The Autumn of Ruth Winters, Fine wrote biographies of filmmakers John Cassavetes and Sam Peckinpah, directed documentaries about film critic Rex Reed and comedian Robert Klein, conducted the Playboy interview with Howard Stern, and chaired the New York Film Critics Circle four times.
Fine applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Hemlock Lane, with the following results:
Here is page 69 of Hemlock Lane in its entirety:Visit Marshall Fine's website.Sol hadn’t always been afraid of his wife. There was a time when her sharp wit had been applied without a coating of acid. He remembered her being genuinely funny when they were first married, someone who could unleash a laugh that tickled his soul. Lillian could do impressions of radio stars like Fanny Brice and Gracie Allen, though only when the two of them were alone; she was too self-conscious to ever be a performer.I was surprised how well page 69 encapsulates the emotional dynamics of my novel, Hemlock Lane. If you dip into my book at that point, you get an illuminating snapshot of the way one family has learned to accommodate its most volatile member.
Something had changed in her after Amelia was born, he believed, though she had returned to her old self—mostly—after Clara arrived to help with the housework and childcare. But after Nora was born, the old Lillian disappeared for good, replaced by a sour, angrier version. In that iteration, the threat of self-destruction seemed to lurk just beneath the surface, at least in Sol’s mind.
He couldn’t confide those fears about his wife to anyone—not even Stan, his closest friend, because Stan would tell his wife Delia, who would inevitably say something to Lillian. Sol knew what a betrayal that would be in Lillian’s eyes.
No matter how he felt about his wife at that point, he couldn’t even think about divorce. In Sol’s world, divorce was a word whispered in shame, almost as shameful as marrying out of the faith. It was a nonstarter, not even to be considered. “Till death do us part.” No other options were available. It didn’t matter how unhappy you were; your only escape from a miserable marriage was death—yours or your spouse’s. No one cared if you wanted to stab each other in the neck with butcher knives. There simply was no way out.
But after her “accidental” overdose, Lillian became moodier in every way. That included sharp-edged comments—not just to him but to the girls and Clara. At those moments, he tried to focus on the things about her that had first attracted him: her humor, but also her insecurity, which always seemed so close to the surface, and her vulnerability, which she tried to mask with an all-encompassing sense of authority. Though they seldom made an appearance, Sol knew that her vulnerable qualities were there, deeply hidden beneath the haughty surface.
Hemlock Lane looks at a flashpoint weekend in the life of a suburban New York family in the summer of 1967. The story takes place over the course of four days, with each day told from the viewpoint of one of the four central characters: mother, father, daughter, housekeeper. All of the characters figure in each day’s present tense, as well as the flashbacks from that person’s point of view. My goal was to create moments in which new information changed the readers’ perspective on something they thought they knew.
Page 69 puts the reader directly into the center of the emotional conflict: a family in which the father—and everyone else—lives in fear of triggering the mother’s bad moods, and spends their time walking on eggshells around her. It provides a glimpse of the father’s past and present with his wife, and the way he sees her effect on everyone else in the household.
Hopefully, the long-burning fuse on the novel’s central conflict sizzles all the way through this page—and this section.
My Book, The Movie: The Autumn of Ruth Winters.
Q&A with Marshall Fine.
--Marshal Zeringue
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