One of the most common pieces of criticism regarding many novels is: the ending sucked.

It seems much easier to write a great beginning, to sustain the quality through the middle sections and then, suddenly, to flop the ending. In fact, reading the ending of any book is a strange experience, because we expect brilliance. I always have this nervous feeling when I turn to the last page. I can barely focus on the words because my mind is over-conscious, over-analytic, waiting for some final metaphor or conclusion of the plot. Many times I have to put the book down, let my heart rate settle, relax for a minute, and then just read straight through.

And if I’m experiencing heart palpitations reading the ending of book, then God knows what the writer is going through. It’s common to hear of an ending being rewritten dozens of times, which is why, perhaps, endings can fall apart so easily. They are analyzed so manically that a writer can lose sense of the greater story. Endings become fragments, abstractions, worlds within themselves.

There is, however, the rare case where a book can begin poorly and end fantastically. Such is the case with Paul Bowles’ “Sheltering Sky,” published in 1949.

This book was recommended to me by a friend who studied abroad in Morocco, who basically just said, “Wait until you get to the last few chapters.” I asked what he meant. “You’ll see,” he said.

I would indeed see. And I can now say that it is among the more spectacular and strange endings I’ve come across, ever.

But to begin at the beginning: The novel follows three British characters who are traveling through Morocco — Port Moresby, his wife Kit Moresby and their friend George Tunner. All you really need to know is that there is an illicit love affair going on with Kit and Port as they travel through the country. That’s really about it. As I said, the beginning is slow and boring. It reads like the boring British literature we read in high school — little action, upset rich people, passive-aggressive quibbles, occasional witticisms, etc … If it weren’t for the Bowles’ searing descriptions of small Moroccan towns, I would have considered putting it down.

Alas, I fought through, and reached the last 60 pages, where the book howls and writhes, as if out of nowhere. Seriously, it’s like somebody suddenly punched you in the gut with brass knuckles.

Out of nowhere, Bowles begins riffs like this: “There was a screaming sound in each ear, and the difference between the two pitches was so narrow that the vibration was like running his fingernail along the edge of a new dime. …His cry went through the final image: the spots of raw bright blood on the earth. Blood and excrement. The supreme moment, high above the desert, when the two elements, blood and excrement, long kept apart, merge. A black star appears, a point of darkness in the night sky’s clarity…”

This is the description of Port Moresby dying of typhoid. And while he is hallucinating and perishing, his wife, Kit, has lost her mind and has wandered out into the desert, where she passes out, is picked up the next morning by a caravan of riders on camels heading out toward the distant city. Kit gets swooped up and quickly becomes the concubine of one of the riders, and is eventually locked away in a room in a different Moroccan city. Seriously.

It’s possible that my plot description seems so farfetched and bizarre that you are rolling your eyes and thinking, “This is too random and weird. No thanks.”

But somehow, mysteriously, this ending works. It’s as if Bowles had to set us up with the boredom in order to really dazzle us at the end. He completely switches the tone and style, creating this aura of madness, hallucination, delirium. It’s as if the characters are released from the stifled banality of everyday life, and their pent-up rage shatters over the last 60 pages.

There’s a great picture of Paul Bowles — a sophisticated man of letters in his fine suits — next to Allen Ginsburg and William S. Burroughs in Morocco. Makes you wonder if those Beats might have rubbed off on Bowles a little bit.

Every year I pick up “Mrs. Dalloway” by Virginia Woolf, and every year I put it back down after about 10 pages. It’s become predictably hilarious.

“Mrs. Dalloway” is one of those classic books that the literati assumes we’ll not only love, but will change our lives. So by not loving it, nor reading it, we feel inferior, the butt of a joke, like we just don’t have the mental fitness to keep up with real readers out there.

Today’s story is more uplifting, I think — because I’ve finally peered into the vexing, brilliant world of Virginia Woolf, and discovered the kind of book that is not only singular in its form, content and style, but almost exists outside the realm of what I thought books were capable of.

Big words, I know. And of course my description of this book will be a savage injustice, a beautifully hopeless endeavor — like hacking at a redwood tree with a pocket knife. But let try me.

I’m referring to “The Waves” by, yes, Virginia Woolf, which was published in 1931. In the simplest possible terms, here’s how I understand what’s going on:

The book is divided up into four sections, each containing brief intros. These intros are written in italics and describe, in four segments: the sun rising, the sun lifting higher in the sky, the sun descending, the sun setting. But, it’s important to mention that Woolf is describing the movement of the sun as witnessed from the ocean shore, such that we’re also getting a description of the ocean itself, the light on the water, the ripples and, yes, the waves.

Okay. Now, there are six characters, three boys and three girls. As children, they spend every summer together on the same seaside estate in England. In other words, they are all good friends, and remained intertwined for the rest of their lives.

The book begins, after Woolf’s first intro, with all six of them, as children, sitting near the ocean, and describing the morning together. Immediately, we see how Wolfe tells the story. Instead of using an omniscient, third-person narrative to observe the characters’ lives, she tells the story through their own eyes — as in through six first-person narratives.

But wait. Doesn’t this kind of writing happen all the time? You know, where each character tells their own story? Yes. It does.

However, Woolf does it much differently. Nearly every paragraph has a different narrator. This is done through dialogue, although it’s not necessarily spoken dialogue (which I realize sounds strange). Rather, it’s just the streaming thoughts of characters, or the internal dialogues.

Think about it this way: Imagine if you and five friends were watching the sun rise over the ocean. Then, imagine if you could actually jump into each of their heads for a moment to see what they were thinking.

This is basically what Woolf does for the entire book: She’s jumping in and out of six heads, one after the other, paragraph after paragraph. As such, the book is not like seeing the world through one set of eyes, but through six.

These six characters remain interlocked throughout the entire book. Even though they all eventually split up, go to different schools, and grow up, the symmetry doesn’t cease. Woolf continues to swim through their heads, one after another.

I realize that this sounds a bit discombobulating, right? I mean, how could you possibly keep up with six individual stories all mashed together?

But here’s the thing: Woolf is not interested in the six individual stories. She’s interested in their collective stories — in what they mean together, in what they’re saying about the different stages of growing older. The characters speak not specifically, but reflectively. They are trying to make sense of their lives in very broad terms.

Which brings us back to the four sections. They end up symbolizing the passing of time: the rising sun is birth, the setting sun is death. So we’re essentially following these characters through the entirety of their lives.

I know this is all a bit much. But this book is a bit much — in the best possible way. All I can say is do yourself a favor and read it. Just get a taste of it. Then, perhaps you’ll begin to see how the metaphor of “The Waves” washes through the entire novel — the sea of voices, thoughts, people, breaking all toward the final point. It’s spectacular.

No one seems to have a very smiley vision of the future, or at least America’s future.

It’s kinda fun to predict irretrievable disaster, isn’t it?

The Fox-MSNBC news talking heads predict political melt down. The environmentalists are throwing up white flags and buying land in Canada. The artists are watching “Jersey Shore” and “Real Housewives of Atlanta” reruns, while imagining all of western culture stumbling off some massive cliff. Academics are watching humans achieve the brain activity similar to that of an amoeba with our shrinking attention spans. And Boston Red Sox fans are contemplating suicide.

Then, there is the writer — the most pessimistic and miserable of the bunch. To be more precise, it’s the fiction writers, whose dystopic novels are smattered through our canon.

Which brings us to the newest novel by Gary Shteyngart, “Super Sad True Love Story.”

Understanding exactly how Shteyngart fits into the crowd of Orwell and Huxley is a tricky matter. On one hand, he has a written a novel that takes place in the future —‚ exactly when in the future is not known. You might guess anywhere between 20 and 30 years. And let me quickly add that writing any kind of futuristic novel is a risky business for a someone who is part of the “literary fiction” crowd. It can quickly drivel into the career- and prestige-killing genre of science fiction.

But I digress.

The real question is analyzing what kind of future Shteyngart is imagining in this novel. Here are some of the basics: Nearly everything, monetarily, is measured in the Yuan currency, as if to say that the days of green dollar notes is far in the past; then, nearly everyone must basically carry an iPhone-like device, which people cling to even more desperately than the situation we have now; people are constantly ranking each other online, and it’s important to keep your score up high; people speak in this ridiculous abbreviated language, which becomes far more advanced than TTYL and LOL, but rather abbreviations like TIMATOV (“think I’m about to openly vomit!”).

Yet it’s very possible that my descriptions of this world sound quite boring and not very interesting. And maybe you’re thinking: sounds un-funny and lame.

That’s because I’m not Gary Shteyngart. And I don’t have nearly the skill he has for writing humor.

Because, more than anything, this is an outrageously funny book. For those of you that read his previous book, “Absurdistan,” you probably know what I’m talking about. It’s satire stretched to its most hilarious limits.

And, in some strange way, this book removes itself from the science fiction category simply because it is funny.

That might seem like an odd point, but think about a scenario in which a writer constructed the exact same world as Shteyngart, but wrote a gooey drama. Seriously. The book would immediately sit in a dusty corner with Asimov and Orson Scott Card.

For whatever reason, humorous satire actually makes a book more “literary,” when initial logic would suggest the opposite would happen. Why? Perhaps because good satire and humor is revealing, and uncomfortably so at times. It’s perhaps the easiest way to make big social statements that can be read by the masses.

“Super Sad True Love Story” is also, as the title suggests, a love story. It’s a romance between Lenny Abramov, the son of Russian immigrants in his late-30s, and Eunice Park, the daughter of Korean immigrants in her early 20s. To no surprise, they make this futuristic world quite real. Their problems are the same ones we grapple with now: identity, family, future. And though they are part of America’s immigrant-heavy past, the America we all grew up in is changing and teetering and falling behind the developing countries.

As such, our identity as Americans, or immigrant Americans, is changing too. In fact, Eunice Park’s family keeps saying they made a mistake leaving Korea, as the Koreans are now becoming more successful than the Americans.

There’s a lot of truth in “Super Sade True Love Story,” a lot of far-fetched speculation, and lot of sharp prose. My only concern was the voicing. Lenny, the protagonist in this book, sounds oddly familiar to Misha in “Absurdistan.” They are both Russian Jews. They both have excessively imaginative and florid narrative abilities, which I like (think “Humbert Humbert” in Nabokiv’s “Lolita”). And they both pine for women of dissimilar ethnicities.

The point being: Shteyngart has tapped into this voice, and it’s a great voice. It’s one of my favorites. They question, I think, is at what point will Shteyngart create a truly different character? When we will see a radically different voice?

Another question is whether or not this even matters. Must we require a writer to continuously stretch themselves? Or, should they stick to their guns when they know it works?

Questions for another day.

For now, go read “Super Sad True Love Story.” You’ll find yourself contemplating and laughing at the demise of our country. What could be more fun?

Eleven days on a motorcycle — listening to the engine scream into the north country of Wyoming and Montana — will do funny things to your head.

There’s the stubborn shiver of steel below your body, vibrations squirming up your spine and jangling the lining of your brain. There’s the violent crackle of pistons firing near your feet. There’s the unexpected swells of air pummeling your face and sliding through gaps of your glasses and helmet. Bugs messily pelt the windshield. Oncoming trucks groan toward you. The pavements blurs into long stretch of gray.

The experience is thick and frightening and beautiful. The motorcycle forces you to taste the swung-open sky of Wyoming and, of course, the prairie — a prairie that will make you understand space — raw, empty, baffling space.

Cross into Montana, with her gentle dark colors of pine and hay and water, witnessed as you spin through Bozeman, Missoula and finally into Glacier National Park, the chilly breeding ground of grizzlies, wolves, moose. Look up and you’ll see the disappearing glaciers which weakly cling to mountains and drizzle away between the exhaust pipes of  RVs and SUVs.

There are moments when the mind can only handle so much of these vistas and becomes pleasantly stuffed with natural beauty. The evening calls for a different silence and experience — those found on the page, between words and stories and poems.

But pack these books wisely, for there’s no space for clutter or comforts on a motorcycle. Just essentials. In fact, I imposed a two-book limit on my trip, and deciding on these titles was harder than navigating a washed-out muddy road near the Montana town of Twin Bridges.

In the end I went with James Galvin’s novel, “The Meadow,” and Jim Harrison’s collection of poems, “In Search of Small Gods.”

They’re a funny pair. Galvin is a widely respected poet who’s only written two novels. Whereas Harrison is novelist first, and poet second. In other words, the writers have switched roles, and it doesn’t take long to notice this.

Galvin’s novel is written in shards, fragments of prose, separated by chapter breaks. The shortest of these shards is a few sentences, while the longest is only a few pages. His territory is the northeastern border of Wyoming and Montana, just south of Laramie, which is where Galvin is from. His characters are high-altitude farmers, the descendants of homesteaders.

Sticking with his poetry background, Galvin is interested in moments, images, crystalline reflections. He’s interested in collaging these images together to represent how people live in the most inhospitable climates — pitifully brief summers, and winters so long that can easily snap you sanity; this is the place of cattle drives, unbroken horses, and sometimes fatal self-reliance; it’s a place where pleasures are found in warm things, fireplaces, cups of coffee, dry wool socks.

There is no dramatic story in “The Meadow.” So if you’re a mystery reader, this probably isn’t for you. Instead, we get lucid slivers of real people trying to stay alive. And it’s done with language that deserves a patient mind, an open mind, a mind that has spent days staring into that stark landscape.

Switching from “The Meadow” to Jim Harrison’s “In Search of Small Gods” is unusually fluid, as if they were meant to travel together. Harrison is that legendary, archetypal Montana writer whose books include “Legend of the Falls.” His poetry reads like his best lines of prose, balancing everyday clarity with moments of exuberance. There are no poetic tricks, odd line breaks, or moments of experimentation with the form. It’s just good sentences, ranging from the charred worlds of Arizona to the bite and freeze of Montana.

And if you happen to be passing through the swollen greenery of Glacier National Park, I would recommend a poem in the collection called, “Spring.” He writes:

“This small liquid mouth in the forest is called a spring, but it is really a liquid mouth that keeps all of the secrets of what has happened here, speaking in the unparsed language of water, how the sky was once closer, and a fragment of a burned-out star boiled its water. This liquid mouth has been here since the glaciers and has seen a few creatures die … to sleep under a deep mantle of snow or feel the noses of so many creatures who came to drink, even the man who sits on the forest floor, enjoying the purity of this language he hopes to learn someday.”

These are the kinds of lines that stick with you on a long motorcycle trip. They tangle in your head, explaining and un-explaining themselves on those long stretches where you deal with nothing but time.

“In Search of Small Gods” by Jim Harrison and “The Meadow” by James Galvin are slim but wise partners to bring on any journey. I was happy to have them tucked in my tank-bag, rattling along as the miles molted away, as the weather played along the horizon, and as the days finally ended and we made camp, bringing our bodies back down to the ground, to listen, and to become, as Harrison just told us, “the man who sits on the forest floor, enjoying the purity of this language he hopes to learn someday.”

LISTEN to an interview with John Vaillant:

(press the play button above)

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READ Jonathan Bastian’s review of ‘The Tiger’:

You have to imagine the location.

You are 6,000 miles to the east of Moscow, nearly a quarter-way around the world, but still technically in Russia. To the south is China. Japan is just off the coast.

This is an area known as Primorski Krai.

Walk through the dark forests and you’ll see many unusual things: species of the boreal subarctic overlapping with species of the subtropics. In other words you have caribou and Timberwolves mingling with leopards and tigers and poisonous snakes.

Equally mysterious is an animal that most people never see — an animal that is perhaps symbolic of the entire region. Silent, vast, fierce, adaptive, the Siberian (Amur) tiger is chillingly mystical.

They are the stuff of myth, legend, fable. Many people living in the Primorski Krai will never see an Amur tiger, even though they know the tigers are out there, hunting, watching, waiting.

These, to me, are the fascinating elements of John Vaillant’s “The Tiger.” But at the same time, they are not why the book will most likely become a consistent bestseller.

There is also the commercial angle, which is why Brad Pitt has already purchased the movie rights to the book: In 1997, one of these Amur Tigers began luridly killing a group of humans.

John Vaillant is a smart guy. His previous book, “The Golden Spruce,” is becoming a classic to the outdoorsy set. He is not interested in Hollywood or bestsellers. He’s more interested in quality and the context in which he presents his subject. Which makes me wonder whether Vaillant was really interested in the commerciality of the story, or if he felt that exploring the more profound aspects of the story would be too esoteric without a little drama?

For example, there is a blurb on the back of the book by George Schaller, who traveled with Peter Matthiessen in “The Snow Leopard.” Schaller is a legendary hard-ass who is not interested in fluff. I also know that Vaillant looks up to Schaller tremendously and reveres “The Snow Leopard.”

At the same time, Random House (the publisher of “The Tiger”) is using trashy mystery/thriller language to promote the book: “It’s December 1997, and a man-eating tiger is on the prowl. …The tiger isn’t just killing people, it’s annihilating them.” I can just imagine Vaillant reading this when the book was first printed, and maybe throwing up in his mouth a little bit.

Why? Because Vaillant is trying to take the conversation deeper. Early in the book Vaillant even writes, “The tiger has been a fellow traveler in our evolution, and, in a sense, our peer. In Asia, there is no recess of human memory in which there has not — somewhere — lurked a tiger. As a result, this animal looms over the collective imagination of native and newcomers alike.”

This I like more. I mean, have you even seen one of these tigers, even if only in a zoo? They generate such feelings of awe and fear that they become nearly biblical. Their strength is beyond our comprehension. Their ability to take life is staggering. In this way, we have come to revere these animals the way we revere higher powers, deities, gods. It makes complete sense to have people worshipping these animals — to see them inscribed on caves and carved in trees.

Vaillant understands our devotional attachment to these tigers through our evolution. In order to stay alive and coexist, we’ve been forced to treat these animals with fear and respect, and that’s been happening for thousands of years. For this reason, they been emblazoned in our collective minds and myths.

But this is changing. Now we kill the tigers for money. We drive them to the brink of extinction. The Chinese will pay filthy amounts of money to smuggle them across the Russian border.

Lets us hope that those creatures find a way to survive. Because when they die, a part of our humanity will die with them.

-Jonathan Bastian (host of ‘Page by Page’)