"The Recruit"

Alan Drew is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Gardens of Water and Shadow Man. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. An associate professor of English at Villanova University, where he directs the creative writing program, he lives near Philadelphia with his wife and two children.

Drew applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, The Recruit, and reported the following:

From page 69:

“Any damage to the inside?” Mr. Clay said, still staring through the broken glass.

“No.” If you didn’t count his trembling wife, his infuriated daughter. Insurance only cared about property damage. America, Bao sometimes thought, only cared about property damage too.

“Well, that’s something to be thankful for, anyway,” Mr. Clay said. He always took his time, like he was typing out a script in his head he would soon read out loud.

Someone made a barking sound from the end of the alley.

“Hey,” Mr. Clay said, spinning on his heels. “Get the hell out of here.”

Bao glanced toward the street and saw three boys, two with shaved heads. The third, a strip of hair down the center of his scalp, barked again. The boys laughed, a couple by-standers did, too. He tried to memorize the boy’s faces, in case they came around the store. He didn’t know what he would do if they did, but he wanted to know who they were, wanted to be able to recognize them.

Mr. Clay started towards them. “Go. Now.”

Bao, embarrassed now, turned to sweep up a few glass shards. Then Mr. Clay was back, running his right hand through his thick hair, as though to gather himself. “360,” he said. Mr. Clay jostled loose the remaining shards of glass in the door frame and dropped them on the cement. “Three hundred and sixty dollars. You got your deductible, but that’s on me this time.”

“No,” Bao said. “We’ll pay the deductible.”

No gifts. No handouts.

“We can talk about that later,” Mr. Clay said, glancing back to the crime scene tape.

“No.” Why this insistence on charity? “We will pay.”

Hmm, I’m not sure if a browser would get an accurate sense of The Recruit from page 69, though to a degree some of the central elements in the book are set-up or hinted to on this page. Bao Phan’s family grocery has been attacked that morning by a local group of white supremacists. Bao’s a refugee from the Vietnam War—or the American War, as he would call it—and he’s recently moved to Rancho Santa Elena from Little Saigon, some twenty minutes away. Bao and his family are part of a growing Asian population in Santa Elena, a community some are chafing against in the mostly white town. Lucas Clay is Bao’s insurance agent, and Bao is perplexed as to how Lucas knows about the attack and the broken window since Bao has not called him to put in a claim. Lucas is a Vietnam veteran suffering from PTSD who sometimes attacks his son, Jacob Clay—who is the antagonist in the novel--when he is in the throes of a flashback to the war. Lucas is keeping a secret from Bao at this point in the novel, one that explains how Lucas knows about the attack, and one which sets in-motion a chain of events that ultimately results in a terrible murder. But three of the four central characters in the novel are absent from this scene—Detective Ben Wade, forensic medical examiner Natasha Betencourt, and the troubled teenager, Jacob Clay. Those characters, plus Bao Phan, are the heart of the novel.

Visit Alan Drew's website.

The Page 69 Test: Shadow Man.

Q&A with Alan Drew.

--Marshal Zeringue