What Happens at the End

I recently finished reading On The Road, Jack Kerouac's classic Beat novel. I'd avoided it until now, assuming it would be like the poetry I read of his years back: unenjoyably sloppy. Now, a character in my novel-in-progress is obsessed with the book; it was my responsibility to head to the library and find out what he sees in it. And there's a lot. Unlike that book of poems, there were very few sections I found in need of an editor, and plenty of passages that blew me away. I like to mark great sentences or paragraphs when I find them. There is now a City of Palo Alto library book full of tiny turned-down corners.

In my own notes, I copied down this passage:

"Man lowers his head and lunges into civilization, forgetting the days of his infancy when he sought truth in a snowflake or a stick. Man forgets the wisdom of the child."

I've always loved working with kids, and while I wouldn't always call what they possess "wisdom," there is something eye-opening about a child's perspective. While in Las Vegas last week, I was invited to visit a friend's fifth grade classroom during Career Week and talk about what it's like to be a writer. So I grabbed a copy of "Ms. Yamada's Toaster" (a certain fifth grader I know claims this is her favorite of my stories) and headed over to Gordon McCaw Elementary.

"Miss Larson" had warned me that this particular class was full of troubled and low-performing kids, and that most read far below the fifth grade level. I was worried they'd find me boring, or have little enthusiasm for writing. But no--the room was packed with passionate little people.

One of the first questions I got was, "Do you know John Grisham?"

Sadly, I don't. But I did dredge up JG's incredible success story semi-accurately to illustrate the value of perseverance.

The class listed their favorite authors. Dave Pilkey of Captain Underpants fame was popular, and were Jeff Kinney (Diary of a Wimpy Kid), Barbara Park (Junie B. Jones), and R.L. Stine (one of my favorite writers as a kid!). Judy Blume was the only vintage author mentioned, unless you count John Grisham.

"What are the two things you absolutely MUST do if you want to be a writer?" I asked the class.

"Go to college and study creativity."
"Buy a sweet laptop."
"Be really creative."

(The correct answer, boys and girls, is "read and write A LOT." A quiet girl with thick glasses, who later grew boisterous when talking about reading under the covers at night, finally got it.)

The kids were very into Being Creative. With this group, creativity was synonymous with compounded absurdity, a Mister Potato Head of the mind. The kids came up with a dog character who is made of chocolate and has a raisin head and grape ears. Someone else proposed an alien who'd abduct Miss Larson and the modifications flowed: "The alien has a monkey's tail," "the body of a zebra," "with purple stripes" and ridiculous numbers of eyes, heads, fingers, and arms. I noticed the same tendencies when volunteering at the bookmaking field trips at 826 Valencia. The instinct is a good one: combine two things that don't normally go together. But I wonder why kids try to write about animals and food when their favorite books are all about totally normal kids like themselves?



I showed the class the MYT book and talked about the plot. The kids were hooked. They all wanted to talk about what it would be like to know how you're going to die. No one was asking the usual questions: "Where do you get your ideas?" and "Why do you write?" Maybe the answers were obvious to a kid: ideas are everywhere, and, in Miss Larson's classroom, writing is FUN.

Finally, I got a stumper: "What happens at the end? Does the toaster explode?"

I hesitated. How did I explain that the Jehova's Witness widow who owned the toaster took the young narrator out to the backyard to pour beer on her husband's grave, then shower in it herself? What kind of ending is THAT?

I started thinking: what is it that a story has to "do" by the end, if nothing explodes? "Then I realized" endings are trite because they don't feel true. Our problems rarely get tied up in bows. My old teacher, John Dufresne calls fiction "the lie that tells the truth." The truth about what? Being alive, I think. And in life we rarely hold on to the truths we find. I used to feel like I was waiting for some answer, some IT, to reveal itself, and then my life would really start. But the reality is that we cycle through our truths. We struggle, glean, spend shimmery moments in IT-land: we explode. But we inevitably come down and when we do, the hunt starts again. That's the appeal of art: it can capture a truth and hold it. We can open a book years later and find that feeling pinned right where we left it.

As Kerouac writes of a drive through Mexico:

"The car was swaying as Dean and I both swayed to the rhythm and the IT of our final excited joy in talking and living to the blank tranced end of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our souls all our lives."

So, that's why I'm heading to the bookstore today and ponying up for my own copy of On The Road. And why, along with the enthusiasm of the kids I met, I'm not afraid for literature. The industry may be changing, but the same need drives it. Soon we'll have access to a universal library, and the Kindle, like it or not, is here to stay and has a lot to offer our portability-enthused culture.

Maybe one day I'll get to download a copy of The Abduction of Miss Larson.