Via normblog, here are the American Book Review’s lists of the 100 best first lines of novels [pdf file] and the 100 best closing lines of novels [pdf file]. These lists exist largely to generate debate, and indeed Norm himself could not resist saying that The Great Gatsby should have come higher and Mr. Sammler’s Planet should have been included. And so to this end, I will add my own debating point: that some of these entries are rubbish.

Now that I have your attention, let me clarify. I’m not talking about matters of taste. There are many of these entries that do nothing for me. Consider the well-known opening line of A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.

This has always struck me as Dickens trying too hard. And there’s an awful lot of trying too hard in these lists. Look at John Hawkes’ opening to Second Skin:

I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint and the bright stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl’s underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim and confidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of my harmless and sanguine self.

While this is beautifully written, it too beautiful. It has all the hallmarks of a writer desperately trying to dazzle the reader from the very outset. It’s a girl on her prom night, 1953, dressed and finished like a porcelain collectible, waiting for her date to arrive and hoping the corsage will march her dress, and deep down all this desperation because she is so unsure of herself.

Now this is just me clearing my throat because what this comes down to is a matter of taste. I have a natural dislike of writing that is too clever, too pretty, too damn smart. (I say this as someone who has committed these sins quite frequently in early writings–although not nearly as skilfully as in these examples–, and there may be readers who feel I still do…but it was just that, a desperation to impress born of awkwardness and lack of confidence.) Of the editors of American Book Review, one can expect that they will have a bias towards the literary and one of the prides of the literary is the quality of prose, even if that prose has become so ornamental that, like the peacock’s tail, it is no longer functional for flight.

Display, though, is a matter of taste. Peahens really go for those peacock tails and this has implications in terms of mating success that more than outweigh their aerodynamic deficiencies. Peacock feathers are so beautiful that even humans, with no mating interest in peacocks (one surely hopes), still adore them and collect them and scatter them throughout Art Deco. And sometimes I love the peacock displays:

“Take my camel, dear,” said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.

That’s from Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond. And although it is overwritten, it helps that Macaulay deliberately overwrote the line and is simultaneously trying to impress and having a joke with the reader about it. So take this as a matter of taste. I find that there’s too much trying too hard on these lists. You may well disagree. But that’s not the rubbish I was referring to. No, the rubbish is this:

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.

That’s the opening line of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. There’s nothing wrong with the line, of course. It’s pleasant enough as introductions go. Hemingway tells us readers that they (plural) lived in a house with a nice view. Excellent. But how could anyone really hold that it is one of the 100 Best Opening Lines ever written? Of course, as it turns out, there is a great deal of meaning attached to that little house in the countryside–but none of that meaning comes from the opening line. This is not a great opening line. It is the opening line of a great novel (well, not in my opinion, but a great novel to a great many people) and no doubt this opening line has been endowed with a halo effect by dint of its opening a well-regarded book rather than on its own merits. Similarly, Margaret Atwood from Cat’s Eye:

Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.*

And Joseph Heller’s opening to Catch-22:

It was love at first sight.

The real kicker in Heller’s novel is not the first line but the second, which Heller even put in a new paragraph all by itself to keep it at break’s length from that floozy opener:

The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.

It’s not that every great book has to have a great opening line, any more than every great piece of music has to open with its best melody in its best arrangement, but this is not a list of opening lines to great books, it is a list of great opening lines**. Many of them truly are great, but many of them are not great, and certainly not in the best hundred ever. And, much as I loved reading these lists, that’s what’s rubbish about them.

* This sentence is actually not even a good line, let alone a good opening line. It is, in fact, the sort of dogmatic declarative scientific statement that tarnished a lot of science fiction of the so-called Golden Age (roughly 1930-1960). I would even hazard a guess that if that line had opened a novel by, say, A. Bertram Chandler, that it would be a popular inclusion on literary lists of the worst opening lines in novels and that Ms Atwood herself would be among the most strident of mockers.

** You’ll notice I’m only talking about opening lines at this point. That’s because closing lines, by their very nature, have the weight of a book behind them. They can appear frivolous when taken out of context, as in a list of best closing lines, while still knocking the socks off the reader who is just finishing a novel. One of the best closing lines in science fiction is in Terry Bisson’s short story “macs” (no capital), but out of context it is entirely meaningless. Opening lines do not have that luxury. By definition, they have no context, or at least no context from the novel itself. J. D. Salinger wrote the opening to Catcher in the Rye with every intention of crashing into the typical 1951 reader’s expectations, so this one does come with some context from Salinger’s historical moment, but for the most part the context of an opening line only comes later in the book itself.