by Molly Gloss
Molly Gloss shares why her fondness for immediately reading the last pages of novels shouldn’t be so contentious to open-minded people. Check out Molly’s latest story, “Wápato,” in our [November/December issue, on sale now!]
Here is something about my reading habits that I suspect will horrify many of you: I’ll read the first dozen or so pages of a novel, and then always (almost always) feel a sudden impulse to turn to the last page and read the last few paragraphs. Horrified as you are, you might be surprised to know that I seldom (almost never) actually learn anything concrete from that last page—not even, necessarily, who is still alive or who might have died, because I’ve learned that endings can trick me.
I don’t really remember when this habit started or why, but I have come to realize that as I keep in mind that last page with its as-yet-mysterious and out-of-context information—as I view the book through that dim lens—I begin to notice things I might not otherwise have paid attention to. A new character showing up very late in the story but since I recall her name from that last page, I start paying attention to her, thinking she might become important. Or a place—the turnoff at Iskuulpa Creek, say, which I would have read past without noticing, but on the last page I remember Annie is driving her truck past that Iskuulpa turnoff when she sees the coyote, so maybe that turnoff is a place—or a metaphor—I should keep an eye on. That sort of thing.
And I have some science to back up my habit of looking ahead at the ending of a novel.
Maybe a few of you saw or read a piece in the the NYT a while back, arguing that “spoiling” a television show or movie or novel, by premature plot revelations, does not actually ruin our enjoyment. In a study published in Applied Cognitive Psychology, study participants who were told the ending of a tense Hitchcock scene before watching it, reported the same levels of engagement and enjoyment as those who didn’t know the ending.
A novel is in some ways like a symphony, and toward the close of a novel, just as in the coda of a symphony, the writer will often (usually?) bring back directly, or in the form of recollection, some of the images, characters, events, encountered earlier, and in so doing call to mind the tone or mood or metaphor that has been driving the work all along.
It turns out we aren’t simply waiting in suspense to learn or guess the resolution to the question driving the plot. There are more significant factors that determine our enjoyment of narratives, and we are just as likely to get caught up in a story even when we know what is coming. Humans are hard-wired not just to absorb facts but also to lose ourselves in stories, to be completely pulled away from the present and transported into the alternate world of a fictional story. If watching a Hitchcock story makes us feel that we are living in that story, then knowing the ending doesn’t affect us, because the characters in the story don’t know the ending and, for that moment, we have hitched our mental state to theirs.
Here is something else I have come to realize from my habit of reading the last page early on: A novel is in some ways like a symphony, and toward the close of a novel, just as in the coda of a symphony, the writer will often (usually?) bring back directly, or in the form of recollection, some of the images, characters, events, encountered earlier, and in so doing call to mind the tone or mood or metaphor that has been driving the work all along. So as I’ve been reading, holding in my mind that enigmatic fragment from the last page, I have slowly begun to glimpse—as in a symphony one begins to hear—that repeating motif, those recurrent images, the rise of the metaphor.
This understanding was driven home to me most forcefully in John Crowley’s novel Little, Big. It’s a book that is on my list of the best books I’ve ever read and never forgotten. My battered paperback copy has thumbed-down corners and pages marked up with scribbled notes, underlines, and exclamations. What I gradually understood, reading and rereading it, is that Little, Big itself, the novel, could best be described through the metaphor of Edgewood, the house that is its principal setting, the house in which many generations of the Drinkwater family live. A house designed by the patriarch to be many houses in one, like an intricate origami, just as Little, Big, the novel itself, is an extraordinary, intricately organized origami of a novel. A symphony of a novel. Crowley returned to description of the house again and again in all its byzantine detail precisely because this was the recurrent motif that he intended to pull us through his long, byzantine novel . . . which I will now, ahem, spoil for you by sharing the last paragraph, a description of Edgewood empty and abandoned :
“One by one the bulbs burned out, like long lives come to their expected ends. Then there was a dark house made once of time, made now of weather, and harder to find; impossible to find and not even as easy to dream of as when it was alight. Stories last longer: but only by becoming only stories. It was anyway all a long time ago; the world, we know now, is as it is and not different; if there was ever a time when there were passages, doors, the borders open and many crossing, that time is not now. The world is older than it was. Even the weather isn’t as we remember it clearly once being; never lately does there come a summer day such as we remember, never clouds as white as that, never grass as odorous or shade as deep and full of promise as we remember they can be, as once upon a time they were.”
You shouldn’t imagine that every novel strives to end like Crowley’s with a symphonic moment that reverberates back through every scene. Little, Big is rightly celebrated because it is singular. I venture to say, even Crowley hasn’t been able to do that again. But it’s the example that proves to me, I am right to peek ahead at endings. To hold in my mind those symphonic last notes through every scene, right from the first page.
From Earth to the Stars 
I don’t read the last page of a novel until I’ve finished, but you make some good points. Sometimes the reader becomes too obsessed with finding the answer to a driving mystery and skims over the bulk of a novel. I know that I’ve missed nuances of a book before because I’ve become preoccurpied with one thing.
Anyone who has ever watched Columbo know the joy of reading the last page first. We alwasy knew the murderer in Columbo. The fun was watching Columbo and the murderer square off until Columbo solved the crime.
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