Colorado Book Award. He received his MFA from the University of Idaho and has been a resident writer at Yaddo, Centrum, and the Vermont Studio Center. His short stories have been awarded the Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize and the Florida Review Editors’ Award for Fiction. His writing has been featured in the New York Times Modern Love column, The Daily Beast, and Shelf Awareness amongst others.
Sullivan applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Midnight in Soap Lake, and reported the following:
From page 69:Visit Matthew Sullivan's website.A short while later Pastor Kurt returned, joined by a young woman with cowgirl jeans and one wet cuff, as if she’d crossed a creek on the way in. She had a long ponytail and was holding an infant wrapped in a blankie.Any reader who flipped to this page would glimpse one of the most pivotal moments in this book: a young girl named Esme, finding refuge in her small town library, has just discovered a secret about her dead father and the encyclopedia he once gifted her; in the same scene, she is invited to babysit for a family who will come to define her very existence. Although it is much “quieter” than other scenes, and it is in a child’s POV, this moment acts as a keystone within the arc of the plot—one that leads directly into the core mystery of the book.
“Esme,” Pastor Kurt said, “this is my daughter, Grace.”
For a second Esme wasn’t sure whether Grace was the woman or the baby, but then the woman held out her hand.
“I’m Trudy,” she said, “Grace’s mom.” Trudy leaned down so Esme could see Baby Grace. She looked like half Fisher-Price person, half Charlie Brown. “Guess how old she is.”
Esme had no idea. “One?”
“Just ten days old,” Pastor Kurt said, “if you can imagine.”
Now it was making more sense: Pastor Kurt was the one whose wife got cancer a few years ago and died within months.
Trudy must’ve been her replacement.
Esme still didn’t quite know what was going on, but when Trudy rested Grace into the crook of Esme’s arm, something stirred within her. As Trudy and Pastor Kurt looked for books, Esme held the infant for a half hour, until the front of her Froot Loops T-shirt held a sweaty blob in the shape of a sleeping baby.
“I knew she’d cheer you up,” Pastor Kurt said.
“When Grace gets a little older,” Trudy said, “you can babysit.”
Esme was so excited by the prospect that the second they left she returned to her table, shoved her face in a book and cried so hard that she forgot all about her dead dad and the stolen Volume J.
What I find astonishing about this is that readers wouldn’t know how pivotal this brief scene is until they reached the final chapters, over 300 pages later. This is the dilemma of discussing mystery novels—spoilers!—so I won’t ruin it by analyzing this scene any more deeply. But I would encourage readers to page back to 69 after finishing the book, once they know the outcome!
This short scene reveals something unconventional in the novel’s larger structure, as well. In the opening chapter, our protagonist—a woman named Abigail, who is a newcomer to this remote, haunted town—sees a boy running through the sagebrush and soon discovers that his mother—a single mom named Esme—has been murdered and left in an Oldsmobile in the desert. On the one hand, this is the story of Abigail as she solves Esme’s murder and, simultaneously, gets to know this creepy, colorful town. But it was equally important to me to tell Esme’s story, from the time she’s a little girl—visiting the library, for example, which is where she is in the scene above—until the night of her death. The novel alternates between these two women’s stories. My goal here was to give Esme—the victim—a full sense of humanity. From the opening pages we know she is dead, yet we are asked to trace her life from beginning to end, to see it for its beauty and its struggles, to get to know her and feel empathy for her as readers. The goal here is to grant her a whole life on the page rather than treat her as a plot device or a “body in the library,” which is sometimes how victims are seen in the genre, especially in traditional mysteries.
The Page 69 Test: Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore.
--Marshal Zeringue
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