Sad endings, happy endings

I hate sad endings. I hate reading books which leave you a crying mess. I hate it when characters you have come to know and love, you have followed for several hundred pages, sharing their feelings, their thoughts, their fears, their hopes, are suddenly, and ruthlessly killed off. Generally, when this happens before the end of the book, when a secondary character I like dies brutally and needless, I spend the next few chapters hoping against hope that it’s not true, that they will be resurrected by the all-powerful writer, that they will appear on the next page, claiming it was all a mistake, a bad dream. But this barely ever happens. 

I’ll admit it. I love happy endings. I love stories that end with “and they all lived happily ever after.” Romances wouldn’t be worth reading if they two main characters didn’t end together. Happy endings are like triple-chocolate chewy-gooey cookies: delicious, comforting, even if they can become a bit sickening after a time. And look at books by Jane Austen: would we love Pride and Prejudice so much if Elizabeth and Darcy did not marry? If Jane was killed in, say, a carriage accident and Bingley committed suicide? We wouldn’t even want Wickham to die or Lydia to be ruined and disgraced. Pride and Prejudice wouldn’t be Pride and Prejudice if it wasn’t concluded by a happy ending.

Of course it all depends on the genre of the book. If romances call for happy endings, it is not the case for thrillers or dystopias. What about literary fiction? I love reading literary fiction but it sometimes seems like it seldom ends happily. Look at Victor Hugo. How do many of his books end? With everybody being killed off. That’s it. The end (and I’m barely exaggerating). No need to go on writing about those characters, to resolve the conflicts that remain, because everyone is dead. And when I read these endings, I’m like, what? Is this a joke? And that’s one of the reasons why Victor Hugo is not on the list of my favourite authors (along with the fact that I hate the style of his prose – but that’s another story). 

If happy endings are the cookies of literature, it seems that unhappy endings must be Brussel sprouts: good for your health/ literary reputation, but leaving a bitter taste in your mouth, though some people do enjoy them and others can even cook them in a way that makes them more edible, and even delicious at times (add a little olive oil, and a little garlic, and a generous amount of pepper…). End of the metaphor.

Some unhappy endings are handled well. Some books do not call for a happy ending. Maybe because literary fiction tries to reveal something about life, and life is not all rosy and perfect. So how could it all end well? How could it all end on a stereotype? On a vision of happiness that, after all, may be outdated?

Yet the difficulties that are part and parcel of life are the very reason why I want to read books with happy endings: the real world is often sad and harsh and difficult. Reading offers a mean to forget, for a moment, the hardships of reality, but what if the alternative books offer is even worse? I want books to uplift me. I want books to give me hope. I want books to show me a side of humanity that is not all about death and destruction. 

Actually, more than a happy ending, I want a positive ending. One which, even if it is shrouded in sadness, even if it makes the reader cry (but not too much!), is full of hope. I want the ending to be satisfactory, to be luminous. To hint at new stories, to a future within the world of the novel I have just read.

I prefer happy endings but I realise that the one in my novel, and the ones I planned for my novels in progress and my novels to be, may not quite qualify as such… I suppose it will depend on the reader, on what he/she expected, on which characters he/she sided with and so on… And the themes of As Winter Came and Went are not exactly happy. It’s certainly not a feel-good novel. But… I hope I managed to turn the ending into one similar to those I like reading. And if not… Well I’ll just be one of those people with opinions on everything under the sky and who cannot manage to live by them and put them into practice!