"The Soldier's House"

Helen Benedict, a British-American professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author of nine novels, six books of nonfiction, and a play.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Soldier's House, and shared the following:

The story in The Soldier's House is told in three alternating voices: that of Naema, an Iraqi widow and refugee; that of Jimmy, an American Iraq War veteran, and that of a third person narrator. Page 69 is in Jimmy's voice, and takes place in a grungy small town bar, where he's having drinks with his younger brothers, Pat and Rory, whom he more or less raised himself. The page doesn't touch on the main dynamic of the novel -- the tension between Naema and Jimmy -- but it does get across the tensions between Jimmy and his brothers, who don't really understand either his experiences in war, or why he's taken his Iraq interpreter's family into their family home.

Rory, Jimmy's youngest brother, has just learned the Naema's son has lost a leg.

“Wow, poor kid,” Rory says. “How old is he again?” Rory has a soft spot for kids.

“Five. Six next month.”

“Bet he gets bullied like hell at school. How’d he lose it? Was he born like that, or what?”

“They were in a war, powderhead,” Pat tells him.

“Fuck, you’re in a bad mood, Pat. Why don’t you chill the hell out?”

“It was a VBED,” I answer, ignoring them both.

“Speak English, for crap’s sake,” Rory snaps.

“Means a bomb in a car. We think the fuckwads who did it—”

“Jimmy, you don’t have to—” Pat begins.

I hold up my hand. “No, Rory should hear this.”

“Don’t want to. Hate your gory war stories. Just tell me about the kid.”

"I am."

I do think this page touches on a central aspect of Jimmy's personality, because he is a good man whose efforts to do right never seem to go the way he wants. He wants to rescue his interpreter's wife, only to find out she resents being rescued by her enemy. He wants to do right by his brothers, who only grow angry at him for acting like their dad. He wants a happy marriage with his wife, who inexplicably runs away. This gets to the essence of the novel: the question of whether forgiveness, whether between enemies or even within families, is ever possible in the wake of an unjust war.

Visit Helen Benedict's website.

My Book, The Movie: Sand Queen.

The Page 69 Test: Sand Queen.

The Page 69 Test: Wolf Season.

Q&A with Helen Benedict.

The Page 69 Test: The Good Deed.

My Book, The Movie: The Soldier's House.

Writers Read: Helen Benedict.

--Marshal Zeringue