As a rule, I dislike epilogues. Everyone already knew that Hermione married Ron and having to watch them put their kids on the train and then shuffle off to their lives of quiet incantation was just a little bit depressing. Surely they fought dragons and Death Eaters for all the rest of their days.
Perhaps part of the problem with epilogues is that they often give a narrative self-awareness, a grounding, the avoidance of which I feel may be vital to fiction itself. And, as the heroine of The Borrower puts it, an epilogue often “[gives] me pause, for a moment, that all my reference points are fiction, that all my narratives are lies.”
But for me, the epilogue of Rebecca Makkai’s debut novel The Borrower may be the best part, which is fitting for a book as much about books and readers as this one.
Lucy Hull, the 26-year-old children’s librarian in Hannibal, Missouri, haplessly runs away with ten-year-old Ian Drake, in a mock-heroic attempt to rescue him from his evangelical parents.
As the narrative grows, it becomes in and of itself a reading list of familiar titles, all the way from Goodnight Moon and The Very Hungry Caterpillar to Oz and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, speaking to those texts, and to a shared love between writer and reader, openly and with a fair amount of glee.
Lucy and Ian form a friendship where it’s not entirely clear who the adult is, and in the end, I might argue that Lucy’s life is changed more than Ian’s. And maybe that relates to the idea that before a real story, before a true book, we are all equalized in the profound world of imagination.
In the final scenes, a clever ploy on Lucy’s part (probably the smartest thing she does in the whole book) and the epilogue leave us Ian on the precipice of discovering and creating meaning in his life on his own. She leaves for him, appropriately subversively stashed in the folds of an evangelical magazine for children, lists of titles Ian should read each year as he grows up. (“‘Books to Read When You’re 12’ started with The Giver and The Golden Compass and ended with Lord of the Flies.” Be still my heart.)
This gesture, those lists of familiar titles, evoked the community of children-now-adults who, like Lucy and like Ian, found such a real world in the lives of Jonas, Lyra, Ralph, that we find those universes still, real and alive.
This is a novel about what we might build with books, what shelter we might find from those bricks of ideas. And our heroine Lucy urges her reader in the end:
Imagine his heaven, where he can float through characters and books at will. Imagine him already there, under his covers with the flashlight. For a blissful eternity, such a world should suffice. For now, it should save him.
Let’s say that it does.
This novel is a paean to books themselves. It made me proud to be a reader, and reminded me that such a safe place “under the covers with the flashlight” is still available to me, and to all of us who seek it.
