Nihil sub sole novum

I remembered this post from Unlocked Wordhoard last night, when I picked up The Kite Runner -- a novel my husband had been urging me to read -- and glanced at the first three pages. I put the book down, looked over at my husband, and, after a preliminary "Ummmmmm," I proceeded to explain how the plot twists, or rather untwists, and how the story ends. I could tell by the look on his face that I had nailed it.

I'll read the book anyway, of course. As Richard Scott Nokes points out, a story that follows a well-trodden narrative path is as likely to be a very good story as it is to be a bad one. There aren't many really new stories in the world, but so what? The old ones -- many-hued, sinuous, shape-shifting -- have stood me in good stead all these years.

Who, for instance, among those who survived the first twenty minutes or so of Moulin Rouge!, didn't know how the story was going to end? I was undaunted by knowing the ending, because I was still curious about how the story was going to make me care about the ending. That's something that always happens -- if it happens at all -- along the way, and it is along the way that the really good stories, however old, become new again.