The last word revisited

Will Schwalbe

Back in 2019, I wrote an essay for this blog ("The last word," May 27, 2019) about a comment made by Will Schwalbe in Books for a Living. Schwalbe says he was told by someone that to discover what a book is about, simply read the last word in the book.

I put this whimsical shortcut to the test and found that nearly 50 percent of the time that is actually true. The last word in a book often does, in fact, tell you what the book is about, more or less. Of course, you may have to read the entire book to interpret that word in a significant way.

I decided to revisit this notion with a few books I have read over the past year..

Take, for instance, Madam, Debby Applegate's biography of Polly Adler, the famous New York madam in the 1930s and 1940s. What should be the last word but "desires." Yep, that's what the book is about, although of course it is also about much more.

The last word in Sy Montgomery's Of Time and Turtles is "eternity" — or endless time or timelessness. Turtles move so slowly and live so long that time must seem endless to them.

I was smitten by Olaf Olafsson's novel Touch last year. It's about an elderly man who cannot forget a Japanese girl he fell in love with decades before. He flies from Iceland to Japan to try to find her again. The last word in the novel is "her." The last two words are "touch her."

The final word in the Amor Towles novel A Gentleman in Moscow is, appropriately enough, "waited." The novel tells of an aristocratic man sentenced by the Soviets to spend the rest of his life in a Moscow hotel — in effect, waiting.

In Somebody's Fool by Richard Russo, the last word is "else." Again, one must read the book for this word to gain significance, but the novel is about making choices, changing directions, trying something new, something else.

I have not mentioned the majority of books I have read in recent months in which the last word suggests nothing at all about the book itself. Still it is fun to discover just how often the last word actually does tell us something about what comes before.