Sentences That Go Bump in the Night

Last month I mentioned reading the John Irving novel, A Widow for One Year, which features a somewhat villainous author of children's books. Of Ted Cole's first terrifying yet successful book for children, Cole's assistant, Eddie O'Hare, believes "there was no better beginning to any story than the first sentence of The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls."

At the time I read that, I presumed Irving had painted himself into the proverbial corner. Besides Eddie's admiration, we are told that Ted Cole's daughter, Ruth, who grows up to become a better novelist than her father, "would always envy that sentence." The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls, we learn, had "frightened about nine or ten million children, in more than thirty languages, around the world."

How could Irving possibly craft the first sentence to that fictional children's book after so much buildup? Well, not only does he reveal the sentence by page thirteen, he includes the entire text of Ted Cole's story by page twenty. It is classic John Irving at the top of his game.

So how does he accomplish it? Through a series of brilliant brush strokes that foreshadow the story and cleverly manipulate the reader. A Widow for One Year begins with four-year-old Ruth waking to an unfamiliar sound in the night. As Ruth investigates, we learn that her parents once had teenage boys, Thomas and Timothy, who are dead. Ruth never knew her brothers, but she knows a great deal about them, having heard numerous stories about the dozens of photographs of them that hang throughout the Cole's household. Ruth believes she sees the ghost of one of her dead brothers and she screams.

That scene ends with typical Irving dark humor, but he moves quickly to another scene, another time when four-year-old Ruth wakes up frightened by "a sound like someone trying not to make a sound." And that's a sound that is terrifying even for an adult. A sound that prompts her father to tell her a story, "One night, Ruthie, when Thomas was your age—Timothy was still in diapers—Thomas heard a sound."

"Did they both wake up?" Ruth asks, prompting Ted Cole to begin the recitation of his famous novel:

Tom woke up, but Tim did not.

Ruth shivers in her father's arms. I shivered with Irving's book in my hands.

Seven words. Twenty-one letters. Nicknames of poetic consonance, subtly revealed. A sentence of haiku-like precision, the conjunction perfectly balancing three syllables of nine letters on either side. I believe I may have gasped audibly when I read it.

Of course, I have read other Irving novels. I know his penchant for black comedy and tragic loss and imperiling children. And now I read him for the first time as a father. And the thought of what he might do with a beginning like that made me shudder.

Tom woke up, but Tim did not.

I had been expertly manipulated. The ghosts of the dead brothers, Thomas and Timothy, were already haunting the novel. The terror of Ted Cole's first children's book had been well established. Because of the clever setup, one infers so much more from that single foreboding sentence than seven monosyllabic words alone can convey.

It is a brilliant beginning—and after weeks of discussing favorite first lines—one that took my breath away.