The Decade's Best Ending

Ending a novel takes some finesse, and often it's the most disappointing part of the story. For a reader to say "That's it?" at a book's end is a common occurrence, as writers either attempt to tie up all of a story's threads (often in a rushed or unsatisfying way), meander on far too long after what would have been a story's righful end (such as Leo Tolstoy in "Anna Karenina" — sadly, one of the world's great novels has one of the world's worst endings), or abruptly end at what must have appeared to be a convenient point to the writer.

Not so with "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay." Like a good dinner guest who leaves before the host tires, Michael Chabon's novel ends before the reader is ready, and mercifully avoids all the usual flaws with a simple, elegant conclusion. In the final paragraph, Chabon neatly and nearly invisibly sums up the partnership at the center of the story (that of cousins Joe Kavalier and Sammy Clay), orchestrates a farewell, and gives the sense of his characters' lives having been put right with the return of one character and the leaving of another. The end of "Kavalier & Clay" is a quiet cataclysm — there's a resolution, one that only occurs with the shedding of all the lies each of of the characters had been living with, and because of that, there's a sense of possibility at the conclusion. There is no "That's it?" at the final page, just a satisfying sense of having been told a good story by a good storyteller.

— Jessica Chapel (jnc at flakmag dot com)