How To Write A Killer Ending, Part 2

Yesterday we were thinking about what makes a great fictional ending--a final line worthy of the 300-odd pages you've put into reading a novel. I chose (at random) two unlikely candidates:

#1"We lived happily ever after," (from A Year Down Yonder); and
#2 "Over in England they married and lived happily ever after." (from Loving, by Henry Green)

No Fariy Tale Ending
No serious writer could end a book this way without tongue firmly implanted in cheek, and Green's choice of an ending is made even twistier because as a writer, he's obsessed with the concrete, the close observation of life as it's really lived. Loving is about as far away from fairy tale as it's possible to get. It's set during WWII, and it concerns the downstairs shenanigans of butlers, maids, and cooks in an Irish castle: hilarious, a little raunchy, dialogue-based, full of psychological depth. By the time you get to the end of Loving you could practically finish sentences for his cast, you know them so well.

So to end this book with "happily ever after" conveys a kind of writerly exhaustion.