On Stories, Hope, and Happy Endings

Office Hours

Thanks to all of you who commented so insightfully and open-heartedly about “The Whistle.” I always learn so much from your comments.

A quick and heartfelt thanks also to The New Yorker for including The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil on its “Four Books to Read During Trump 2.0.” And for saying this about it:

“I’ll bet Saunders wishes he had been less prescient than he was when he wrote this fable, twenty-odd years ago, about a demagogue who exploits his compatriots’ fear of foreigners to launch himself into his nation’s Presidency—inaugurating a new era of cruelty and violence against the weak. The demagogue, Phil, a “slightly bitter nobody” who resides in the large and strong country of Outer Horner, discovers that he has a talent for swaying audiences by disparaging the inhabitants of a tiny neighboring land. Inner Horner can hold, at the most, only one of its citizens at a time, leaving the others no choice but to spill over into Outer Horner—an aggressive border incursion, to hear Phil tell it. Soon Outer Horner begins levying taxes (tariffs, anyone?) on the Inner Hornerites, and physically attacking them when they can’t pay. Phil speaks in a Trumpian register, though with a touch more whimsy: a day that didn’t go his way, “Dark Dark Thursday,” is followed by “the Memorable Friday of Total Triumphant Retribution.” Let’s just hope that Saunders’s prophetic vision holds when it comes to the “brief” part.”—Douglas Watson, copy editor

Thank you, Douglas. I do wish I’d been less prescient. For my next predictive book, I am going to write an illustrated novella about an imaginary country that pulls its head out of its rear just in time to stop itself from skidding into full-out autocracy, after which there follows a period of prosperity, freedom, and non-cruelty.

Now, our question of the week…

Q.

Dear George,

Thank you for Story Club. Your kindness and dedication have helped me not only grow as a writer but to become a kinder, more tolerant person. It has deepened my dedication to the craft.

My question is about hope, largely due to the recent story “He.” I found it to be a deeply moving narrative, and the Story Club comments suggest that I am not alone in my feelings. It is masterfully crafted (with no laptop?) and deeply layered, with an ending that feels like a punch to the stomach. I’ve been taught that the reader must be left with a kernel of hope. I don’t see this in “He.” Have I missed something? I don’t think so. This is why in my humble opinion, the story lingers long after the book has closed.

I once workshopped a story in which a mother decides to take her son off life support. It was visceral and deeply moving, but without a safety net to protect exposed nerves, it left the class feeling despair and bummed out. The instructor said it was the most depressing thing she had ever read. But do people really want to read about these sucky times in life? Then I think of “He.” And your comment that “To do the hurtful thing here is love.” Yes! Yes! After reading the story, I bought the book. So, there you have it.

Back to my question: Where does hope fit in stories with no happy endings?

Thank you,

A.

What an interesting question, especially for someone like me who more than once has been pegged as a “dark” writer, even a “too dark” writer, even a “why the hell do you write so dark when you actually seem pretty nice?” writer.

There are a few embedded assumptions in the question we might want to unpack a little.

First, we might want to talk about what it is, exactly, that makes a story feel “hopeful.”

Second: we might discuss whether that’s a legitimate expectation to put on a story, this alleged giving-of-hope. Is that what a story is supposed to do? Is obliged to do? (Who says hope is the preferred condition in life or in a story, anyway?)

Third: we also might ask ourselves: what is this thing we call “a happy ending?” (What makes a given ending “happy?”)

One obvious thing, that it might be worth stating anyway: in a story, the writer controls the reality. If she states that a thing has happened, well…it did.

So, it’s not so hard to make a story with a happy ending: just slap one on there.

Regarding “He,” we might easily imagine some not-good movie producer saying, “Well, you can’t just show them leaving the kid at the institution, for God’s sake! Too depressing.”)

But when a writer “tacks on” a happy ending – that is, when the ending seems to contradict all that has come before, and/or contradict the way things are in reality – it doesn’t make me happy at all.

Say Porter had ended “He” in a different, ostensibly happy, way (a way that would please our imaginary movie producer): in the back of that car, on the way to the state home, “He” suddenly completely recovers – he has no issues at all. And then the mother realizes, “Oh wow, I did that with the power of love.”

Is that a happy ending?

No, it’s a false, schmaltzy, unearned ending, which gives me exactly zero hope. The story has failed to fulfill its contract. We’ve been played for rubes: we believed in the writer (believed that she was honestly leading us into the jaws of a worthwhile dilemma) and then she chickened out and tricked us and told us a falsehood about the nature of reality, when we were hoping she might provide some measure of enlightenment about it.

In “He,” it is made clear that the son’s condition is real and getting worse. In the real world, conditions like his don’t get cured by love alone, or by wishing, or through good intentions. Sometimes, as we all know conditions and diseases and situations actually are bad, and we can’t get rid of them.

So, if we take “hope” or “a happy ending” to mean: “everything turned out great in the end”…we delude ourselves.

For me, a happy ending one in which the story fulfills its potential, in which it refuses to falsify anything and, therefore, brings itself face-to-face with a difficult dilemma it didn’t plan to encounter. And then…the writer doesn’t chicken out, but faces that dilemma down.

That makes me happy, and that is “hopeful.”

It’s hopeful because we’ve seen a fellow human being go right into the maws of a difficult question and not flinch.

I think this is what’s so powerful about “He.” Porter abides with it right up until the last line, finding an expanded meaning.

Why is this so moving?

Would it be as moving if, at the very end, the artist had fallen to the tramp and lay there, as if dead?

I think it would have been, yes.

So it’s not the outcome that moves us.

What I find moving about this clip is: the artist has unlocked some essential truth about what it feels to be alive, and I love him for it.

So maybe a “happy ending” is when something truthful and beautiful….ends?

So, whatever a happy ending actually is – whatever a hope-giving story might actually be – it isn’t dependent on the events depicted within it.

Exactly because the writer is completely in charge of what happens, the things that happen in a story are not what make it “happy” or “sad,” “hopeful” or “depressing.”

If I write: “George won the lottery”…that’s easy. I can just as easily write “George tumbled down a hill,” or, “George lost every fight he was ever in,” or “George never lost a fight,” or “George grew an antler right before prom.”

“George won the lottery” doesn’t tell me anything about this character named George. Not yet. It’s just something I made happen to him. But now that he’s won the lottery, we get to find out something about George, as he reacts to that win. If he gives it all away, that’s one story. If he hires an expensive team of Professional Insult Specialists to roam the earth, Insulting anyone he perceived to have ever done him wrong, that’s another story.

So the event-core of a story…that’s anecdote. What people do around that event – how it changes them – is what a story is really about, and that’s where the hope will be found (or not).

In your example (“a story in which a mother decides to take her son off life support”) it sounds like people were reacting to the sad core event only. But, of course, a story with that as its core event could be about a lot of things.

What is your story about? Not having read it, we can’t say, but I think it’s safe to say that it’s going to be about the people involved: how they came into the situation (what beliefs, hopes, etc) and how they leave it; how they’re changed by it, what it brings out in them, and so on.

And that’s where the hope or not-hope will be found – that’s where your essential attitude about life will be revealed.

It could be the story of a group of people rising to a difficult occasion (or failing to rise to it). It could be the story of a rift developing between the people who have to make that decision.

So, dear questioner, besides the taking-off-of-life-support, what is your story about? There are an infinite number of stories that could have that core act as their spine; which one is yours?

We talked above about falsely hopeful stories.

Are there stories that are falsely unhopeful? That override the reality the narrative has established (and/or reality itself) in order to seem more edgy/artsy?

Hoo boy, yes, for sure.

It’s just as tempting and just as easy to do.

We’ve all seen those stories or TV shows that seem to take it for granted that life is shit and people are terrible and everything about our culture is rotten – these are just the mirror-image of the stories that assure us that everything is wonderful and people are always generous and ours is a blameless culture.

What these two types of stories have in common is that they both fear nuance and ambiguity and self-contradiction; they are both too anxious to occupy a strong position (i.e., go on AutoPilot in either the optimistic direction (“It’s all good!”) or the pessimistic direction (“It’s all shit!”).

Whereas, those of us who have done some living know that neither of these statements is true, at least not all the time. Both are sometimes true, in specific situations.

So the writer is trying to strike a difficult balance between auto-hope and auto-despair. This may be, in the end, why we value writing so much. The writer is asking the biggest question of all (“How should we feel about existing in this veil of tears? Hopeful or despairing?”) and we want her to be scrupulously honest, lest she give a facile answer.