On the Novel That Refuses to End
Six hundred pages, and an ending that keeps not arriving.
The novel is six hundred pages of genuine craft attached to an ending that never comes, and I am no longer sure the author thinks that is a flaw.
By page four hundred it becomes clear the plot is not building toward a resolution so much as accumulating, the way weather accumulates, without any promise of a storm at the end of it.
Reviewers have split cleanly on whether this is a failure of nerve or a deliberate refusal of the tidiness readers are trained to expect. Having finished it twice, I have landed, reluctantly, on the second reading.
It is a genuinely uncomfortable book to recommend, because the discomfort is the point, and because most people asking for a recommendation want to be told the discomfort resolves. It does not, and I think that is what makes it worth the six hundred pages.
