That may be an obscure reference for some of you, but I’m referring to a popular television show (Dallas) that ran fourteen seasons—from 1978 to 1991. It was a phenomenon at the time. You know: Ewing Oil, Southfork Ranch, J.R. Ewing (and who shot him) … and his brother Bobby, who got out of the shower in the first show of the tenth season to comfort his wife, who was crying over a nightmare she’d had.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvinAPPfyAQ

“None of that happened,” he said, thereby negating all of season nine. Whew. It was all a dream.

Some folks loved that mind-bending twist. Others hated it; they’d become invested in the plot. The show generated a lot of water-cooler conversation. I don’t know about you, kids, but it feels like a cheat to explain your way out of a plot problem (and I believe that’s what it was in this case) by calling it all a bad dream.

And yet … it’s a fine line between a cheat and a twist, don’t you think? I loved Ian McEwan’s Atonement, for example; I found myself thinking about it, marveling over how clever the ending was for days afterward. But many readers were annoyed. They felt they’d been deceived.

In a recent piece called “Sneaky author tricks” at Salon, writer Laura Miller discusses three novels (the article also trumpets a spoiler alert*) that employ a plot device that might be called a twist or a cheat. (Atonement is one of them.) It’s “a legitimate way to do this,” she says, “but for readers … it can register as a violation. That’s because it’s a bait-and-switch, a work presenting itself as one kind of story then revealing itself to be another.” That’s it exactly. One woman’s Holy mackerel! is another woman’s facepalm.

A good twist often comes near the end. And you expect it—don’t you?—if you’re reading genre fiction, like a thriller or a mystery. The Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle astonished me the first time I read them as a kid. That was logic (according to Holmes), nothing more; certainly not a cheat. Author Harlan Coben’s novels (and I’ve enjoyed many of them) employ devices like a narrator’s misinterpretation of events from the past to throw a reader off course.

I generally love it when I didn’t see something coming (whether it’s at the end or not) and I consider it a mark of good book. I cried unexpected tears over The Elegance of the Hedgehog, dismayed by a direction the plot had taken—but even as I sobbed (and I did), part of me was thinking Wow! That was brilliant!

Do you like being knocked out by a twist? Here are some titles I liked:

Atonement (Ian McEwan)
The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Muriel Barbery)
Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
Fight Club (Chuck Palahniuk)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (Ernest Hemingway)
The French Lieutenant’s Woman (John Fowles)
Gone Girl (Gillian Flynn)
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
The Hound of the Baskervilles (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
The House of Mirth (Edith Wharton)
House of Sand and Fog (Andre Dubus III)
The Lace Reader (Brunonia Barry)
Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
My Sister’s Keeper (Jodi Picoult)
The Remains of the Day (Kazuo Ishiguro)
Shutter Island (Dennis Lehane)
Sophie’s Choice (William Styron)
Tell No One (Harlan Coben)
We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lionel Shriver)

I recently worked on a book that employed the Bobby Ewing Solution, and at first I wasn’t pleased. But once I got over the shock, I decided it was amusing and, more importantly, probably just right for the story. (You might call it the Five Stages of Editorial Grief: 1) What? No way! 2) What can we do about this? 3) Bummer. 4) Oh, OK. OK. 5) Yeah!)

What do you think? What’s your favorite twisted novel?

* Regarding spoilers, you’ll get none from me other than the discussion of Dallas, which, since it happened in 1988, is fair game, I think. With the advent of the DVD and DVR, it’s easy to find folks who don’t want to know the ending of a show or movie or sports event that has already aired, but we book readers have always known we might run into someone who’d ruin the denouement of a novel. However, I think it’s a crappy thing to do. And won’t.

Tweet: The Bobby Ewing Solution and other twists.
Tweet: It’s a fine line between a plot cheat and a plot twist, don’t you think?

Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the brands, products, or services that I have mentioned. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”