A book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us. — Franz Kalka.

By PJ Parrish

Spoiler alert: I’m going to reveal an ending. I have a good reason.

The plot setup: On a warm June day, a crowd of villagers gather in the town square. They’re there to hold an ancient ritual, the meaning of which has been lost to time. They come forward, and each villager draws a slip of paper from an old wooden box. The tension builds because, according to tradition, no one can look at their paper until everyone has drawn. The crowd is restless:

“They do say,” Mr. Adams said to Old Man Warner, who stood next to him, “that over in the north village they’re talking of giving [the ritual] up.”

Old Man Warner snorted. “Pack of crazy fools,” he said. “Listening to the young folks, nothing’s good enough for them. Next thing you know, they’ll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody work any more, live that way for a while. Used to be a saying about ‘[ritual] in June, corn be heavy soon.’ First thing you know, we’d all be eating stewed chickweed and acorns….”

Finally, each person opens their paper. Only one paper has a black dot on it. It is held by Tessie Hutchinson. The crowd parts and Tessie stands alone in the center. All the other villagers, men and women, old and young, begin to pick up stones.

Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. “It isn’t fair,” she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head.

So ends Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery.” You can click here to read the whole story, though I’d guess most of you already have. It was pretty much required reading if you went to school after 1950. I hadn’t read it since oh, 1970 or so, but I did so today because I want to talk about fiction that leaves room for ambiguity and maybe even pain.

First, back to Shirley Jackson’s classic. It was published in The New Yorker, to great controversy and outrage, three years after the end of WWII at the start of the Cold War. With its twin themes of conformity and cruelty, many saw it as an allegory for McCarthyism or the Holocaust. It is debated anew today amid our politics of populism and cancel culture (source: not me, but Harper’s Magazine ciritic Thomas Chatterton Williams).

But Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin argued in an essay published last year that reading politics into the story misses the point. The story’s power comes from its disturbing ambiguity:

The author deliberately declined to wrap up the ending neatly for her readers, some of whom (in a foreshadowing of the ending of The Sopranos), asked whether The New Yorker had accidently left out an explanatory final paragraph. That’s why the story has retained its relevance: not because of any obvious message or moral, but precisely because of its unsettling open-endedness.

I’ve posted here before that I believe all good fiction comes from disturbance — not just for the characters, but for the writer herself. (By the way, Sue had a good post on this yesterday, about identifying your character’s defining wound. Click here!)

I think making the reader uncomfortable isn’t a bad thing. The best literature, Ruth Franklin says, provides a vital service when we allow it to disturb us. Yes, what one person reads as discomfort another reads as aggression. But Franklin believes the idea that a writer should not offend someone is a recipe for bad writing.

The Lottery shocked people in 1948 because of its lack of a tidy message. It’s the reason it is still taught and talked about 75 years later.  Great writing can entertain, enlighten, and even empower, but it’s greatest gift to us is its ability to unsettle, prodding us to search for our own moral in the story. It is the ax, Franklin writes, quoting Kalka, to break up our frozen souls.

Many readers really hate ambiguous endings, thinking the open-ending negates everything that came before. I get that. When I read The Life of Pi, I felt really frustrated by the ending — Pi Patel washes ashore in Mexico after surviving a long time at sea on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. On land, the tiger simply walks away into the jungle without looking back. Pi is left to grapple with the ambiguity: Is the magical story with animals the truth? Or is the truth what he later tells investigators, a dark horror story involving human violence and cannibalism.

I was a bit angry. What the? Is this a who-shot-JR dream switcheroo? What really happened? Which story is the truth? Was the tiger a hallucination Patel made up to block out the horrors of his real life?

Years later, I gave it a second read. I came at the story from a different place and to me, it became an allegory about faith, survival — and the healing power of storytelling.

But hold on a minute, I can hear some of you saying….

We genre writers work within certain guidelines and reader expectations —  The lovers must live happily ever after. The white-knight hero must vanquish the evil villain. How do we square the narrative circle that our readers crave? How do we provide the satisfaction of a well-resolved plot and still find room for ambiguity?

Can we color outside the lines?

Ambiguous endings are polarizing, for sure. But when done well, they add emotional layers that make our readers confront their biases — and make us crime writers stretch the boundaries of our genre’s tradition.

It’s not easy to pull off. A well-done ambiguous ending comes from being in complete control of your narrative. It might make a reader uncomfortable, but if it feels logcial and well-earned, they will go with it.

One last point before I go. I said above that all good fiction comes from disturbance — not just for the characters, but for the writer herself. That last part is important, if a tad off-subject. To write well, you have to be willing to take chances and not be afraid of challenging your readers. But you also have to be willing to challenge yourself. The best writing — indeed, all of art — comes from a private place inside you. Sometimes that place is painful to revisit. That’s just part of the work of writing.

Indulge me for one more minute. This is a scene from an episode of Dr. Who. The doctor goes to the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, sees Van Gogh’s 1890 painting The Church at Auvers (my favorite Van Gogh). Struck by the fact that Van Gogh was ignored in his lifetime, he goes back in time and brings the painter back to modern-day Paris. Get out your hankies…

“He transformed the pain of his life into ecstatic beauty. To use your passion and pain to portray the joy and magnificence of our world, no one had ever done it before. Perhaps no one ever will again.”

Write well and without fear, crime dogs. I am traveling today to be with family but will check in with you all. Happy turkey day.