Milan correspondent for W magazine and Women’s Wear Daily, and disappeared for four years in Tuscany. In L.A. she was on the writing staff of Unhappily Ever After; Encore, Encore; The Dead Zone, and Wildfire. She now lives in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. She is the co-author of two novels under the pen name Magnus Flyte. She teaches at College of the Sequoias. The Italian Party is her debut novel.
Lynch applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Sally Brady’s Italian Adventure, and reported the following:
Page 69 of Sally Brady’s Italian Adventure plunges the reader directly into life under Fascism in 1930s Italy. We’re fireside in the bar of ultra-swanky Badrutt’s Palace Hotel in St. Moritz in winter 1938. Though Sally is the main character of the novel, the second main character is Lapo, an Italian writer who gets gradually pulled into Mussolini’s orbit against his will. Page 69 finds us in the middle of a conversation between Lapo and Count Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law and foreign minister in his regime. Though Ciano is relaxed, tension is high for Lapo, who has come to Switzerland to illegally buy an apartment on behalf of a Jewish friend who is trying to leave Italy because of the new anti-Semitic laws. Lapo can’t reveal this to Ciano, of course, who is pressuring him into ghost writing an autobiography of Mussolini. Lapo’s excuse—he's too busy with the ancient estate he’s renovating into a modern farming operation—backfires when Ciano decides to arrange a photo op for Mussolini at Lapo’s farm: “We’ll arrange it with the local officials. Brilliant idea. Splash it all over the papers.”Visit Christina Lynch's website.
Lapo’s navigating a tightrope here. His son Alessandro—the third main character of the novel—is openly anti-Fascist. Alessandro was now seventeen. He’d have to do his compulsory military service when he turned eighteen, but Lapo imagined with Ciano’s help he could arrange for his son to have something cushy and safe. Lapo asks Ciano about the rumors of war, and Ciano’s reply is true to his real life diary: “Italy is utterly unprepared for war. After Africa and Spain, we simply can’t afford it.” Lapo asks what Mussolini said to this, and Ciano’s response is gut wrenching because of all we know is coming: “He’s jealous of Hitler.”
The Page 69 Test definitely holds up here—even though it’s not a Sally page, it’s got all the elements I strove to include in the novel: glamour that’s fun but also a bit sickening because of the world war about to erupt, dark humor that ends up helping the protagonists weather the storms to come, echoes of our own era’s ego-driven power plays, and the incredible tension of trying to do the right thing and protect your loved ones in a society that is inching daily deeper into injustice and violence. The test works!
The Page 69 Test: The Italian Party.
My Book, The Movie: Sally Brady's Italian Adventure.
Writers Read: Christina Lynch.
--Marshal Zeringue