An interesting thing about books: you always know when they’re going to end. You can’t say the same about movies or songs. Unless you’re fastidious enough to check the running times before watching or listening, the end of a movie or a song does not present itself before the fact, the way a book’s does. There is always an element of surprise when the picture fades to black or the music fades to silence. The finality is recognized only as it realizes itself. (I am talking of the first time, mind you.)
With a book, however, it’s a simple question of materiality. I hold the book in my hand; I turn the pages; each turned page alters the balance of pages between the covers; as I read on, more pages accumulate on one side than on the other; by the time I reach page 205, I know that only fifty or so pages remain. Whatever is happening in the story (and the story may not be letting on that it is about to end), I know the story is nonetheless about to end.
This material fact may seem to spoil the last moments of rising action, the dénouement, the conclusion, all of which I saw coming simply because I could see the pages turning. However, I’ve found that knowing “the end is nigh” imbues the final 50-100 pages with a beautiful melancholy that is not a result of the writing or the story, but a result of my knowing the story is close to its end, the characters close to their departure from my imaginative life. The story itself, as I said, may not indicate its near termination; however, the sense of finality nonetheless encircles every unfolding action, every drop of dialogue, with an affection that enhances the experience. I am watching my new friends slip away. I am experiencing the end of an era. I am feeling the slow evaporation of the world that has filled my waking and dreaming life since the moment I started Chapter One . . . even as the action hurtles forward and the characters drag me onward as though still in that first chapter. This affective experience never accompanies a film or a song because the end does not present itself when still distant from itself. This experience is solely the domain of the written story.
I am fewer than a hundred pages from the end of Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald’s final novel. Knowing that the end is closing in, even though the characters don’t know it and though the story doesn’t know it, I find myself hanging on every word. I always read with a highlighter, marking passages that strike me as particularly noteworthy. Now, as the book signals its end well before its end, I find myself highlighting every other sentence because I know that soon the story will be over, and never again will I experience it for the first time.
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