"The Last Spirits of Manhattan"

John A. McDermott was born and raised in Madison, Wisconsin. He now serves on the board of directors for the Writers’ League of Texas and teaches creative writing at Stephen F. Austin State University. Prior to teaching, he worked as an actor, bartender, house painter, and advertising copywriter. He lives in Nacogdoches with his wife and teenage daughter.

McDermott applied the Page 69 Test to The Last Spirits of Manhattan, his first novel, with the following results:

Page 69 of my novel has my protagonist, Carolyn Banks, a young woman who’s run away to Manhattan from Wisconsin to avoid an unattractive marriage proposal, and Pete Donoff, a young man who works in an advertising agency, decorating an old house for a haunted party thrown by Alfred Hitchcock. We find Carolyn reading, for the first time, the cocktail menu for the evening, a series of campy-scary drinks and hors d’oeuvres, which Pete and his colleagues have composed. The scene is flirty and hints at Pete and Carolyn’s growing attachment and also the expectations for the party—a little spooky, a lot tongue-in-cheek, as you’d expect from a guy like Hitchcock. The menu is presented in an alternative font, so readers get a sense of the actual menu.

Here the Page 69 Test works like a meat thermometer. Poking into page 69 of this novel, readers find a lighter romantic comedy moment. It’s reflective of one aspect of the novel, but certainly not the whole. If a reader enjoyed this page, they’re going to find some threads of the novel to their liking—the humor, the romance, maybe even the fun of that alternate font. (I love odd textual elements—the novel includes telegrams, a newspaper ad, and screenplay pages to shake things up). But if you poked the thermometer in a different spot, you could jab some scarier passages with a ghost or two, a more serious conversation between spouses, or a screwball ensemble piece. (Maybe my analogy just broke—are these spots hotter or colder? I guess that’s up to the reader!) I’d never heard of the Page 69 Test but now I sort of love it. Maybe it’s like the blindfolded men touching the elephant—you’re going to find a spot that belongs to the novel, but it's the parts that make up the whole.

It might be an effect of having a novel with varied elements—is it historical? Magic realism? Comedy? Romance? Horror?—that makes page 69 a good snapshot of one or two aspects, but not every element. I do think page 69 will make a reader ponder what they’d order off that menu!

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--Marshal Zeringue