"The Department"

Jacqueline Faber is an author and freelance writer. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Emory University, where she was the recipient of a Woodruff Scholarship, and taught in the Expository Writing Program at New York University, where she received an award for excellence in teaching. She studied philosophy in Bologna, Italy, and received a dissertation grant from Freie University in Berlin, Germany. Faber writes across genres, including thrillers, rom-coms, and essays. Her work explores questions about memory, loss, language, and desire. Steeped in philosophical, psychological, and literary themes, her writing is grounded in studies of character. She lives with her family in Los Angeles.

Faber applied the Page 69 Test to her debut novel, The Department, and reported the following:

It just so happens that page 69 of The Department is short. Only about a third of a page. So, in some ways, the Page 69 Test isn’t an accurate representation of the work as a whole, as the reader only gets a very small taste of the writing and the narrative pacing. On the other hand, it just so happens to be the precise moment in the novel when the stakes are raised to a dangerous height. For this reason alone, I would say The Department passes the test.

The last lines of the page read as follows:

The year Luke took it, there were only eleven students in the class.

Luke-fucking-Lariat was one.

Lucia Vanotti was another.

Until now, one of our protagonists, philosophy professor, Neil Weber, has been casually investigating the disappearance of undergraduate student, Lucia Vanotti. He has a vague memory of sharing a smoke with her on a bench outside the philosophy department months earlier. At the time, it felt inconsequential. Two people shooting the shit, killing time.

Now that she’s missing, he’s imbued their exchange with meaning. He can’t help but pore over every nuance of their conversation, in part because he senses it might have been a plea for help, and in part because his own life is unraveling, and Lucia’s mystery offers him a new raison d'être.

On page 69, Neil realizes that the informal (and unsanctioned) questions he’s been asking around campus have led him to the very place he least expected: the halls of his own department. At this moment in the text, one of his closest friends and colleagues is implicated in a highly concerning way.

It is a moment of no return for Neil. He can no longer simply hop off this moving train — a train that he himself put into motion through his amateur sleuthing. The question now is: how far is he willing to go to uncover the truth, and what unexpected secrets will he reveal in the process?

Visit Jacqueline Faber's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Department.

Q&A with Jacqueline Faber.

--Marshal Zeringue