There are few writers
who can hit you with a final sentence quite as hard as J.D. Salinger. I am not
just talking about the famous punch in the teeth you get at the end of "A
Perfect Day For Bananafish". In fact, I'm not talking about that story at all. If anything, that ending is –
although brilliant – much too dramatic, much too larger-than-life, much too
O'Henry-esque.
Rather, I'm talking
about something like "Uncle Wiggily In Connecticut", the second entry
in Nine Stories. And not just the
last sentence but the whole final paragraph where Salinger, like a masterful
composer, hits just the right note that brings the whole thing into harmony yet
leaves you hanging.
(and fucking please, don't get me started on
'spoilers')
"Mary Jane. Listen. Please," Eloise said,
sobbing. "You remember our freshman year, and I had that brown-and-yellow
dress I bought in Boise, and Miriam Ball told me nobody wore those kind of
dresses in New York, and I cried all night?" Eloise shook Mary Jane's arm.
"I was a nice girl," she pleaded, "wasn't I?"
The question at the
end, the pleading nature of this question (and I'm not even going to delve into its meaning as that is not the point of this piece), leaves you on the very edge of fully
understanding an artistic creation and the whole plan of Salinger's intricate
mind. But, crucially, you are never quite there, and hence the sense of
discomfort. It's not a bad sense, it's essential to great art, and musically I
could compare it to what Stravinsky does in those sinister final seconds of Apollon Musagète. This date, J.D.
Salinger is telling you, this date ends not with a kiss but with a wink.
Basically, what this
writer does at the end of most of his stories is find a nerve, or should I say
the nerve, that he has discreetly
exposed throughout the story and then jump upon it. Pinch it, squeeze it,
albeit not cruelly, with a pair of artistic tweezers.
Another great example
would be "A Girl I Knew" from a variation on Complete Uncollected Short Stories Of J.D. Salinger that does not
so much leave you hanging as stops you dead. Because you were thinking the
story would go on forever (and would you mind?) or at the very least reach some
sort of resolution, but in fact Salinger hits you with a seemingly unremarkable
question that happens to be the last line of the story.
And this is where the
catch seems to reside. Because the knock-out power of Salinger's final
sentences is not just their subtlety and elegance and faux unexpected nature –
it's the fact that the ending you see is inescapable.
It's the one chord missing, however chilling it is, and the sense that however
unfinished a story like "A Girl I Knew" may seem, it could not go on
for one more word.
