Category: 30 Days of First Lines

Today, Shirley Jackson, best known for “The Lottery,” but whose stylish, edge-wise view of life extended to many other novels and several clear-eyed (and hilarious) takes on family life.

“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead.”

The kickoff of We Have Always Lived in The Castle.

Not so often read today perhaps, but a lion (admittedly one with a sort of post-modern grin) of my youth and young adulthood, John Barth opens his “Lost in the Funhouse” thus:

“For whom is the funhouse fun? Perhaps for lovers. For Ambrose it is a place of fear and confusion.”

“It is about water. It was about water in the beginning, it will be in the end.”

This is the opening of Thomas Sanchez’ Mile Zero, a great Key West novel. It explores the figurative (and literal) “end of the road” that also inspired Wallace Steven’s extraordinary poem “The Idea of Order at Key West,” which opens,

“She sang beyond the genius of the sea.”

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Floating houses off Key West.

“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.”

Raymond Chandler, “Red Wind”

Yes, it’s more than one line. It took him five, but pans in on an L.A. that has stayed in our imagination a long time.

There are many ways for a novel to pass the “first line test”  (in short, does it keep you hooked? ).  A commonplace turned on its head is one, and nicely done here.

“Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.”

The first line of Waiting, by Ha Jin

Today’s first line if from E.B. White’s Stuart Little:

“When Mrs. Frederick C. Little’s second son arrived, everybody noticed that he was not much bigger than a mouse.”

White managed the rare feat of being a fine essayist–his lean prose style, gently humorous, yet fierce, set a standard for American mid-century prose–and writing two children’s classics; I loved them (and even liked his third) and also spent many years trying, fruitlessly, to catch the rhythm of his lines.

A friend once said the world could be divided into Jane Eyre people and Wuthering Heights people, and I’m with Charlotte.

“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.”
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.

Particularly appropriate on this soggy night…

For today, Thomas Pynchon’s “Crying of Lot 49,” introducing his protagonist and, in passing, displaying his penchant for goofy names.

“One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.”

Another of his great openers: “A screaming comes across the sky…” from Gravity’s Rainbow.