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Can a great novel — a classic! — have a bad ending? Joan Acocella’s thoughtful post on the New Yorker’s “Page Turner” blog calls out the lame last halves and endings of, among others, Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” Charles Dicken’s “David Copperfield,”and Emily Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights.”

Her point: the characters’ intense struggles — for freedom, for success, for forbidden love — at the heart of these great novels is what engages us. It’s what we remember and treasure. The rest, she says, is filler. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/on-great-novels-with-bad-endings.html#ixzz2DeOWzkx0

She’s right,of course, but it hasn’t kept me from reading, and loving, all of those books.

With her complaint in mind, I’d like to tip my hat to novels that grabbed me by the throat and never let me go, novels that end inevitably but not predictably.

In Dan Chaon’s “Await Your Reply” an identify-theft ring involves a a high school history teacher and his student, brothers who may be the same person, and a college student who loses his hand in the story’s first pages. The ins and outs of this thrilling read I have mostly forgotten; its ending, never. That teenage girl who leaves her dull Ohio town with her cute teacher? She’s headed to Rome, alone, with a ton of cash.

In I.B. Singer’s “Enemies, A Love Story,” Herman Broder finds himself married to three women. Believing his first wife dead, he marries the Catholic Polish girl who kept him hidden during the Holocaust; she’s pregnant. In the U.S., he marries his Jewish mistress Masha, his true love. His first wife reappears, very much alive. Herman is devoted to each, in his own crazy way. That’s one thread of the story; what’s chiefly at play is Herman’s inability to shake the terrors of the Holocaust. Even on a beautiful day, beside a lake in the Catskills, he hears the Nazis coming for him. His exit, by his own hand, is fitting.

Read Junot Diaz’s “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” It’s an encyclopedic story of Dominicans in New York and in their home country, past and present. Our hero, Oscar, is a fat misfit and nerd in New York’s Washington Heights; in college at Rutgers University in New Jersey, he’s… a fat misfit and a nerd. Why do we keep reading? Oscar’s impossible love for a Dominican whore, whose boyfriend is a cop. That Oscar dies in a field, beat up by the cop, is the only possible ending to this astonishing story.

Military prison? It’s the only safe place, and proper conclusion, for the “hero” of Kevin Power’s “The Yellow Birds,” a novel of the Iraq war.

Others that end memorably: Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre,” Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth,” Bernard Malamud’s “The Assistant,” David Nicholl’s “One Day.”