I think this is an incredibly important technique for a fiction writer--put two unlike characters in a room (or along an estuary) and see what happens. The fact that Wallace has just lost a fight and that he's probably on the way down and out of this career he loves makes him receptive to getting into something w/ a guy whose wife seems to suggest is crazy ("sensitive"). We want this kind of conflict. I think the fact that Wallace doesn't beat the guy up makes us like him even more. He's got the ability to literally beat this guy to death and everything in-between, but he just embarrasses him. It's useful that we don't know anything about the guy at this point. We think that he really is an upstanding citizen w/ kids and that Wallace will end up in jail or at least sued. It creates an incredibly useful tension for the story so that we're surprised when we realize that the guy is a nutjob who married a high school friend's mother. In many ways it's a pretty satisfying ending.
What do you guys think about the ending? Are you satisfied or not w/ the open ending?
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