What I had thought of as Linda’s book wasn’t Linda’s at all. What I didn’t see coming, what astonished me about Mitford’s elegant ending, was the way the last sentence of the book revealed the protagonist to be someone else altogether. And maybe that’s why, when Mitford dispatches her lively, love-seeking heroine, Linda, in a couple of offhanded sentences on the last page of the novel, I had the same feeling I always have: things were falling into place.
This was a bygone world, full of characters who were destined for extinction. Perhaps the opening of the book-the narrator Fanny’s description of a photo in which the eccentric, privileged Radlett family are cast in amber-allowed me to know, without reading ahead, where it was all going. Why I never flipped forward, I don’t remember. Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love is one of the few books where I’ve come upon the end in its correct sequence. Now I understand myself to be more interested in structure than in plot.
(I remember a fight with my mother about Smiley’s People that ended with the novel being forcibly removed from my hands and locked away.) When called to account for my unnatural tendency, I always maintained that I was more interested in how an author got to an ending than I was in being surprised by it. If it involved a book beloved of my parents, I was more likely to be punished for it than I was for something like skipping school to spend the day at the movies.
Growing up in a house of novelists, this proclivity was denounced and despised. I can recall with clarity the birth of the habit: I needed to know what was going to happen to that dancing pig and so my fingers reached for the last page. Once I’m engaged by a story (usually within the first three chapters), I want to discover, right away, where it’s all going.
From a very early age-all the way back to my first grade reader, A Pig Can Jig-I have always skipped to the last page of a book and read the ending.
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