A draft of the household novel ends like this. Four months after their father’s death, three adult children have spent the book reconstructing what he left: Elena, who wants to know why their mother changed the shop’s locks in March; Nadia, who counts things; and Dov, who gave Elena the new key in his doorway and kept the reason to himself. Then a letter comes.
The letter came on a Tuesday, forwarded twice, and it was Elena who opened it. Whitlock & Ames, Solicitors, regretted to inform the family of the late proprietor that the deeds to the premises had been placed in trust the previous February, and that a copy of the medical report lodged with them at that time was enclosed for the beneficiaries’ attention.
Elena drives to her mother’s, and the mother, who has had no scene in the book, explains everything: she had known of the illness since January, he had made her promise, and she changed the locks to keep the children out of the ledger until she had decided what to tell them. Nadia arrives at nine and Dov at eleven, and the draft closes on by midnight there was nothing any of them did not know.
Nothing in the passage is badly written. Its sentences are clear, its facts consistent, and every question the book raised is answered. A reader who reaches it nonetheless feels that the book before it has been cancelled: the investigation, the counting and the ledger turn out to have been a way of not opening the post. That feeling is the subject of this chapter, and it has a structure.
The ending is the best-funded stretch of any novel. Every character, object, phrase and question the book has put down is available to it, and nothing needs establishing. Two constraints follow from that position, and they pull against each other. The first is that the account cannot be added to. An ending may spend what the book has deposited and nothing more, so a firm of solicitors arriving on the last pages is a withdrawal against an account that was never opened; readers call this cheating, and what they have detected is an unfunded transaction. The second is that nothing comes after the ending. Every other unit in this book works inside a story that is still running: a slack chapter can be redeemed by the next, and a scene whose point is hidden acquires one when its plant pays off, the relation The Chapter Break (Chapter 6) calls proposition and payoff. The ending has no next scene, so whatever it does is what the book did.
Together the two constraints produce a third fact, which governs the rest of the chapter: the ending is read backwards. Until the last page a novel is an unfinished object about which the reader is still forming hypotheses; at the last page it becomes a finished one, and its shape is conferred from the end. This chapter calls that the retroactive lens. Because of it, the letter does not spoil one chapter of the household draft. It reaches back and reassigns every earlier scene to a book about delay. The same mechanism works in the writer’s favour, since an ending that lands can make a slow middle read as patience and an obscure early scene read as design.
The ending is the unit through which the whole book is finally read, and nothing follows it to correct what it does; so an ending may spend only what the book has already deposited, and it is judged by what it gives the reader in exchange for stopping.
The second half of that claim concedes something. Closure ends the instability that made the book worth reading, and a serious tradition of criticism, set out in How It Works, holds that this makes every ending a loss. The chapter accepts the loss and asks what the reader receives for it. In the household draft the answer is a set of facts delivered from outside. The revision in Worked Analyses gives the same three people one room, one document read together and one act; most of the facts still arrive, the one the post supplied (the mother’s reason) stays unsaid, and the book’s own material, not the post, produces what the reader is given.
See also: the Reference introduction, on where the ending sits among the book’s recurring concepts; The Opening Pages (Chapter 9), on the opening, which works with no accumulated context where the ending works with nothing else.