A good ending, really, is a taking-into-account of everything that came before. Sometimes – not enough has come before. No bowling pins are up in the air, or not enough of them. The fabric from which a rich ending gets made is supplied in the earlier portions of the story…. If that early richness isn’t there, we get that sadly familiar feeling of begging the ending to work – stretching it and making it over-literal and so on. 

GEORGE SAUNDERS