Endings 2

 Eudora Welty said of the last sentence of Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, 'If I had written that sentence, I'd be happy all my life!' High praise from a writer of her calibre, and well merited: the sentence is indeed beautiful and eloquent, when read in context.
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant ends with Ezra finally managing to bring the whole of his dysfunctional family together, after his mother's funeral, for a dinner at his restaurant – even including Beck, the errant father who deserted them all long ago. But then Beck absents himself, and the rest of the family go in search of him to bring him back. Cody, Ezra's troubled and troublemaking brother, is the one who finds him. In the closing paragraph, Cody recalls  a boyhood incident when he accidentally shot his mother with his new bow and arrow, with dire consequences...

'Cody held on to his elbow and led him toward the others. Overhead, gulls drifted  through a sky so clear and blue that it brought back all the outings of his boyhood – the drives, the picnics, the autumn hikes, the wildflower walks in the spring. He remembered the archery trip, and it seemed to him now that he even remembered that arrow sailing in its graceful, fluttering path. He remembered his mother's upright form along the grasses, her hair lit gold, her small hands smoothing her bouquet while the arrow journeyed on. And high above, he seemed to recall, there had been a little brown airplane, almost motionless, droning through the sunshine like a bumblebee.' 

Another American novel from much the same time (forty years ago!) as Dinner at the Homesick is Jayne Anne Phillips's Machine Dreams, which also follows the members of a broken family, but in less straightforward manner, drawing in particular on their dreams (and quoting letters). The emotional heart of the book is the close loving relationship between Danner and her younger brother Billy, who is fascinated by machines, especially aeroplanes, becomes a pilot in the Vietnam war, and is shot down and killed. Here is the closing dream of the book, Danner's. It gets me every time...

'Danner and Billy are walking in the deep dark forest. Billy makes airplane sounds. Danner, oblivious to her brother's play, is stalking the magic horse. There are no cloven tracks, but the dust on the path is disturbed and the horse seems to be circling. Occasionally Danner looks over her shoulder and sees the animal watching them through thick leaves. The mare's eyes are large and certain. Certain of what? Billy pays no attention and seems to have followed his sister here almost accidentally. They walk on, and finally it is so dark that Danner can't see Billy at all. She can only hear him, farther and farther behind her, imitating with a careful and private energy the engine sounds of a plane that is going down. War-movie sounds. Eeee-yoww, ach-ack-ack. So gentle it sounds like a song, and the song goes on softly as the plane falls, year after year, to earth.'

I guess the most famous ending of an American novel is that of The Great Gatsby, which I quoted recently, on the centenary of its publication – 

'Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And then one fine morning – And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.'

And then, in a very different register, there is the equally famous (?) ending of Huckleberry Finn: 

'Tom's most well now, and got his bullet around his neck on a watch-guard for a watch, and is always seeing what time it is, and so there ain't nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it because if I'd a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't a tackled it and I ain't agoing to no more. But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can't stand it. I been there before.'

Follow that.