Great Beginnings Monday: Erich Segal

November 8, 10:16 PMNY Writing Careers ExaminerTad Richards

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Illustration by Tad Richards
What can you say about a 40 year old novel/film that won't die?

What can you say about a 25-year-old girl who died?

This line has become famous as perhaps the corniest, sappiest. kitschiest openings ever written, to a novel that's become almost legendary as the epitome of cornball, sappy kitsch, a novel that actually contains another entry in the corniest, sappiest,  kitschiest sweepstakes: "Love means never having to say you're sorry." How can it qualify for Great Beginnings Monday?

 Easy.Look at all those superlatives. Anything that's that good at being anything, even if it's that good at being awful, is worth paying attention to. Nobody who's heard those lines can ever quite manage to forget them, much as one might want to.

 And the beginning sentence of Erich Segal's Love Story, which is still in print after nearly 40 years, also illustrates a really interesting fictional technique: giving away the ending.

 If you start a novel by giving away the ending, you sacrifice a certain amount of suspense, but what do you gain?

 You gain a sense of inevitability. You gain a kind of trust, as the reader feels that you're sharing everything with her.

 And you gain a certain gravitas that can be quite wonderful. The sadness that hangs over the doomed Jenny Cavalleri, even at her most blissful, gives her a certain depth of character that she probably doesn't really have -- but if the reader feels it, that can be just as good for your purposes as a writer, as if she really had it.

 A much better novel, Oscar Hijuelos' The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, begins with the old, sick, ugly, disillusioned and dying Cesar Castillo. After the prologue, we meet the young, handsome, musically gifted womanizer who will dominate this great story about Cuban-Americans in the mid-20th century, but always there's that note of sadness in the back of our minds.