Never Endings
Some authors can’t resist bringing charismatic characters back in a sequel, but why?
Richard Bach, the author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which is possibly the most 1970s book of all time, wrote that true love stories never have endings. It’s a sentiment that remains woven into the North American vernacular and probably hundreds of trite wedding speeches. But what about other types of stories? A recent surge in literary sequels has seen authors like Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Strout and André Aciman pick up familiar storylines years or even decades after the original works were published. Assumptions about authors’ venal motives in writing a sequel—namely that sequels are opportunistic cash grabs—permeate pop culture discourse. We’ve probably all declared “The sequel is never as good” about a lamentable spinoff (with some notable exceptions). Granted, this is more often reserved for films, but authors also express fear that they’re doomed to failure when they make an attempt. The catastrophe that authors risk in
penning a sequel seems to outweigh any potential satisfaction for the reader (or writer), which raises the question “Why do it?”
Most artists, writers included, will concede that a work of art is never truly finished. It can always evolve or be improved on in some way. Perhaps this is particularly true of fiction. Authors spend years building vivid worlds populated with complex human characters; letting them go can feel like ignoring a child or best friend. Strout brings her complicated, ornery and beloved Olive Kitteridge of the eponymous Pulitzer Prize-winning novel back to readers in this fall’s sequel, Olive, Again. “I really thought I was done with her and she with me. But a few years ago, I was in a European city, alone for a weekend, and she just showed up. She showed up with a force—the way she did the first time—and I could not ignore her,” explained Strout in an interview with The New Yorker.
Heightening authors’ desire to resurrect old friends and old worlds is the fact that great literary themes will always be relevant. Aciman returns to the eternal theme of unrequited love in this fall’s Find Me. The new novel explores what happened to Elio and Oliver, the passionate lovers from the erotically charged original book Call Me by Your Name, which left readers with a dagger in their hearts (and an inability to ever look at a peach in the same way again). Aciman might have created a completely new storyline with a similar theme, but returning to these known characters conjures a yearning in readers that intensifies the anguish of lost love that’s central to the books.
In The Testaments, Atwood’s fervently anticipated sequel to her 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, the author returns to her dystopian world anchored by the totalitarian state of Gilead. The depressing reality is that the themes of white supremacism and misogyny central to the original work have never stopped being relevant. But in 2019, when, particularly in the United States, we’re witnessing an attack on reproductive rights and children are being torn out of the arms of their (non-white) parents at the border, those themes feel even more urgent.
More so than in The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments strikes at the heart of our current social issues by examining how a totalitarian regime happens and how it collapses. Three characters narrate the story. We gain insight into the regime’s incipient stages, how it gained momentum through moral compromise and the forces that conspired to orchestrate its fall. It’s the former aspect that contemporary readers should find the most chilling. Oppressive regimes aren’t born overnight, and not everyone involved is intrinsically evil. Their growth is slow and insidious, and we underestimate their depravity, all the while inching toward a horrifying new normal.
In the case of The Testaments’s release, the answer to “Why now?” is an obvious one; but with other sequels, it’s not as clear. “It’s a mistake to think of an author as functioning in a vacuum,” says Betty A. Schellenberg, a professor of English at Simon Fraser University and one of the editors of the anthology Part Two: Reflections on the Sequel. “Audience, cultural and commercial forces are also at play.” In multiple interviews, when asked why he decided to write Doctor Sleep, Stephen King cited the many fans who have been in touch over the years to ask “What happened to Danny?” And one blogger wrote of Olive, Again, “Elizabeth Strout delivers exactly what book clubs across the globe have been wanting more of: Olive Kitteridge.” Much like with the attachment writers form to their own characters, readers also come to love certain protagonists. Haven’t we all felt a pang of melancholy when a book we love comes to an end? At a time when news headlines read like their own post-apocalyptic novel, amplifying life’s already uncertain nature, there is comfort to be found in a familiar storyline.
A narrative’s adaptation to film or television strengthens the bond formed between fictional characters and readers. While that’s certainly encouraging—anything that gets the masses to pick up a book is a plus—it’s presumptuous to reduce an author’s motives down to capital gain. When a beloved character is brought to life by an actor we admire (the formidable Frances McDormand, for instance), it adds a layer of depth to the story for the reader or creates “a desire to more fully experience a world or character that has been tasted through a film or TV adaptation,” says Schellenberg.
But it’s about more than just spending time with a familiar, beloved character. “A sequel can’t just be more of the same,” says Schellenberg. Perhaps therein lies the crux of a good sequel: the ability to return to the familiar in an original way, a theme explored in Part Two. For example, The Testaments picks up the characters and themes of the original novel but expands upon them to propel the narrative forward and provoke different thoughts and questions from the reader.
In Part Two’s “Echoes of Paradise: Epic Iteration in Milton,” writer Samuel Glen Wong notes that with great literary sequels throughout history, such as Paradise Regained (John Milton’s sequel to Paradise Lost), the cosmic weight of each work on its own is enough that they both ascend to the same level and the notion of the sequence dissolves. The root of the word “sequel” may come from the Latin sequi, meaning “to follow,” but a good sequel does much more than that.
The catastrophe that authors risk in penning a sequel seems to outweigh any potential satisfaction for the reader.