"In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel"

Genevieve Plunkett is the author of Prepare Her: Stories. A recipient of an O. Henry Award, her short fiction can also be found in journals such as New England Review, The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, Colorado Review, and The Best Small Fictions 2018. She lives in Vermont with her two children.

Plunkett applied the Page 69 Test to her debut novel, In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel, and reported the following:

Page 69 lands in the middle of a chapter about Theo, Portia’s love interest. It describes the circumstances that led to Theo joining a band as the band’s drummer, despite problems in his marriage.

He had been about to say no, that he did not play drums and that his life was falling apart. He and his wife had just started marriage counseling, where they discussed how often they touched each other affectionately or where in their day they might find time to practice compassion. They never spoke about the looks of pity and impatience that Theo’s wife gave him whenever he tried to talk about anything out of the ordinary, as if she knew already where he was going with it, as if she had figured him out long ago.

“I’m wondering about that sensation that you get. The sensation of falling when you’re trying to sleep,” he might say to her, and she would say, “What about it?” with her eyebrows raised.

“I’m wondering if it ever leads somewhere other than sleep. What if--” but she would cut him off.

“I’m sure it’s nothing more than what it is,” she would say. “You don’t have to make everything into something more interesting than it is.”

I think this passage does well at showing a glimpse of the novel’s central theme: characters reckoning with desires that might seem unrealistic, and the backlash they face from the people around them. A bookstore browser would get an accurate sense that this story is, at times, about sensitive people navigating relationships with less sensitive people. The only potentially misleading part of this is that it might suggest that Theo is the central character, when most chapters follow Portia’s perspective. Theo is my favorite character, so I am selfishly pleased that the test finds him here.

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--Marshal Zeringue