Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

If ‘Brokeback Mountain’ ended any other way, it wouldn’t be what it is. I tears your heart out and hands it to you in your own Risistol hat.
But, if everything ended that way I probably wouldn’t read at all.

Has anyone seen Stranger than Fiction?  That movie does deal with the fact that in “serious” literary fiction, only unhappy endings seem to be taken seriously, and then basically explaining why that idea is total crap.  At the very end, Dustin Hoffman’s character, an English professor, tell Emma Thomson, the writer, that her happy ending wasn’t as good as tragic ending would have been and she basically tells him, “I don’t care.  I can’t take sad endings anymore.”

When I saw that, I was like, “Yayyyy, me either.” If a book does demand a tragic ending, my imagination can fill in for that all on its own.

Has anyone seen Stranger than Fiction?  That movie does deal with the fact that in “serious” literary fiction, only unhappy endings seem to be taken seriously, and then basically explaining why that idea is total crap.  At the very end, Dustin Hoffman’s character, an English professor, tell Emma Thomson, the writer, that her happy ending wasn’t as good as tragic ending would have been and she basically tells him, “I don’t care.  I can’t take sad endings anymore.”

When I saw that, I was like, “Yayyyy, me either.” If a book does demand a tragic ending, my imagination can fill in for that all on its own.

I think all of us deep down want the HEA.  Speaking for myself, though I suspect many here will agree with me, I read romances to escape (read “live vicariously” as in the hot hunky male panting after me...erm, the heroine; yeah, that’s who I meant, the heroine) and even if I don’t get my HEA every time RL, the heroines in the books do. Now, that being said, if the HEA is too pat or smarmy, it makes me want to swig single malt scotch straight from the bottle. I want the ending to remain true to the story. A lazy writer who takes the easy way out is a sure way to make sure I never buy their books again - even if the next one they write is a blockbuster.

I think the movie Castaway is a perfect example of what Candy’s talking about.  I knew many people who disliked the ending, and because of that the movie as a whole, because it didn’t meet HEA expectations.  But had the ending catered solely to the HEA instead of sticking logically with the arc of the plot, I don’t think it would’ve been such a success, at least for me.

I think Joss Whedon is brilliant at finding the balance between satisfying the more sentimental urges of his audience while consistently shaking up their expectations without making the work he produces seem in any way contrived.

I read Nick Hornby’s new book, How To Be Good, a few months ago. After a 300 pages of marital strife, drama, fighting, passive-aggressiveness, etc, the book just sort of ... ends. No one’s particularly happy. No one’s particularly miserable…

I don’t demand a happy ending, but I do look for characters that grow or change, and an ending point that’s different from the starting point.

To paraphrase Peter S. Beagle via Schmendrick the Magician, the reason that there are no happy endings is because there are no endings. For some reason (I blame Plato) is that as a culture we believe that the most valid art is the art that is most like life, what is most “real”; and what is most real is apparently the tragic end of the spectrum of human experience. This, in my opinion, is an absurd way to judge the quality of art since reality is multifaceted and like Candy said, the ending should fit the book, the narrative structure of the story not reality. A tragic ending tacked onto a story is just as ridiculous as a HEA tacked onto the story.

But if you notice, people regard comedy with a great deal of suspicion. It means you aren’t serious enough. Just look at the category divisions at the Oscars. When was the last time a movie with a happy ending won Best Picture or even got nominated? Yeah, can’t even think of one can you.

The pre-menopausal, divorced woman in me says : “happy endings are fairy tales cuz life’s a bitch and then you die. “

The male unit in the house says on this subject “A REAL MAN would only read books without HEA. HEA is for wusses!”

Where do open endings fit into this discussion? to be continued…

hmmmmmm Good question.

When we are reading a book we are not imitating life (as the literary people want to say) because we are only getting a snapshot of the couple and their lives. Sure it ends happily because they are together. If their lives went on (beyond the book) it would not be happy, happy all day long.  Sometimes the hero would annoy the heroine because he keeps leaving his dirty underwear on the bathroom floor. But really, do we need to read about that to make it “authentic”?!  Do those overly dramatic literary endings any more realistic?  Do the majority of people really have lives like what happens in those books? I doubt it.

When I read a book (or even watch a movie) I prefer the happy ending. I want to see things working out for everyone.  Real life is hard enough, why does my entertainment have to be much of the same?

gah..hit submit too soon.

I was gonna say , in all seriousness I like open endings cuz I’m a sequel whore. Gimme a character that I can follow from childhood to old age and read over the course of years and I’m a happy gal.

ARGH, I need to proof read before I hit submit (I keep thinking I’m hitting, “review” even though that is no longer an option!)

This: “Do those overly dramatic literary endings any more realistic?” should say ARE instead of DO.

Also, to add to my last paragraph.  Even though I don’t prefer my books and movies to be so true to real life (read: depressing and boring LOL) that doesn’t mean I judge those that do like that. Why do those of us that like the happy endings always have to defend ourselves?  frustrating!

I’ve never understood the argument that happy endings are unrealistic. Sure, we all have unhappy and often even tragic endings to some of the stories in our lives, but we also have genuinely happy endings. Many of us do partner up with a person we love (whether it’s our first marriage or our fifth, and whether it lasts for a lifetime or just a few years). Sometimes we do get the promotion we’ve been fighting for, or the remissions in our illnesses. And sometimes, of course, we don’t. But why would only the times that we don’t “count” in realistic terms? I’d like to focus just as much on the good parts of life as on the bad ones.

I have no wise answers about the happy-endings thing, so TOTALLY RANDOM ASIDE:

“My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead”???

All I can figure is that he’s alluding to the Catullus poem that’s a mock-elegy for his lover’s dead bird.  Which had me cracking up even before I got to the rest of that entry, because when we translated the poem in high school, my sister and I discovered that passer meant both “sparrow” and “flounder.” As in, the fish.  So she and I, naturally, used that as a jumping-off point for the WORLD’S WORST translation ever: “Wear mourning clothes, oh highest toss of the dice, and whatever men there are that are endowed like Venus—my girl has killed her fish.” Etc, etc, getting worse all the time, through to the end of the poem.

But I suppose Catullus is Eugenides’ idea of a proper love story: jerked around by a bitch of a woman for poem after poem until he finally snaps and can’t take it anymore.  ‘Cause it’s deeper and more meaningful that way, doncha know.

Give me my “lucky eventualities” and what’s her bucket can go on aspiring to write the literary equivalent of General Hospital. I prefer my soaps on TV not on my book shelf.

How speciesist!  Why shouldn’t the ponies have orgasms too?

Thank you Sarah for your typically well thought out post. I agree that a lot of the hating on HEA’s comes from the hating on romance novels in general, and all the sexism and classism involved in that general hate.

On the other hand, there is something about genre fiction that’s formulaic, and by it’s very nature “art” is *not*. Good art simply flows from some place deep inside us that we can’t touch or control and it does what it wants, formula’s be damned! I think that’s Eugenides’ point about love, which comes from the same place.

But it’s not an either/or thing - we’ve all read some really fantastic genre fiction, where the characters had so much life we felt as if we’d actually made some new friends by the end of the book. I think it’s more like a continuum and, while it may be difficult for genre fiction with it’s formulaic (and not in a bad way) nature to allow for the freedom of expression that “true art” needs, they’re certainly not mutually exclusive.

my girl has killed her fish

Monty Python moment…
I wonder where that fish has gone.
You did love it so. You looked after it like a son.
And it went wherever I did go.
Is it in the cupboard?
Yes! Yes! No!
Wouldn’t you like to know? It was a lovely little fish.
And it went wherever I did go.
It’s behind the sofa!
Where can that fish be?
Have you thought of the drawers in the bureau?!
Shh!
It is a most elusive fish!
And it went wherever I did go.
Ooooh, fishy, fishy, fishy fish!
A-fish, a-fish, a-fish, a-fishy, ooooh.
Ooooh, fishy, fishy, fishy fish!
That went wherever I did go.
Look up his trunk!
Yeah, it’s hidden in his trousers!

I’m working on a nonfiction project that’s giving me fits because I like happy endings and this person’s life did not end happily. It’s been a struggle: I’ve talked about it to my friends and my partner-in-project about how if it were fiction, there would have been forgiveness and redemption instead of what there was in life, which was anger and blame.

It sucks, yo.

Which, of course, has led me to wonder why it is I’m wired for happy endings and I suppose it all comes down to why I write at all: I want to make people happy by telling them a good story. Period.

I don’t have an answer about why the happy ending is looked down upon: because they’re somehow perceived as “not real”, I suppose. But if it’s honest, shouldn’t that be the important thing?

I also love Stranger Than Fiction: it’s an incredibly powerful movie, and I love its ending because it’s a celebration of the small things, the things that are so easy to miss but that make life worth living. My favorite exchange in the film is (paraphrasing):

“Who spends the rest of their life eating pancakes?”

“That depends on the kind of life being lived and the quality of the pancakes.”

Personally? I’ll take the pancakes. Mm.

Funny how the anthology wasn’t entitled “Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo,” eh?

I WOULD BUY THAT IN A HEARTBEAT.

And a copy for my sister.  And every other Latin geek I know who ever asked, “How come we don’t get to translate THAT poem in class?”

(For those who never had the special glee of discovering that Catullus was more than just a whiny pawn of love: that line basically translates to “I will bugger and face-fuck you.” He wrote good angry poetry, full of all the words you never get on your Latin vocab lists . . . .)

Why is HEA viewed as inferior?

Simple.

Real life is more complex than that.

I think the HEA is looked down on for the most part because it is associated with the Romance Novel.  And let’s face it, while the Romance Novel has come a long way, it has remained the perview of women.  And we all know that women and women’s interests have always been looked down upon: love, families, relationships, etc…

Also, I think it has a lot to do with historically important literature, such as Shakespeare’s writings or the plays of ancient Greece.  Notice that only the comedies have the HEA.  The rest are Tragedies.  So you either have a happy funny story with an HEA, or a sad, true to life tale, with no HEA.

Is it any wonder we haven’t shaken this ideology, considering how deeply it’s rooted in both our literary history and the history of the female sex?

Would somebody fill me in on the unusual ending of Seize the Fire, please?

I have never read Kinsale and the synopsis does not make it likely that I’ll read the book, but I have to admit I’m really curious about the ending now!

Please email me at

As for a romance that deals with very serious life issues and still has a good HEA, I recommend Isabella Martens “Johanna”.  There was a little itty bit that I didn’t care for, which probably made the story more realistic, but disturbed my sense of what a hero gets or doesn’t get to do, but overall it’s a very intense 5 hanky read!

Maybe, as some upthread have suggested (sorry, down with the flu and not coherent enough to cite specifics), this is rooted in a certain Aristotelian...well, I don’t want to say “snobbery,” but...okay, snobbery. Maybe a catharsis from witnessing a negative experience is considered more pure because...er, because it comes seasoned with a dash of schadefreude?

I tell people that accuse me of reading fiction that isn’t true to life that a) they need to read some romance novels to see that’s not true and b) that if I wanted the horrible reality that you can find in ‘literature’ I’d turn on the TV and watch the news!

HEAs have to do with emotion, men don’t do emotion and since men are the ones who get to be the arbiters of what’s literature, naturally anything with a HEA can’t qualify.

Sorry state of affairs.

GrowlyCub, I have to disagree. It’s not that men don’t “do” emotion; it’s that they only consider some emotions to be emotions. Anger, aggression, distress, disgust, anything to do with violence: absolutely not an emotion under any circumstances, and if you disagree with them they’ll scream in rage to “correct” you. The only emotions they see as emotions are ones not connected to aggression, and wanting to read about *those* makes you crazy.

Ooh, I actually have two theories about this.

One comes from when I was in my teens and writing short stories for English lessons.  I always wrote sad endings, generally ones with a ‘twist’ (oh I was so proud of my twists--never did I expect to find them on magazines’ ‘do not want’ lists).

I did this because it was easier to impress people with a nasty or sad ending than with a happy one.  And because a nasty or sad ending is, almost by default, more dramatic than a happy one.

So, if you’re writing to impress, to shock, to make people go ‘oh no’, sad endings are the way to do it.

(I still like to surprise people, but I like to do it in a more fun way than ‘and then they found out her twin sister had killed her!’)

My other theory is based solely on advice given to Anne Shirley in Anne of Avonlea: ‘only a genius should try to write a sad ending’.

I think people buy into the idea that sad endings are really difficult to write, whereas any sentimental idiot can write ‘and they all lived happily ever after’.

This ends up leading to the belief that a sad ending is likely to be qualitatively better than a happy ending, because it’s more likely to have been written by a genius.

There are some books that have to have sad endings.  I Capture the Castle’s sad ending is perfect for the storyline and completely consistent with the characters.  As is The Time Traveller’s Wife.  And possibly, Gone With the Wind.

Bet Me, The Lord of the Rings and Howl’s Moving Castle, however, would be horrible worthless messes with a sad ending.  Not because Crusie, Tolkien and Wynne Jones aren’t brilliant writers, but because a sad ending wouldn’t fit with the story.

Why do sad endings have a better reputation than happy endings?

I think it is for the same reason that comedy is thought of as less intellectual, less artistic, than drama.  Because we as a society are gluttons for self-punishment.

There is a root feeling that nothing that is good for you can also be good.  Don’t like your veggies?  Tough, that’s where you get vitamins.  Isn’t that twinkie tasty?  Guess what, you’ll gain ten pounds just from looking at it. 

In life, every indulgence comes with a punishment.  Thus, psychologically, maybe we try and add punishment and reward where there isn’t any.  Society then comes up with rules that add this punishment/and reward: reading a fun book with a happy ending is escapist and pleasurable, congratulations, you just rotted some of your brain.  Conversely, the sad, depressing, real-to-life book with the ambiguous ending was really hard to read, that must mean it made you smarter.

In the end, it gets translated to the idea that sad and ambiguous endings are “better for you” than happy endings.  And those of us aware enough to see that it’s all an artificial construct are left rolling our eyes and eating our Twinkies as we read our favorite pulp genre novel.

There seems to be an assumption floating through all this that happily endings aren’t worthwhile because they aren’t as complex as unhappy ones.  Why not?  Just because something ends on an up note doesn’t mean that the getting there is necessarily more simplistic, or that there’s only one kind of happy ending.

Happy endings require a lot of work-- perhaps more than the unhappy ones do.  Although I know many people have problems with the book, one of my favorite examples of this is Georgette Heyer’s “A Civil Contract.” In the end, the hero and the heroine do wind up happy with one another.  But, boy oh boy, do they have to work to get there. And what they wind up with in the end isn’t rapturous joy; it’s a quiet (one might even say complex), appreciation of one another’s company.

By the way, has anyone else noticed the parallels between Eugenides’ description of love and that of Andreas Capellanus and the other twelfth century theorists of Courtly Love?  Fascinating the way things come back around....

Speaking of Latin and the classics, I wonder how much of the bias against happy endings is carried over from ancient Greek drama. You know, hubris—the befalling sin of mankind. You get too big for your britches, something BAD happens, and either you learn a lesson or the audience does if you’re now dead. Sad endings are, in modern jargon, “teachable moments”, and negative reinforcement is flashier than positive reinforcement.

I’m a sucker for happy endings, myself. I get much too upset when I read a book with a sad ending. It’s like I got kicked in the stomach. So sue me—I want things to go well.

yes, and…

in high school, trying to be a serious writer who wrote happy endings, i told people, “If the story doesn’t have a happy ending, it ended in the wrong place!”

...and in some ways, I still believe that. Life doesn’t have an end, so the author gets to choose where they stop writing. And I think sad endings are cheating.

But that’s me. :*)

Imogen - I like what you say, and I like the books you read!

YO, YVONNE!  ANOTHER BROKIE!  God knows what you said is true, though.  It will be a while before I can watch that luminously painful movie again (oxymoron intentional).  Couldn’t sob any more than I did without having a stroke.

And therein lies the appeal of the HEA.  I often despise them for their simplistic lack of realism--life is indeed never quite so tidy, regardless of what eHarmony commercials would like us to believe--but I would have given my left nut, had I had one, to see Jack and Ennis of BbM have their HEA.

That craving is certainly the result of how effectively the writer (or film maker) manages to engage the reader (or viewer).  If a storyline has some psycho-emotional depth and believability and the characters strike a sympathetic chord, we can’t seem to settle for less than their happiness.  They’ve striven and suffered and touched us with their striving and suffering, so we want them to be rewarded. Our sense of justice and rectitude demand it.

But predictable HEA’s tacked on to silly, superficial stories populated by silly, superficial characters?  Stuff ‘em.

I let a friend of mine read my black-sheep dystopian Samhain novel.  She loved it but was infuriated by the ending, regardless of its logic.  I was deeply flattered.  I’d engaged her enough to want I wanted from Brokeback Mountain.

Sometimes I wonder if the preference for sad endings isn’t a result of all the bad stories for kids.  I can remember reading all these stories in elementary school where two siblings were always bickering and then one of them was tragically hurt and the other realized how much s/he loved her/his sibling.  Suddenly the bickering was over, the tragic sibling healed, and the two of them never quarreled again.  I loathed those stories.  They made me feel like a bad person because no matter how hard I tried, I could not stop arguing with my siblings.  Then it got worse when one year not only did the class I was in get assigned a load of those to read, we were asked to write a story like that.  I failed that assignment miserably.  It brought on a deep disgust of happy endings that I only got over in college when I started reading romance novels regularly and realized that a realistic happy ending was possible in literature.
Or maybe it has something to do with Victorian fiction?  I wasn’t an English major, but I seem to remember that Dickens and George Eliot had a thing for happy or at least happy-ish endings.  I’m not sure if I can think of any Victorian fiction that doesn’t end with some sort of attempt at an (usually moral) uplift.

Susan Helene Gottfried sayeth,

Why is HEA viewed as inferior?

Simple.

Real life is more complex than that.

Funny, the questions raised here are also more complex than that answer.

I think that part of the problem is the perception that, since the novel ends at a happy point, then all the future holds for the characters is the same level of happiness (hence the ‘ever after’ bit). Personally I’ve always thought of happy endings as the beginning of another story--the one with the underwear on the floor right next to the hamper, and the damp towels on the bathroom floor.

I’m not entirely convinced that happy endings are looked down upon by the literary elite. Romance novels have a certain repuation, which is largely undeserved, or no longer relevant today.

Happy endings in general, though? I’m not convinced. The comic novel, by definition, must have a happy ending. Dickens is known for his comic novels, and he’s pretty well respected. And I’ve taken honours courses specifically on the Dickensian comic novel. So… the academy isn’t ignoring it. George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, William Makepeace Thackeray… they’ve all written comic novels. And their comic novels are really well respected. Vanity Fair? Come on.

And not just comic novels, but there are really well respected love stories with happy endings. Charlotte Bronte, Jane Austen.

A happy ending, structurally, sets up a “good society” at the end of the novel. In order for it to be a completely happy ending, things must end as they should, and in a satisfactory order. Everyone should be in their proper place, or it should be established that they are heading towards their proper place. From a critical perspective, this is an interesting thing for literary folk to analyse. What does the author posit as a “good society”? How to happy endings function? What do they suggest?

There’s lots there for literary folk to discuss and ponder and find significance in. Any actual literature buff worth their salt recognises this.

I’ve always been baffled as to why “Literature” hates a happy ending. Some of the contortions it goes through to ensure no one gets a happy ending are just as convoluted as the contortions done in Romance to ensure a HEA.

In the last literary novel I read the hero spent 20 years obsessing over a lost love who was dead the entire time. My girlfriend and I held that behavior up to the “what would my husband do test ?” and decided in real life he would have been distracted from his obsession in about six months tops.

Frankly, I read fiction for entertainment. I don’t find death, loss, illness, political strife or exploitation entertaining. There is lots of that in the non-fiction section.

And yes, I also read non-fiction.

I think a lot of literary critics are children of privilege. They’ve never been hungry or had to make desperate choices. They live the happily ever after. And they’re hungry for the novelty of squalor and turmoil.

To validate their sensationalistic yearnings, stories with positive endings are trivialized.

That said, I’ve heard it said that if you tell a story for long enough it always ends badly…

My problem with the HEA is that in the Romance Novel Industry it’s not only guaranteed, it’s freakin’ enforced.  [I know, I know—my issue, and not anyone else’s.]

But how can I believe the characters are worthy of the HEA if it’s a sure thing—no matter what—particularly when the Hero’s an ass-hat and Heroine is TSTL?

I require HEAs (if I wanted reality, I’d read the newspaper) but I also require realistic ones. In what I consider the Absolutely Perfect Romance (Nora’s Chesapeake Bay books), nothing really is solved. It’s acknowledged that Gloria will always be a problem, that the Quinns will always have to deal with her, but each of the brothers has found love and that gives them a strong base from which to deal with her. It’s realistic yet optimistic.

I don’t have much to add to people’s theorizing why optimism is considered less realistic than pessimism is - it’s late and I’m not that deep a thinker anyway. But if everything is doomed to end badly, why bother? I need a reason to go on living, sometimes.

For some reason (I blame Plato) is that as a culture we believe that the most valid art is the art that is most like life, what is most “real”; and what is most real is apparently the tragic end of the spectrum of human experience.

Representational art, ie, “most “real"”, has not been considered a valid art form for many a year now.  I use the word “representational” because terms like “realistic” or “life-like” are misnomers--every artist edits what he or she presents to the world and decides what to show their audience.  Even so-called “editorial” photography is not “real”, since the photographer impresses their own world-view upon the photograph by choosing what to frame and when to frame it in a certain space in time.  He/She also informs the presentation by what they choose to leave out.  Since the advent of photography in the late 1800s/early 1900s, representational art of the likes of David, Michelangelo, Bouchet, etc, has been considered by the majority of the “serious” art world as passe.  True representation could be achieved easily through photography.  (In fact, early art photographers took pains to make their photos more like paintings through various tricks with the lens and with lighting because true representation was considered “not” art.) There is a direct correlation in the timeline with the rise of Impressionism and the advent of photography as an artform.  Impressionism was followed by various forms of Modernism.  Subsequent to Modernism, you find Postmodernism.  At no point in this timeline has representational art ever made it back as a truly valid style. 

As for HEAs and why they are not considered as valid as pain, despair, entropy, and chaos--look at our artwork from after WWI.  You have art where the technique is the most important aspect and virtuosity in form is celebrated.  Emotional content is considered trite.  A large portion of Great modernist pieces fit into this category.  Then you have the Postmodern period, specifically from the 60s on.  The 60s are a time of the anti-aesthetic.  To a large extent, the concept is the most important part, not the form it takes.  Beauty is cheap and inauthentic.

Whether or not that’s why the HEA is also considered inauthentic and not “valid”, I don’t know, but I can certainly see a parallel for this thinking in other artforms from the same period.

This art history lecture has been brought to you by 5 years of undergrad work and 2 years of postgrad work to achieve a degree that, when coupled with two bucks, will buy me a cup of coffee.  :)

This discussion is delicious and thoughtful and I love reading all the answers. 

I never get why happy endings are so downmarket, either. I tend to think it has to do with men being in charge of literary standards for so long, but that’s just me. 

Nothing wrong with a great redemptive tragedy, either, but it still should make sense, and a great many downbeat literary endings are grim beyond all belief.

I think Jasper Fforde had Thursday Next say it well:

“If the real world were a book, it would never find a publisher.  Overlong, detailed to the point of distraction – and ultimately, without a major resolution.”
Jasper Fforde - “Something Rotten”

I believe that anthropologists have proven that the human mind seeks patterns and will create patterns if none are available.  The genre formula, no matter which genre, probably speaks to very deep seated preferences in the human brain.

I’m going to throw another theory into the mix.

I think it has something to do with the cultural mood of the times as well as the process of growing up in a media-heavy society. Children are quite satisfied with, desire and expect the happy endings in Disney movies, religion and in other settings.

However, (spoiler!)Santa isn’t real (/spoiler!) and other realities are thus discovered and questioned as you grow up. Part of the process of considering yourself an adult and serious for most people these days is simply to not believe in a happy ending. It is to become skeptical in a skeptical age, and to discard the media & trappings of childhood (cartoons, religion for some as well as viewing things in black and white).

These are the chief reasons why I believe, then, the happily ever after universally becomes much maligned.

Becca, that’s a really nice point. The Quinn stories have resolutions, and a promise of happiness, but that promise isn’t without complications, and I think that’s part of what made it feel so real.

This made me think of Atonement (the film, not the book, which I haven’t read). When it ended I wanted to effing die I was so sad. STOP READING HERE IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW HOW IT ENDS. (Sorry for yelling.) The capriciousness of the lie and the havoc it wreaked made me angry instead of sad, and I just wanted happiness for Cecilia and Robbie. (And for James McAvoy. James, call me.) I like the central thrust of the story, that Briony is giving them their happy ending, but I wanted it to be real goddamn it!

This is probably a weird example, but I view the end of I Am Legend (the movie again) as an unhappy one, but like the end of one of my favorite movies, West Side Story, the tragedy of the ending feels different to me. It feels earned. You can see where everything just goes off the rails, where the tragedy begins and spirals out of control. That feels like it serves the story to me, which isn’t to say that Atonement is unclear or hard to follow, but it feels different and unsatisfying to me.

I’m not sure what this says about why I, or we, like happy endings (HA - except the obvious) but maybe it’s that great authors make you care for the characters. You invest a few hours and 300 pages and you want to know they’re taken care of when you leave. This is part of why I hate Thomas Hardy. Because everyone’s just dead.

What sara said. When I invest lifespan and attention on a book, get involved with the story and the characters, I want to enjoy the experience. I don’t want to read 700 pages and have everyone die, because then I just want to add the author’s body to the pile for wasting my time in getting to care about the characters.

I guess I liked sad endings as a twenty-something, but now I find some of them pretentious, and since I’ve had children, I’m a little more invested in the HEA.  Besides (as another poster said) life is a mixture of good and bad, why focus on the latter?  In fact I’ve spent abt 5 hours tonight trying to convince a sister that she can have some HEAs in her life, and that all of our lives can have purpose and joy.  That is the truth, and all those literary killjoys want their HEAs just as much as we do.

blue45--maybe sometimes, but not always!

We have visiting writers who speak at my school for the Creative Writing Department.  My teacher said to my class that she thought one of the books was not good, and one of the few reasons she gave was that the man and the woman get together in the end. 

My immediate reaction was WTF?! Why does that make a book not good? 

There’s some kind of stigma that it’s more “real” for characters to be miserable.  Now, I’ve had my share of rough times, but am I consitant pile of angst who feels no hope for the future?  No.  And I consider myself pretty real...what with the way I exist in the universe and all.

I’m also on the staff of a magazine, and when looking over poetry submissions, I came accross a well written love poem and immediatly gave it my vote for print.  We ended up sticking it right in the middle of all the angst poetry, so our readers would have a chance to catch their breath and not blow their brains out.

When it comes to Romance Novels and the people who hate them there is usually three things I believe: that a) they haven’t read one and are just relying on that stigma that its whoopi all around and that it won’t be a satisfying read or b) they read one but it was one of the badly written one with rediculous sex scenes and bad dialogue that further build on the stigma and finally maybe c) they’ve read some but they haven’t read the right romance novel for them. The Fantasy reader isn’t going to enjoy a contemporary romance set in one City with a secretary and a billionaire.

On the happy ending note I think that a lot of the times in our postmodernist world view anything that is traditionally happy like Jane Erye or (in some cases) stuff by Dickens, or other such books that are literature but also the beginnings of the genre book are considered too traditional and safe. Today in our mind sets of constantly searching for the new, we want books that contemporary in nature and comment on contemporary issues of lost and real love. With books like those by Nicholas Sparks we’re treated to this world were the love between to people isn’t perfect its damaging but also provides growth.

I think a lot of times people view romance novels as books without real contemporary suffering to validate the happy ending. That they are too much like the ancestors of literature to be considered valid reading for today. I believe that this is wrong. That romance novels have become varied some more happy then others.

I’ve noticed some people who diss the HEA are dissatisfied or bored with their own lives but either don’t know or won’t try to make married life/family life fun.

My husband and I get out for a date every week or so.  We play Scrabble with the kids and take them skiing.  We have some rough patches but most of the time, we’re having a blast.  Yet we know too many couples who can’t be bothered to call sitters, and who let their kids get addicted to TV, Webkinz, etc… We see them bored, bickering, vaguely disappointed with life and yet unwilling to break out of the rut.

The idea that you could create your own HEA is very threatening.  So much easier to just say it’s unrealistic, isn’t it?

I can tell you that drama in general is seen as more serious, even when it comes to movies. I don’t see why. There are plenty of obvious, stupid dramas like The English Patient that are a complete waste of film stock; there are wondrous, complex comedies like Cold Comfort Farm that show them up. It’s harder to be funny, I think. It’s relatively easy to be sad. Everyone knows what sad is.

A few months ago, someone recommended an author to me, saying she was “funny.” She wasn’t...well, at least in my eyes she wasn’t. Humor is very personal and very hard to do across the board. Maybe that’s why happiness is looked down upon, because so many people find drama easier to identify with. Personally, I’m more likely to think someone’s a good author/director if they do a good, believable upbeat story than if they go for the cheap dramatic angst.

Too lazy to read through this whole thread, but someone mentioned the advice given to Anne Shirley--only geniuses can write sad endings.

I disagree. I think it takes a better and more interesting writer to write the happy ending--and make it *believable*--than to write the sad ending. How easy would it be to end Jane Eyre with Rochester dead? Instead, Bronte managed to give us a happy ending that is bizarrely satisfying and believable--even though it really shouldn’t be.

A fan-fic writing friend of mine writes only happy stories that get categorized as “fluff.” A while back, she wrote about why she does that. Her life has not been all sunshine and rainbows, and for her, writing the happiness is actually more challenging and more fulfilling.

I think we have this idea that writing tragedy is harder, but I disagree. The world can be a bleak, horrible place. Finding joy in those horrors, and making that joy believable, is the true strength of a good writer. And that’s why I love happy endings. They make me believe that, even in the face of a world like ours, there is some possibility for joy.

Snarkhunter said,

And that’s why I love happy endings. They make me believe that, even in the face of a world like ours, there is some possibility for joy.

That’s perfect. That’s beautiful. That’s it, exactly.

I think Tina brought up a valid point. (sorry I haven not figured out how to quote yet!). It’s about the “modernist” concept of art. Basically, around 1900, the modern movement wanted to renew art in all its form. In literature (I use this term to denote “arty” writing), that led to a deconstruction of narration, to a focus on form over plot, a playing with tradition, etc. Novels like James Joyce’s Ulysses or Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplace are examples of “modern” writing. Part of the problem, however, is that a huge part of the public did not follow the writers on their search for new meaning and new form. They prefered to read stories with a conventional appeal - a conventional story arch, plot, characters developement. That’s where popular fiction is coming from. The rub is that people want different things from their books. The HEA is really no issue in the literature of the 20th century and later because plot is not as important as in popular fiction. A literary novel is more about the way it is written and also about the irritation factor as I call it. It is about challenging your view of the world but also your conceptions of how to use language, how to think, how to describe. It’s not that a positive ending is impossible per se, but a lot of time the characters described make it impossible. How to end on a positive note when writing about people without redeeming qualities? So a lot of people just have an open end, which is usually seen as a negative one. Someone posted that they did not like books without closure and I think that is part of this devide again. Modern literature does not believe that it can picture the world any more, it just shows fragmented and incomplete shards of reality so there cannot be closure. Of course, the paratigm might change again and actually I have seen signs that it is changing already.

I could go on about this forever and get very theoretical, but I am going to spare you…

“Why is the happy ending viewed as something inferior in and of itself compared to a tragic ending, or a bittersweet ending?”

Children’s stories have happy endings. Perhaps that’s it? With people who are against HEAs, you often get this sense of how grown-up and sophisticated they want to be. If a story is tragic, then it’s realistic, and if it’s realistic, that must mean it’s grown-up and sophisticated.

Both these conclusions aren’t really sensible. I can think of several tragic endings I found very unrealistic. One of my pet peeves is the tacked-on tragic ending. Those endings where you almost hear the writer go: “Uh-oh, if I don’t watch out, my hero and heroine will live happily ever after, so… she GETS RUN OVER BY A CAR!” How sophisticated and grown-up is that?

First-time commenter here… this discussion has fascinated me, because the comedy/genre/HEA vs. Serious Fiction debate comes up frequently in my life.  My freshman year of college, my Lit professor said, point blank, “There’s genre fiction and then there’s good fiction.” Direct quote.  That and a couple of similar conversations with my advisor was enough to make me switch my major to Art and never look back.  Since then, I’ve mostly had to deal with this debate in terms of film, and I always cite Sullivan’s T