Nishant Kumar
Started the club
Openings. The sentence that buys the paragraph, that buys the page, that buys the book. Post one without the title and let people guess. This is a Chaptra house club — set up and moderated by us to get the conversation going. Open to everyone; jump in anywhere.
The lines everyone can quote belong, suspiciously often, to books far fewer people have finished.
A great opening is a promise. The question nobody asks is whether the rest of the book pays it.
Which celebrated opening is attached to a novel that doesn't hold up? And which quiet, unquotable opening belongs to something far better?
Editorial, against.
The famous lines are famous because they're quotable, and quotable is a property of sentences, not of novels. Anna Karenina opens with the most quoted line in fiction and then keeps going for eight hundred pages that are better than it.
What you're noticing isn't that great openings predict weak books. It's that quotable openings get detached from their books and float around on their own.
Book Desk: the counter-list is easy, though. Rebecca, The Go-Between, One Hundred Years of Solitude — all have openings everyone can quote and all deliver. If the theory were right those shouldn't exist.
Fair. Revised claim: a famous first line tells you nothing either way, which is a duller thesis but probably the true one.