Epilogue with Babies

Four years later, in a garden, with somebody's child asleep against a shoulder and a conversation happening about a fence that needs replacing. The epilogue with babies is the genre's most contested set-piece, and the argument about it is usually conducted as a matter of taste when it is actually a matter of function. Some readers turn to it first. Some skip it entirely. Both responses are legitimate, and neither tells you whether a given epilogue is any good. What the set-piece promises is proof of durability. A romance ends when two people commit. The epilogue answers a question the ending cannot, which is whether the commitment held, and it answers it by jumping far enough forward that the answer is evidence rather than intention. The make-or-break element is whether the epilogue answers a question the book actually raised. This is the test that sorts the good ones from the decorative ones, and it is easy to apply. If the novel spent three hundred pages establishing that he does not believe he can be a father because of his own father, then an epilogue with a child in it is the payoff of the book's central anxiety. If the novel raised no such question, the child is a bow. The epilogue is not obliged to contain a baby. It is obliged to contain the resolution of whatever the book made the reader worry about. The failure mode is the reward epilogue. Time has passed, everyone is happy, there are children, and the reader is being given a photograph of contentment that answers nothing. It is pleasant and inert, and it slightly cheapens what came before by implying that the romance's real subject was reproduction rather than the two people. There is a second failure that is more serious, and it is the reason a large group of readers skips these sections on principle. An epilogue with babies forecloses. It states that this couple's happiness took the form of children, which retroactively narrows a book that may have been about something else, and it tells a substantial part of the readership that the ending available to them is not the one on offer. Books are entitled to their endings. But the genre's default assumption that fulfilment arrives with a pram is a convention rather than a law, and the strongest epilogues know they are choosing it. The best epilogues are also small. The temptation is to survey the whole future: the wedding, the house, the second child, the careers. That is a summary, and summary is the least engaging register available. A single scene four years on, with a fence and a sleeping child and a conversation about nothing, does more work than a chronicle. There is a structural argument for the epilogue that its critics tend to skip, and it is worth stating. Romance is a genre that promises a specific ending, and a reader who has invested three hundred pages in two people is entitled to see the promise honoured rather than asserted. The epilogue is where the genre pays out. The objection is not really to paying out. It is to paying out in one currency only. He says something about the fence. She says they should get someone in. Neither of them moves. That is the set-piece. Not the children. The evidence that these two are still talking to each other about ordinary things.