordinate that I need to measure out the doses I permit myself. (Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard is one such book for me.) Or I put the book down because I fear its force. It’s so good I worry it will smother every last spark I need for my own writing (which is how Virginia Woolf felt about Proust).
Something in the structure of the work demands [not finishing] it, demands it because it touches something in the structure of our lives. This is true of any work arranged around a plot, however loose, and it is true because the worlds of these works (novels, plays, movies, TV series) have a beginning, a middle, and an end. They have a beginning and a middle because they have an end. When dealing with them, like it or not, we must deal with the end, their end and ours.
Like every reader, I know instinctively that events gain in significance as the end draws near. There are ups and downs throughout, but once you enter the homestretch, the up-and-down logic changes. Time no longer flows but starts ticking, and the space of possibilities narrows.
Unlike life, the novel does not just break off midstride; it ends, which means that things come to a close—not all things, but enough of them. Plotlines are tied up—sometimes neatly, sometimes not. What seems like a knot is in fact an unknotting (the literal meaning of dénouement in French), an untangling.
Because the book ends the way it does, the past—Newland’s past and Madame Olenska’s, the past of every character and every object in the novel—is now not a jumble of incidents, meaningless in their isolation, but a sequence with a logic, a logic I know to be there even when I fail to name it. There is a logic because there is an end. That, finally, may be why people read fiction: it creates a world in which it makes sense to ask about sense.
Meaning doesn’t mean good meaning. When we say of a life that it is, or was, meaningful, we often think uplifting thoughts, but to call a life “squandered” I must make use of meanings too. Only a meaningful life can be squandered.
Does that mean that we think of the end of a novel as a death? Perhaps, but the reverse strikes me as being closer to the truth: we think of death as the end of a story, the culmination of a plot. Or rather we like to think of death as the end of a story; we wish it were so. The good scenario would be that a life has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and therefore some meaning. Benjamin thought that the reason we read fiction is to help ourselves to the meaning lacking in our lives. “What draws the reader to a novel,” he wrote, “is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.” That’s one reason I cannot be indifferent to the end, even—especially—when I leave a novel unfinished.