Perhaps it’s the economic realities of trying to publish literary fiction in an age of late capitalism, or perhaps it’s simply our culture’s diminishing attention span, but the first line of a novel now carries with it tremendous and arguably unreasonable expectations. According to all kinds of writing blogs and listicles, this one line has to not only draw a reader in and keep them reading, but also establish the author’s voice (and, if possible, the character’s too), set up the primary narrative (and, ideally, a bit of the setting), and even underscore the novel’s grander themes. It’s as if we think every reader who picks up a book today is scrolling through a Twitter feed, and only a perfectly witty and elegant string of 280 characters will stop them from putting a volume down and moving on to the next.
The truth is, most first lines, including the classics, meet only a few of the aforementioned goals. If we applied such requirements to Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, we’d expect the first line to read something like this:
I first saw Jay Gatsby one night early in the summer, when he was standing on the lawn before his mansion in West Egg, silhouetted in the moonlight against the tall trees and reaching his hand out to a green light at the edge of the water.
But the novel’s actual first line is very different (“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.”), and it tells us nothing at all about Gatsby or West Egg or the death of the American dream. And honestly, it’s not exactly an arresting or gripping line—there is perhaps a compelling sense of Nick’s vulnerable yet guarded interiority, and the rhythm of the prose suggests an author with a confident voice, but otherwise the line contains very little of what makes the larger novel so great. And yet, would a modern reader really stop reading Gatsby because they thought it was going to be a novel about a man and his father and some vague piece of advice? How many great novels then would this modern reader let slip by because they didn’t find the opening line compelling?
One of literature’s most famous first lines is Holden Caulfield’s autobiographical screed at the beginning of Catcher in the Rye:
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
The line of course encapsulates the novel’s larger theme of adolescent rebellion, and there’s obviously a strong authorial and character voice here, which alone is intriguing enough to keep a reader reading—but we don’t get much of an image or a setting or a narrative. Similarly, the first line of David Copperfield (“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”) is thematically intriguing but otherwise tells us little about the character and the setting and the plot and the author’s voice (aside from the fact that it was probably written some time in the nineteenth century, given the syntax). And yet, these two lines are obviously highly compelling opening sentences, and any reader who isn’t intrigued to read more probably isn’t someone who enjoys reading novels.
So why is it then that we today hold our own first lines to such unreasonable standards when even such classics don’t meet those expectations? Even the first lines of contemporary novels rarely accomplish everything all these listicles argue a good first line must. Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers opens with a first line that’s also a chapter title (“He killed him with a motorbike helmet (what he had in his hand).”), which may not tell us about the characters or the setting, and is perhaps too short to really give us a flavor of the the author’s highly lyrical prose style, but nevertheless is blunt and brutal and draws us in with a very literal forcefulness. Emma Cline’s The Girls meanwhile (“I looked up because of the laughter, and kept looking because of the girls.”) compells us mostly by what it leaves out—who are these girls, and what are they laughing at, and why is the narrator drawn to them? We don’t get any sense of the novel’s 1960s California setting or any of its themes of female friendship twisted by a patriarchal culture—but we don’t need to because, like the narrator, we’ve already been drawn in.
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon perhaps has a first line that accomplishes everything modern readers expect:
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.
Here, we’re not only introduced to a setting, a character, and a plot, but also are given a sense of the author’s voice via the intricate syntax, as well as the novel’s larger theme, the journey of a housewife whose life was previously only Tupperware and fondue into a tangled world of real estate moguls and financial conspiracies. It’s an incredible sentence that prepares us for what we’re about to read with such precision and grace that we can’t help but be impressed and compelled to keep reading. But must all of us really craft first lines as perfect as this one? As Sean Penn’s recent debacle proved, trying to imitate Thomas Pynchon can end very badly.
In fact, even Pynchon himself didn’t always write first lines that did all of the above. Gravity’s Rainbow opens with just this simple yet highly effective sentence: “A screaming comes across the sky.” No complex financial web, no hints of conspiracy, no characters and settings—just the sound of rocket exploding in orgasm, a sign of the novel’s strange and twisted themes, but not of much else. Yet unlike the short and compact Lot 49, the dense and sprawling Gravity’s Rainbow perhaps requires a line with such simplicity, to let the reader breathe for a moment before everything else yet to come.
Ultimately, there is one feature that unifies all the lines quoted above: each of them establishes the rhythm of their novel, and thus a mood. Whatever else they do, they prepare us for how to read what comes next. Similarly, for writers, a first line can help prepare us for how to write what comes next. When I start a novel, I may not know exactly what it will contain, the setting, the character’s voice, the larger theme. But if I manage to write a first line with a rhythm to match the emotion I’m trying to convey, then I usually find that this rhythm will carry me onward through the prose. Maybe that’s all we can ask first lines to do.