The Page 69 Test: "Boundless as the Sky"

Saturday, February 18, 2023

"Boundless as the Sky"

Dawn Raffel's books include The Strange Case of Dr. Couney: How a Mysterious European Showman Saved Thousands of American Babies, two short story collections, the novel Carrying the Body, and a memoir. Her stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including O, The Oprah Magazine, NOON, BOMB, Conjunctions, Exquisite Pandemic, New American Writing, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, Best Small Fictions, and more.

Rafffel applied the Page 69 Test to her new book, Boundless as the Sky, and reported the following:

From page 69:
Streamers and Signs

Shhh. Quiet.

High overhead, the Sky Ride is empty. The aerial cars hang vacant, inert. Birds perch on a few. In the heat of the day and in the sizzle of the night, thousands of people will rise above Chicago, the city’s gritty industry, the World’s Fair (“The Century of Progress”), the Great Lake, with views stretching north to Wisconsin and south to Indiana, the sweat and heavy perfume of one another’s bodies. Salt. Breath.
Marshall McLuhan must be smiling from the hereafter. Page 69 opens the second part of the book, which is the titular novella. The themes of flight, birds, and industrial “progress” pervade the whole book. For that matter, so do salt and breath.

Although Boundless as the Sky is fiction, it hews closely to real events from 1933. The Century of Progress, with its signature Sky Ride, was as described. People who couldn’t spare a dime during the Depression somehow scraped together the 25-cent admission fee for a vision of hope—a valentine to a future in which technology would solve our problems.

Additionally, the book was inspired, in part by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. While the first part contains a number of fictional metropolises, perhaps none is as fantastical as the World’s Fair, which was a kind of temporary city within the city of Chicago. Not only is The Century of Progress long gone, but the Chicago that existed in 1933 is now an invisible city, reposing underneath the surface, breathing through its pores. In hindsight, 1933 looks quite different than it did in the moment, but perhaps we find ourselves in a similar moment now.