It’s a wonderful and rare event to come across a perfect ending. Recently I discovered one: the six words that conclude “The Faber Book of Adultery,” the opening story by Jonathan Gibbs in The Best British Short Stories 2014. I admire the story’s ending not only because it closes the narrative in a wonderfully gasp-worthy way, but because it’s a perfect little story in itself:
What precedes those words is a sex scene. The story’s protagonist, an academic as well as a writer, views adultery as the overriding subject compelling the achievements of a previous generation of writers: Roth, Cheever, Updike, Yates. Half stunned by a flirtation that’s turning into action, Mark edits in his mind each sensation as it occurs, as if he’s writing a story. His actual participation in adultery unfolds not out of lust so much as out of curiosity, his desire to cannibalize experience for his own writing, and his naïve conviction that an earlier generation led lives infused with more sexual daring—and wrote better fiction as a consequence.
