Is the happy ending making a comeback?

From a fairytale wedding to news of an unlikely cab ride – are audiences regaining their appetite for cheerful stories?

Robert McCrum

The Observer, Sunday 1 May 2011

For a storytelling species with a narrative gene in the DNA, it's been a good week for stories. First, from America, there was news of the 3,000-mile cab ride that will have quickened the pulse of any scriptwriter on the lookout for a new angle to Taxi.

(Photograph: Stuart Dunn Travel/Alamy)
A New York cab driver, Mohammed Alam, landed the fare of a lifetime ($5,000) when two passengers, an investment banker and a friend, decided to do something "magical". John Belitsky and his pal Dan Wuebben conceived the idea of taking a yellow cab to Los Angeles, hailed the driver at La Guardia airport, and set off on a six-day epic across the US. Had the meter been running, the trip would have cost an estimated $17,000.

Taking to the road to obliterate your past, liberate the present and possibly find a better future is a truly American dream that's deep in the national psyche. Huck Finn does it when he sets off on the journey of a lifetime down the Mississippi, the greatest highway on earth. Jack Kerouac, in On the Road, created a blueprint for a generation of hitchhikers in the adventures of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty. More recently, Hollywood sent Thelma and Louise into the far west to escape from suburban anomie, and created an international hit.

Messrs Belitsky and Wuebben are good candidates for myth-making. One is from New Jersey, the other from Queens. They broke their extraordinary journey in Las Vegas and won $2,000 on the tables. Or so they say. This trip has been documented by Belitsky on his Twitter page. We know how travellers like to embellish their story. When he reports that they woke their driver "to a shower of $100 bills at sunrise", it does seem a bit too good to be true.

No matter. The dream of leaving is one of seven archetypal stories that rarely fail to capture the imagination. Expect to see a yellow cab cruising through the Painted Desert on your neighbourhood screen sometime soon. Mohammed Alam will probably be a woman and his passengers gay but – hey! – that's showbusiness.

Here at home we had our own bit of showbiz in another archetypal story – a painted coach trundling down the Mall into history. The fairytale wedding of a true commoner with bog-standard ancestors to a real prince who is heir to the throne of a "sceptr'd isle" also exhilarates the narrative gene. The global interest in the royal wedding and an international audience of some 2 billion speaks to many things but one of them is terribly simple: many little girls dream of marrying a prince.

That's not the whole story, of course. The televised wedding of a navy helicopter pilot to a former (part-time) Jigsaw employee may symbolise a country awkwardly coming to terms with the realities of the 21st century, but it also plugs the national narrative into the historical mains. Like the best fiction, it's possibly even cathartic. Princess Diana's ghost can rest quietly at last.

Actually, marriages are supposed to resolve the plot of comedy, followed by "and they all lived happily ever after". Contemporary audiences have less appetite for what Henry James, who anticipates so much modernity, used to refer to as "the time-honoured bread sauce of the happy ending". In The Art of Fiction, he scorns such contrivances. In some novels, he remarks, it is just "a distribution at the last of prizes, pensions, husbands, wives, babies, millions, appended paragraphs, and cheerful remarks".

Read McCrum's full piece at The Observer.