Why books should always have happy (redemptive) endings

I am an honorary member of my aunt Ann's book club. Every year she sends me the best couple of novels she read. I got Atonement from her (Ian McEwan) and read it. While reading it, I remembered bits and pieces of Crime and Punishment, which I read six years ago. Why? Here's my guess.

The landscape of Atonement is as much interior as exterior, that is, as much in the characters' minds as outside in the visible world. The main character Briony, a budding writer, in particular is described by her thoughts about the malleability of reality. The book's drama centers on Briony's false witness -- intended? -- that sends an innocent young man to prison. The sympathetically portrayed psyche of a guilty person is what brought to mind Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. Briony's "crime" is not nearly as severe or overt as Raskolnikov's, but the believable layering of rationalizations is similar.

I liked Atonement; I snuck away from family during Christmas to read a chapter or two now and then. I attribute that to the masterful description of the characters' thoughts. I recognized some of Briony's thoughts as my own, and I'm sure I know people like her mother, father and older brother (her sister Emily I can't quite place). This is not what reading was like for me as a boy. I didn't like to read up through my sophomore year of high school. I thought novels assigned in school were loaded with boring "description", by which I meant scene setting, as opposed to cool "action", by which I probably meant depictions of events that would stir my hormones. What changed my mind about reading is that I found books were a way to engage in philosophical debate with heavyweight minds. I was, and am, contemplative by nature. So when my friend Brian lent me The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran, I realized I was getting some high-powered thinking delivered directly to my mind. I was hooked. To tie this back to Atonement, I was reminded while reading it that I still don't like lots of scene-setting verbiage. I like action and thinking. That's what the book had.

I disagreed with Atonement the way I disagreed with Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. Both stories carried me right along but the existential shape of the world being presented in each did not sit with me. In the case of Dan Brown I thought he was being decitful in his use of fiction to propose a conspiracy theory about the church. With McEwan, I just honestly disagree. Back to Crime and Punishment to explain. Dostoevsky sees Raskolnikov redeemed at the end. McEwan leaves Briony's situation ambiguous (on a couple of levels). There's no doubt about the ending's cleverness, and I know the mantra about literature relishing ambiguity, but I don't think you're telling the whole truth in fiction if you leave out God's providence. I'm not saying every ending has to be happy, but if you're going to depict a world shouldn't you give a nod to the character of its creator?