"The Blue Window"

Suzanne Berne is the author of the novels The Dogs of Littlefield, The Ghost at the Table, A Perfect Arrangement, and A Crime in the Neighborhood, winner of Great Britain’s Orange Prize.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her latest novel, The Blue Window, and reported the following:

Page 69 falls on the first page of Chapter 11:

Marika refused to visit the urgent care clinic. It would take too long to see a doctor. When Lorna pointed out that she could get all of Marika’s errands done while Marika waited for an appointment, Marika said she didn’t want to sit for an hour in a waiting room full of crying children with bellyaches or fishhooks in their thumbs and that she was fine in the car. Despite the heat, she wouldn’t let Lorna roll her window all the way down, either.

“I’m cold-blooded.” Marika gazed out at the miniature suns flaring from a dozen windshields. “I like being hot.”

She watched Lorna head toward the post office, and then folded her hands as she contemplated the village green across the street, an open rectangle of grass interrupted here and there by shade trees and wooden benches. To the left was a bridge with wrought-iron railings, leading across a narrow-channeled river to a long redbrick building, once a paper mill that now housed the post office, a hairdresser’s, and a couple of shops selling knickknacks and T-shirts for tourists. A diner called the Millstone had opened there a few months ago, replacing a coffee shop that had been there for years.

A reader opening randomly to page 69 would get both an accurate and skewed idea of the novel. What’s accurate is the impression that Marika is a grouchy older person who’s hurt in some way, but refuses care. Nor does she want to face other people’s complaints and injuries—especially those of children. In her own words, she’s “cold-blooded.” She insists on sitting in a hot, stuffy car and looking out at a world she seems unable to relate to except as an observer, a tourist in her own town. From this page a reader could guess, correctly, that somehow Marika will be forced to confront her own childhood injuries, and perhaps the injuries she inflicted on a child, or on children.

But page 69 might also give the impression that the whole novel is about Marika, which is not true. The other main characters, her estranged daughter, Lorna, and her grandson, Adam, are actually more central. It’s what dealing with Marika does to them, how attempting to care for such a locked-up person moves them out of their own locked places, that provides the real heart of the story.

Tension between uncomfortable, closed spaces and the wide, active world outside runs all the way through the novel, so I’m glad to see that tension appear literally on this page.

Visit Suzanne Berne's website.

--Marshal Zeringue