5 Books that Contain Amazing Self-Contained Scenes

A great book is more than the sum of its parts—there’s always something you can’t quite put your finger on that elevates a book to a work of art that fully immerses you in the alternate world it has created. Every year a parade of good books come out, and every year a handful jell into greatness. What’s always interesting is that within many good and great books are individual scenes that are, in a word, perfect. No matter how the novel plays out, that single scene is a standalone gem that can be read on its own, out of context Here are four books that contain such flawless sequences:
Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace: The Prologue
Yes, Infinite Jest is huge, sprawling, complex, and difficult to comprehend without repeated readings. But the opening sequence, which actually lies at the end of the narrative, is a perfect organism: You don’t need to know anything else about the book, the characters, or the story to appreciate this amazing scene. Writing in a more straightforward manner than in the rest of the book, Wallace eschews formal trickery to craft a creepy, Twilight Zone-ish scene about a brilliant young man interviewing for college—and being completely unable to communicate. Worse, his attempts to speak visibly shock and horrify his audience. This scene is essentially a masterful short story that gains significance and power read at novel’s end, but also stands alone perfectly.
Gaudy Night, by Dorothy Sayers: The River Scene
The Peter Wimsey mystery novels were primarily cosy whodunits, with Wimsey functioning as a hilarious, brilliant sleuth making his way through mildly alarming adventures. In Gaudy Night, however, Sayers slowed down and wrote a novel that’s barely a mystery at all, concentrating instead on the relationship between Wimsey and his love interest, Harriet, and her struggles to balance her desire for a life of achievement and independence and her burgeoning love for him. Though this was written in 1936, the sexual politics are surprisingly modern (except for when they’re surprisingly hilarious), but the scene where Wimsey and Harriet float serenely on the river while Harriet slowly, then pulse-poundingly works out that she is actually in love with this man is sublime—and worth reading even if cosy mysteries aren’t anywhere near your thing.
Man in the Empty Suit, by Sean Ferrell: The First Hotel Sequence
This brilliant literary sci-fi novel, about a man who invents time travel and returns to a specific point in the future every year on his birthday to gather with his younger and older selves, is a brain-bending achievement. The scene where the narrator enters the dilapidated hotel and we see him—dozens of him, older, younger, broken and blustering, each version the result of the particular challenges that version of the man has dealt with in his subjective year since the “last” party. It’s an amazing sequence that leads directly into the central mystery of the story, but if you were trying to convince someone that time travel doesn’t have to be silly, show them this sequence and mission accomplished.
Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn: The “Cool Girl” Monologue
Very few excerpts in novels have the kind of impact the Cool Girl speech in Gone Girl has had over the last few years. The soliloquy opens like this: “Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl.” Then it builds from there into one of the most ferocious and memorable inner monologues ever committed to paper. It’s rare to see a film adaptation criticized specifically over a single sequence in a novel that isn’t action-oriented, but the recent Gone Girl film caught some flack because people thought they gave short shrift to the Cool Girl speech. If you’re curious what the fuss about Gone Girl is all about, you can read this speech and suffer no spoilers, but know exactly why you want to read the rest of the book.
The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner: Part 1
Yes, it’s a lengthy selection, but the brilliance of this opening sequence to one of the most challenging novels of the 20th century can’t be overstated. Initially disorienting, it can take uninitiated readers quite some time to figure out what’s going on. But the cadence of the writing, the rhythmic tricks Faulkner uses to almost subliminally guide you, and the recurrence of images and sounds and smells slowly coalesce into what amounts to the most thorough introduction to the story you could ever experience, and you’re not even consciously aware of how much information got dumped in these first few dozen pages until you’ve finished the book.
What’s the most perfect scene you’ve ever read?