Robin | May 12th, 2008
I’ve realized for a while now that the endings of most Romance novels don’t much interest me. In fact, those last few pages and paragraphs are so often a disappointment to me, an anti-climax of bassinets and baby talk and blissful proclamations of undying love that I am tempted to stop reading once I know that the couple have resolved their major issues and realize that they are IN LOVE and meant to be together just to avoid that let down when the book ending doesn’t match the intensity of the couple’s emotional commitment.
For better or worse, I am not the reader who needs a articulated guarantee of happily ever after. And I used to think that the ending of the Romance novel didn’t matter to me at all. But I’ve come to realize that it’s not so much that I don’t care, it’s more that I so often find that the end of the book, the supposedly all-important happy ending, does not really make me believe in the couple. And when I think about the endings that really stick with me, I realize that they solidify my belief in the couple’s happiness, not by promising babies and bliss, but by showing the couple at a place that is realistic and relatable given the course of their relationship.
Candice Proctor’s Whispers of Heaven, for example (an author I discovered thanks to KristieJ), ends in a way some might find bittersweet, with the couple leaving everything they know to strike out on their own, knowing they will never return. The heroine, in particular, knows she will likely never see her family again, and her departure with the hero is literally an escape (he is a convict). But for me, the ending fit, and it gave me a faith in the couple, which is the most important thing I need as a reader. If I do not believe in the couple, that they understand what they face, the problems they have or will have, their so-called happy ending is meaningless to me. And if I do believe in the couple, in the strength of their love and their reasonable intelligence, I don’t need the artificially glowy ending to keep me believing in the strength of their love and commitment, and the idea that their love will ultimately triumph.
Laura Kinsale’s Seize The Fire is one of the most heart-wrenching Romances I’ve ever read. It’s one of my favorites, too. And the end of that book seems bleak, with Sheridan, who has spent most of the novel struggling with horrific post-traumatic stress disorder and trying to avoid his growing love for Olympia, finally reaching out to her, desperately extending himself to a woman who has been laid low by a devastating loss of innocence. She is living outside, like some wild animal, and she is so alienated from herself and from him that he is not sure he can break through. It is not until the last paragraphs of the novel that he begins to reach the woman behind the pain, and even then, the ending of that novel features two people, on the ground, huddled like the refugees they are at that moment.
Like I said, it’s bleak. But as much as I wanted to know Sheridan and Olympia would someday make it to Vienna to fulfill one of Sheridan’s cherished fantasies, over time I have come to realize how much more powerful the existing ending is than the typical HEA. At that point where Sheridan and Olympia re laid so low, I believe wholly in their love, and that, for me, is the draw of Romance, even more than the promise of eternal non-disturbance and an effusion of cutesy kids and animals. It’s not that I don’t believe in happy endings; it’s more that I don’t believe in happy endings that reflect neither the state of the couple or the state of their world. And trying to sell me more just cheapens the value of what I’ve already bought.
Yet in a genre where the happy ending seems paramount to almost everything else, that “happy but not delusional” final scene seems harder and harder to find. I have to hand it to Loretta Chase, because in her upcoming book, Your Scandalous Ways, she finds a way to create a very happy ending that fits perfectly the tone of the characters and the book as a whole. But that is the exception, at least in my reading experience. Anyway, I would like to see more “yes, we’re committed and in love but won’t go from running from the law to suburban nirvana in one chapter” kinds of endings, sans the requisite epilogue, as well. I’m not asking for more “happy for now” endings, just a lack of rushing toward 2.5 kids and the white picket fence before the last page of the book.
So how about you; do you love the blissful ending/epilogue, or is it enough that the couple is together, even if you know it may take a while for them to have a normal life of togetherness? What is your favorite Romance novel ending and why?
