Waiting for the End: Gender and Ending in the Comtemporary Novel.(Book review)

WAITING FOR THE END: GENDER AND ENDING IN THE COMTEMPORARY NOVEL, by Earl G. Ingersoll. Cranbury: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2007. 288pp. $55.00, hardback.

In his critical work, Waiting for the End: Gender and Ending in the Contemporary Novel (2007), Earl G. Ingersoll examines the narrative structure of numerous contemporary novels and the ways in which gender plays a role in this structure particularly regarding the function of the ending. Through this work, Ingersoll desires, "to find a larger and more complex paradigm with the power to resist the temptation merely to reject the male plot and to replace it with a 'female plot' that completely excludes the elements of that traditional male model" (255). He explores the creation of "female plots" and by contrast "male plots" in an attempt to understand the structural framework that underlies the order and manner in which the narrative is presented.

This work begins with an examination of the plot and ending of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925). The "open ending" and "closed ending" that appear simultaneously within this work make it a great model for the exploration of novels that deviate from the traditional linear plot structure. This examination brings into question the impact of a "female plot" existing alongside a "male plot" within the same text. Ingersoll points out that the two alternative storylines of Clarissa and Septimus both raise the same questions regarding whether a loss of faith in the future can ever be reverted back to hope. While Septimus's story is an alternative to Clarissa's, it reshapes her story and places her as the creator of the narrative. This narrative technique takes the traditional "male plot" and uses it simply as a means to produce the "female plot" thus breaking with the traditional narrative dependency upon male perspectives. He also suggests that the title and the restricted time sequence of the plot are Woolf's attempts to further question the traditional male plot and the issues of gender in narrative. The close examination of this text provides a platform from which Ingersoll explores the relation between gender and ending in contemporary novels.

After the exploration of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway in his introduction, Ingersoll then structures his examination as three "clusters." He begins by examining the masculine narrative paradigm, then moves onto works that seem to undo this paradigm and finally ends with the third cluster making up texts that escape the paradigm by discounting its existence and thus creating autonomous works. Ingersoll stresses the fluidity of his narrative categories:

 
   In one very important sense, these clusters might be seen 
   as overlapping rather than as discrete "categories". These 
   explorations of narratives are meant to provoke readers 
   to think about patterns and endings, not to impose an 
   organizational chart of self-contained and mutually exclusive 
   concepts. (193) 

The first "cluster" contains works that follow the traditional function of ending in which it holds the meaning of the work itself. According to Ingersoll, "The novels in the first cluster succeed in seducing the readers into waiting for the end in large part because the reading of narrative has been culturally constructed to have both a ...