"The List"

Tara Ison's first novel, A Child out of Alcatraz, was a Finalist for the 1997 Los Angeles Times Book Awards, "Best First Fiction."

She applied the "page 69 test" to her new novel, The List, and reported the following, starting with the text from page 69:

“Don’t tell me how I’m being.”

“You’re being a fucking Venus Fly Trap. Just stop it. Just shut the fuck up.”

“Don’t talk to me like that.”

“Oh, look,” says Stu. “They’re bringing a tram around. You guys coming to the—”

“Let’s just leave,” says Isabel. “There isn’t any point. I don’t want to be here. Let’s just go home.”

“You sure? You ready to cross this one off? Item 9? I don’t want to get home and find out this didn’t count or something. Do you mutually agree?”

“Yes, fine, I mutually agree.”

“The list,” Al offers to Stu, in explanation.

“Oh,” he says.

“We’re just going to go,” Isabel says to Stu. “It was nice meeting you.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Listen, Al, if you change your mind, call Teal. She’ll set up time for us with the guys, and we’ll talk, okay? But no pressure. I mean, only if that’s what you want to do. If it feels good for you now, you know? Or call me…” he glances at Isabel, “…even if you just need to talk, right?”
* * *
Back in film school, when he and Jules were briefly, erratically, going out – that phrase isn’t right, but they never came up with a better one, although she liked “fuck buddies” – she showed up once at his and Griff’s apartment with a plastic dropcloth and an industrial-sized bottle of storebrand baby oil, and the key to a syphilitic-looking motel on Cahuenga near Universal. She’d picked up the idea from some article on lesbian bed death, she told him: “How to Keep The Edge Alive” between you and your lover. He didn’t know whether to be hurt or honored that she felt they were suffering from lesbian bed death, but then she said she’d never have the

Ah – page 69 of The List. It’s an oddly critical moment in this love story, actually – prior to this, mismatched but madly-in-love couple Isabel and Al have decided to make a list of 10 things to do together before finally breaking up. Starts out fine and fun – but soon goes awry. They’ve just completed Item #9 (first half of p. 69, above), where they’ve had a huge fight, and run into an old work friend of Al’s (Stu). Isabel and Al are now barely speaking to each other. And yet they feel compelled to keep going…. (A metaphor for the relationship as a whole, of course.)

They’re about to do Item #10, a seemingly fun sexual encounter (something Al did with a previous girlfriend, Julie, many years earlier.) The scene continues in the tone of the above – explicitly sexual, angry, emotionally detached. But this “Item” takes a significant turn in the coming pages – Isabel and Al, in fact, will wander into a greater intimacy, tenderness, and understanding than they’ve ever experienced together before. And so what was supposed to be “the end” (Item #10) simply raises the stakes of this relationship. Now they really can’t bear to let go - and so decide to let The List continue for a while longer….

While the above might be a bit confusing, and Isabel and Al don’t seem to have a lot of “page time” (the characters of Stu and Julie probably seem more significant than they are), I think the central theme of the novel is indeed hinted at: the intensity and complexity of romantic and sexual love, its conflicts and confusions, its horrors and hopes.

Visit Tara Ison's website and read an excerpt from The List.

Check out the complete list of books in the Page 69 Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Weapons of Mass Seduction"

Lori Bryant-Woolridge is the author of the best-selling novels, Read Between the Lies and Hitts and Mrs.

She applied the "page 69 test" to her new novel, Weapons of Mass Seduction, and reported the following:

When I first saw the email in my box about writing something for the “69 Test,” my first thought was, okay, another freaky website that thinks my book is some lusty erotic tale full of sexually aggressive women performing unspeakable sexual acts. Instead I learned that the 69 Test was an interesting and legit concept, and that based on page 69 of my new novel, I’ve passed the test. Not an A but definitely a solid B-.

Weapons of Mass Seduction is about three women of varying ages and races, who attend a workshop of the same name, in an attempt to find and/or revive the lost side of their sensual selves. Page 69 gives you some hint as to who the main character, Pia Jamison, is and what state her personal life is in. This fortysomething woman has given up on men and marriage but not motherhood. She wants to have a child but after five years of celibacy she lacks the confidence go after the man she wants to father her child. This is the moment towards the end of the four day workshop that Pia decides it’s time to climb back into her stilettos and get her flirt on.

WMS is a fun and sexy book that explores the excitement and struggle of what it means to be a confident sensual woman. Part flirt-manual, part fiction, readers have the chance to work on their own sensuality levels and flirting skills right along with the characters.

After getting Becca to bed, Pia headed back to her own room. Too wound up to sleep, she reached for the remote. She surfed channels for a few minutes before the talented cast of Waiting to Exhale captured her attention. As her eyes watched Robin try to shake off her no-good ex, Pia’s mind replayed her evening.

So far, tonight had been a complete bust. First, that idiot bore, Mike, followed by little girl lost, Rebecca. Surprisingly, Pia felt more disappointed than she’d have thought. Initially she’d been so apprehensive about going, and now she was upset that it had ended so abruptly. Now she would have to return to New York with all the cobwebs she’d arrived with still clogging up her dating game.

“You know the baby is going to have more than one mama, girl.”

The familiar line turned Pia’s attention back to the movie. The characters were all gathered around a bonfire, raising a toast to the New Year and the new life Robin was about to bring into the world. The scene was a harsh reminder that Pia was in the uncomfortable position of needing the exact things she claimed she no longer wanted.

“Screw this,” she declared, turning off the television and grabbing her purse and hotel key.

Pia stepped into the elevator certain that the bubbles in her stomach alone could lift her to the penthouse bar. She was nervous. It had been an awfully long time since she’d been on the prowl, but Pia refused to leave California the same woman as when she arrived.

Read an excerpt from Weapons of Mass Seduction.

Check out Lori Bryant-Woolridge's website and the Weapons of Mass Seduction blog.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Scarlet Ibis"

Susan Hahn is a poet, playwright and the editor of TriQuarterly literary magazine. She has published seven volumes of poetry: Harriet Rubin’s Mother’s Wooden Hand (1991), Incontinence (1993), Confession (1997), Holiday (2001), Mother In Summer (2002), Self/Pity (2005), and The Scarlet Ibis (2007).

She applied the "page 69 test" to this new collection of poems and reported the following:

It was interesting to write this for Page 69 because, in fact, The Scarlet Ibis ends on page 64 and, since this book is about invisibility, disappearance, and, ultimately, extinction, Marshal Zeringue's initial invitation seemed wonderfully strange.

The book starts out with some amount of descriptive language about plumage, cages, illusions, and invisibility -- either by blending into the environment or going along with what is asked of one for protection and safekeeping. (Many of the sections deal with a clever Magician who tries to control -- with tricks -- a wise Bird and a determined Lady.) Halfway through the book is the beginning of a more stripped language of illness.

Using poetic license at Marshal's suggestion, I turned to pages 34 and 35 (halfway to what would have been a page 69). Since this book was just published I was not that familiar with those pages and wasn't exactly sure what was there. (Also, it takes me awhile to get comfortable with a new book -- corrected page proofs cause me
little concern, but a book is "forever" so this was the first time I had actually opened it.)

At the bottom of page 34 I found that the last stanza of "Lady" Section V began the escalation of the entire meaning of the book:

tape held tight, the wound
where the dug scab once lived --
the crater where I now sleep
curled around the fevered wings
and quiver of a bird with black tips.

"Lady" Section VI, at the top of page 35, further developed this:

Hunting for the margins of the wound,
trying to get past the rancid place
to a paradise of garden...

Here was the beginning of final disappearance -- the real one -- and by page 69 it's all over.

Read more about The Scarlet Ibis at the publisher's website.

Several of Hahn's poems are available online at the Illinois Poet Laureate page.

Check out the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Secondhand World"

Katherine Min’s short stories have appeared in numerous publications, including TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, and Prairie Schooner, and have been widely anthologized, most recently in The Pushcart Book of Stories: The Best Short Stories from a Quarter-Century of The Pushcart Prize.

She applied the "page 69 test" to her highly-acclaimed debut novel Secondhand World and reported the following:

Page 69 of my novel Secondhand World turns out to be an encapsulation of Isa's (my 17-year-old Korean American narrator's) central difficulty -- the longing for acceptance by her Caucasian friends versus the filial bonds she feels toward her Korean immigrant parents. In her best friend Rachel's basement, Isa makes fun of her parents -- their accents and predilections -- for the pure amusement of her
peers.

"I would mimic my father cruelly," Isa says, "exaggerating the l's instead of r's, leaving out articles, making him sound like some dim-witted M*A*S*H extra." Later, Isa admits, "Oh, it was terrible what we did. My laughter was studded with guilt, pricked with shame. I watched Rachel laugh and could hate her for a moment, even as I laughed too, knowing that I was pandering to her racism, that my betrayal cost her nothing, that she was aware of no truth about my parents beyond what I told her. It made the laughter more pungent, more bracing. It made it necessary."

The book is about many things, but it is essentially this straddling of two cultures that leaves Isa feeling isolated from her friends and estranged from her family. I have thought about Isa more and more in the wake of the terrible tragedy at Virginia Tech, and I wonder, under different circumstances, what role this sense of disconnection -- from both adolescent American culture and more traditional Confucian Korean values -- could have played in Cho Sang-Hui's own dark sensibility.

Isa finds a kind of redemption at the end of her struggle; tragically, Cho Sang-Hui did not. I only wish that he -- like Isa -- was fictional.

Visit Katherine Min's website, and read an excerpt from Secondhand World.

Check out the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Missing"

Chris Mooney's latest book is The Missing.

He applied the "page 69 test" to the novel and reported the following:

Page 69 of The Missing beings with a doctor talking to the main character of my book, Darby McCormick, a criminalist for the Boston Crime Lab, about a patient brought into the hospital: “The nurse was checking the IV line and was stabbed repeatedly with a pen. She’s in surgery right now. Hopefully, they’ll save her eye.”

My first thought is what any normal person would think: “What sort of sick bastard wrote that?” The writer in me smiles. The person lying in the hospital bed, Rachel Swanson, not only saved the book, she gave me what writers like to call “happy accidents” – those unexpected, joyous moments that take you completely by surprise.

When The Missing opens up, Darby is called to a crime scene at a house where Carol Cranmore, a teenager, was kidnapped. Walking with Darby, I saw the house through her eyes – the blood on the hallway wall, the dead boyfriend, the panicked mother wanting answers.

For weeks I followed Darby as she circled the crime scene, feeling her frustration at finding so little evidence. There was something in there. Darby just had to find it.

But she didn’t want to look in the house anymore, so I reluctantly followed her outside, into the pounding rain. Darby, using her flashlight, examines the driveway and back stairs. No evidence. I made her check the cars and surrounding homes. Nothing. I wanted her to go back in the house. Darby wanted to return to the driveway.

Using her flashlight, she examined an area underneath the back porch, a small, lattice-enclosed space holding garbage cans. Together we saw a pair of eyes, the two of us thinking it was a raccoon. When Darby opened the tiny door, I jumped when she discovered a woman:

“During a college history course, Darby had seen grainy black-and-white footage taken of prisoners inside Hitler’s concentration camps. The woman underneath the porch had clearly been starved. Most of her hair had fallen out; what little remained was thin and stringy. Her face was incredibly gaunt, the cheeks sunken, the skin waxy and white. The only color came from the blood around her lips.”

I didn’t know who this woman was or why she was there. But she seemed to know Darby, and she wanted to talk to her. Darby wanted to crawl underneath the porch. I let her go, as you must all of your characters, and eagerly followed her inside the dark space, wondering what surprises I would encounter along the way.

Visit Chris Mooney's website and read an excerpt from The Missing.

Check out the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Inventing Human Rights"

Lynn Hunt, former president of the American Historical Association and the Eugen Weber professor of modern European history at UCLA, is the author of Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution and coauthor of Telling the Truth About History.

She applied the "page 69 test" to her new book, Inventing Human Rights: A History, and reported the following:

My page 69 is very brief because it comes at the end of chapter one, which explains how reading novels in the eighteenth century helped create a feeling of empathy for other people, even those very different in social status, sex, or race. The two sentences on page 69 concern Thomas Jefferson and his own agonized effort to make sense of equality. Jefferson had penned the immortal phrase of the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and yet Jefferson owned slaves and never freed them. My last two sentences in the chapter address this paradox:

Although he [Jefferson] recognized the humanity of African-Americans and even the rights of slaves as human beings, he did not envision a polity in which they or women of any color took an active part. But that was the highest imaginable degree of freedom for the vast majority of Americans and Europeans, even twenty-four years later [than a letter he had written in 1802 to Englishman Joseph Priestley extolling the American example] on the day of Jefferson’s death.

My point is not to excuse Jefferson’'s attitude toward African-Americans or women, but rather to put it into the context of his times. What is most surprising about Jefferson is his willingness to embrace the idea of equality, given the hierarchical nature of the society in which he lived, and his eagerness to put it into political practice for ordinary men.

Jefferson is not the main focus of my book, which traces the origins of human rights in both France and the United States, and emphasizes the impact of new cultural practices such as novel reading and portrait painting. Still, Jefferson pops up again and again, not only as a framer of the Declaration and the aspirations of the new American nation, but also as an avid novel reader himself and the subject of one of the first experiments with physionotrace, a technique for mechanically reproducing portraits.

Read more about Inventing Human Rights at the publisher's website.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability"

Gowan Dawson is a Lecturer in Victorian Studies in the Department of English at the University of Leicester.

He applied the "page 69 test" to his new book, Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability, and reported the following:

Chosen at random from almost 300 pages, page 69 is actually the most striking, as well as perhaps the most disquieting, of the entire book. On this page, as throughout, my argument is that our familiar image of Charles Darwin as a deeply respectable Victorian gentleman, so helpful to the acceptability of his radical scientific theories both in his own times and even now, was something that he and his supporters could not take for granted and had instead to work extremely hard to fashion and maintain. This was especially the case when so many of his theories were predicated on sex and desire, and contemporary critics of evolution were not slow in exploiting some of the tensions between Darwinism and conventional notions of Victorian respectability. Page 69 contains an illustration of a French engraving from the 1870s entitled Troisième darwinique. Le prédécesseur, which responds to Darwin's famous insistence on man's evolutionary connection with simians by depicting an anthropoid ape performing cunnilingus on a reclining and entirely nude woman. The apparently consensual sexual coupling of human and ape represented in the engraving enacts, I argue, a rupturing of the boundaries of conventional taxonomic classifications. This transgressive sexual tableau not only emphasizes the instability of species identity, but also draws out the implications of Darwin's refutation of human uniqueness in provokingly taboo ways. The engraving, as I propose on page 69, implies that 'nubile Caucasian females might actually welcome and even initiate such carnal encounters' with bestial apes, thereby revealing the essentially animal nature of the sexual desires exhibited by human females, a persistent trope of much nineteenth-century pornography, which, in deliberate opposition to prevalent cultural assumptions regarding the natural modesty and coyness of women, habitually represented them as beings who were regularly overcome with insatiable and unmanageable desires. Darwin himself had anxiously repudiated any such suggestions, but, paradoxically, had at the same time actually made them more conceivable by rooting every aspect of human sexuality in animal behaviour. The self-consciously Darwinian etching featured on page 69, by visually representing man's intimate affinity with the lower animals in the explicit idiom of pornography, inexorably drew attention to precisely this feature of Darwin's thought. This is the first time that Troisième darwinique. Le prédécesseur has been discussed, or indeed even mentioned at all, in a book about Darwin. Significantly, though, I go on to argue elsewhere in the book that Darwin's sensitivity to precisely such attacks on his respectability had some very important implications for his scientific thought.

Read a description of the book and an excerpt at the Cambridge University Press website, and learn more about Dr. Dawson's other publications and research.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Death Pans Out"

Ashna Graves's first Jeneva Leopold mystery is Death Pans Out.

The author applied the "page 69 test" to the novel and reported the following:

The action on p. 69 occurs at a gold mine, which certainly represents the book in that the main character, Jeneva Leopold, is spending her summer at a mine while recovering from a double mastectomy and subsequent depression. This scene takes place at a mine down the creek from Jeneva’s, and involves two important characters, a charismatic young miner named Reese Cotter, and his young partner, Roy. Reese has just learned that Jeneva found a hat and knife belonging to his missing brother. Deeply worried, he reacts with violent emotion that comes out as anger.

Reese’s sudden ferocity made her recoil backward on the catwalk. Her foot hit a support strut and she fell against the railing. His hands flashed out, grasped her shoulders, and pulled her upright again without a break in his outpouring. “Those belong to my brother and nobody else, hear me? He went missing. We didn’t have a goddamn clue where he went. Not a goddamn clue.”

Reese apologizes for getting rough, explaining that his brother “doesn’t have all his marbles, if you know what I mean,” and demands that she take him up the desert canyon to the water trough where she found the hat and knife. As they hurry out of the mine pit, Roy tries to tell Reese something but is cut off, a moment that most readers would slide over but that turns out to be loaded.

“Wait a second,” Roy said, but Reese strode by with a terse, “Can it, Roy. I’ll be back.”

“But I want—“ he tried again.

“I said can it. I’ll be back in a jiff.”

Neva exchanged a sympathetic look with the young man, and was struck by his dark eyes, the irises precisely defined against the clear whites in the manner of a Byzantine painting. She said, “He’s really worried.”

Roy shrugged and smiled, the two conflicting gestures seeming to sum up frustrated good intentions.

This page gives no clue to Jeneva’s complex character — she’s a journalist with a finely tuned nervous system — or to the stark beauty of the desert landscape that restores her strength and interest in life, and the strong descriptions of the setting that occur throughout the book. With only this page for evidence, a reader would have no sense of the wide range of characters, from an itinerant religious scholar to an old lady artist who lives in a renovated chicken coop, or of the complexity of the plot. Even so, p. 69 does well in that the two young men soon become the focus of the story as one turns up dead and the other is arrested for his murder. Jeneva has different ideas about what happened, and this leads to discoveries that shock the whole region and nearly leave her dead rather than healed by her summer of blissful solitude in the desert.

Visit the official website for Ashna Graves and Wendy Madar, and read an excerpt from Death Pans Out.

Check out the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Promise Not to Tell"

Jennifer McMahon's debut novel is Promise Not to Tell.

She applied the "page 69 test" to the book and reported the following:

I was happy to discover that page 69 had my favorite character, Del Griswold aka the Potato Girl, on it. In this passage, it’s 1971 in rural Vermont, and Del and Kate (two misfit fifth graders) have been spying on two women baking bread at the commune Kate lives on. Del’s never been to the commune and they’ve snuck up to spy from the woods so that Kate can prove that she really does live in a tepee. As they crouch, listening to commune members Doe and Mimi bake bread, they learn that Doe has been lying to everyone about who the father of her new baby really is.

“Let’s go,” I whispered to Del, but she didn’t respond. Curious as I was, I didn’t want to hear anymore. New Hope wasn’t the kind of place where people kept secrets and I found a certain easy comfort in that. Everyone shared everything during the circle meetings – all the women even shared when they had their periods (although they referred to it as their “moon time”).

I got up from my crouched position slowly and gently tugged at Del’s arm. She stayed put.

“Look at her titties,” Del hissed. “They hang down to her belly! Don’t hippies know about bras?”

“I’m going with or without you. I don’t want to get caught,” I whispered, feeling strangely like a trespasser outside my own home. Del just stared at Doe and Mimi as if they were some kind of exotic circus animals – peacocks or dancing bears. I turned and started to make my way back down the path, careful not to make too much noise stepping on sticks and dry leaves. I picked my feet up high and watched where I stepped.

In a minute, I heard footsteps behind me, as Del galloped up and grabbed my shoulders.

“Boo,” she whispered. “You’re walkin’ like you got a load your pants.”

I like this passage because it gives a taste of the dynamic between Kate and Del, and their relationship is really at the heart of the book. I also like the reference to secrets. In Promise Not to Tell, everyone has a secret, and keeping secrets becomes a crucial test of Kate’s loyalty to Del both before and after her death. On the other hand, this is a “quiet” page, not representative of the more spooky or suspenseful aspects of the story.

Browse inside Promise Not to Tell for an excerpt or read a briefer excerpt at Jennifer McMahon's website.

Visit McMahon's MySpace page and the group blog, "The Debutante Ball."

Check out the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Complete Tales of Merry Gold"

Kate Bernheimer applied the "page 69 test" to her most recent novel, The Complete Tales of Merry Gold, and reported the following:

I was anxious when I first agreed to do the Page 69 Test for The Complete Tales of Merry Gold. Like both my novels, Merry has a lot of blank pages -- 21 out of 156 pages, to be exact. If it turned out that page 69 were blank, I'd have to say how page 69's blankness truly represented the rest of the book. I wouldn't be able to lie and say page 69 might be empty, but boy is this novel full, for it's not a full novel at all, by design; its main character, Merry Gold, is so mean and cold she barely even exists. The book is sort of her one attempt at an angry and delicate rasp. Soon I began to hope page 69 was blank.

Imagine my disappointment when page 69 turned out to be not blank, and in fact contained what in my view is a whole lot of words. If only it had been at least an illustration! There are nine of them, after all. (As it turns out only 126 pages in this novel even have sentences on them.) I tried to put as few words in this novel as I could get away with, without robbing Merry Gold of her dignity, its tiny shreds. On page 69 she's a child on the cusp of realizing the true horror of her little existence, which is not to be believed.

On page 68, there's a line readers seem to think is funny, about creepy songs with creepy names, like "Haven't Got Time for The Pain," and "I Guess I Just Lost My Head," but that's page 68. On page 69, Merry admits she sometimes ditches her piano lessons to go across the street to a fried chicken shop where she says always has the urge to eat the chicken under a table. I think that's funny, but no one else seems to; maybe it scares them, as well it should too. In many ways, page 69 sets Merry's fear in motion. For on the last line of page 69, Merry sees "the little girl in the white dress" who appears earlier in that chapter. She, Merry, and Ketzia — Merry's younger sister — all are most likely being molested by the same person, though there's no explicit description at all, whatsoever, of this in the book (I couldn't' bear it). On page 69 the girl in the white dress is standing on an ice-covered pond and on page 70 she disappears. "The ice walker," Merry yells on that page. "IS THE ICE WALKER HERE?" For me that line, which appears just after Page 69, contains all the fear of this novel, this completely cold, nervous fear. The dread. Page 69 is very, very important to that moment. So I think it does represent the book, even if it's too far from blank.

Also, page 69 is part of a chapter based on a Russian fairy tale. That's appropriate since the entire novel pays homage to fairy tales.

Page 69:

Although I was supposed to be learning piano, often Danilo would play piano himself, and have me dance around the room. After a while, I never did play. I suppose I played very badly and he got tired of me. Also, when I would try to play I would get so nervous I’d hold my breath and pass out and fall off the bench on the floor.

“Dance like a butterfly,” he would say. “Dance like a bee.” Because the songs were creepy, the dances I did were creepy too.

When I was done, Danilo would have me sit on the bench and lean my head on his shoulder until our time together was over.

I remember being exhausted. I remember seeing my face stare back at me from the black window. I remember the shiver of cold on my spine. Sometimes snow would blow into the room and cover our bodies.

And it was strange: even though my father gave me money to pay Danilo, Danilo never would take it. “Keep the ten,” he’d say. Or, “Keep the twenty.” Never did he once take the money. “I won’t tell on you if you won’t tell on me,” he would say. I’d shove the money deep in my pocket. Sometimes I would leave the Academie early and walk down the street to a fried chicken shop, and order potatoes with gravy, sometimes a leg. I always had the urge to eat the chicken under the table. Something about my piano lessons made me feel wild, untamed. Once, I was leaving my lesson and as I climbed into my father’s car outside the Academie Musicale, I saw the little girl in the white dress across the street, on Bullocks Pond.

Read an excerpt from The Complete Tales of Merry Gold, and learn more about Kate Bernheimer.

Check out the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"In Search of Another Country"

Joseph Crespino, a history professor at Emory University, is the author of the new book, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution.

He applied the "page 69 test" to the book and reported the following:

Page 69 puts us in the middle of white Mississippians’ confusion about how to reconcile their Christian belief and their segregationist practice. Segregationists made two very different religious arguments about how to justify Jim Crow. Some believed that segregation was designed by God as a way of keeping peace between two fundamentally antagonistic races. Others argued that segregation was a political matter that had nothing to do with religion. This argument was pitched toward liberal ministers and Christian groups that preached about the moral imperative for racial justice. This latter argument would, over time, predominate.

This page is representative of the rest of the book in that I’m trying to understand the world as white Mississippians in the civil rights era saw it. My book argues that this is a surprisingly important thing to do. The common view is that Mississippi in the 1960s was—as a famous phrase of day put it — a “closed society,” and white Mississippians were the most backward looking members of a region that was decidedly out of step with modern America. I argue, however, that since the 1960s white Mississippians have been significant contributors to a broad conservative countermovement in American politics. And to understand that countermovement, we need to take a group like white Mississippians much more seriously than historians typically do.

But page 69 is not entirely representative. The religious view of conservative white Mississippians is just one theme of the book. I’m also interested in competing strategies among segregationist leaders — how some influential white leaders abandoned the politics of “massive resistance” in favor of a strategic accommodation that allowed them to preserve important priorities. And I look at how conservative white Mississippians linked their interests with those of other conservative white Americans. On some issues — like their opposition to the de facto/de jure distinction in the 1964 Civil Rights Act or their support for private evangelical schools — white Mississippians led the way on subjects that would become rallying points for conservative activists in the 1970s and 80s.

Learn more about In Search of Another Country at the Princeton University Press website.

Check out the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The First Stone"

Judith Kelman, author of The First Stone, applied the "page 69 test" to her new novel and reported the following:

On page 69, three-year-old Tyler Colten observes an ultrasound image of the unborn baby sister he ardently does not wish to have.

Tyler frowned at the grainy swirl on the monitor. “Looks like icky soup.”

“Let me help.”

My obstetrician, Dr. Carla Piacenza, slowly traced the fetal contours with the tip of a long, blunt finger.

“There’s the head, the tummy, and a foot. And look. The baby’s sucking its thumb.”

“That,” Tyler said, leveling an accusatory finger, “is not a baby brother. No way.”

My books often examine what happens when evil invades ordinary lives. Before things begin to unravel, Emma Colten’s biggest worries are fairly typical. Is she a good enough mother? How will her son accept the new baby? Is her husband too interested in an attractive young female resident? How will their expanding family fit in the tiny New York City apartment the hospital provides?

In crisis, perspective shifts. Resilience is tested, and the measure of the character’s core strength is revealed. Emma copes through the considerable force of her intelligence, humor and determination, but she’s also humanized by insecurity and self-doubt. In writing the book, I grew to know and like her more and more. Like a dear friend who’s moved far away, I miss having Emma in my life.

Learn more about The First Stone at the publisher's website, and see how "the page 99 test" served the novel.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue