"The Swan's Nest"

Laura Rhoton McNeal holds an MA in fiction writing from Syracuse University and has worked as a freelance journalist, a crime writer, and a high school English teacher. She is the author of the novels Dark Water, a finalist for the National Book Award, The Practice House, and The Incident on the Bridge. She and her husband, Tom, are the authors of Crooked, Zipped, Crushed, and The Decoding of Lana Morris.

McNeal applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Swan's Nest, and reported the following:

If you turned to page 69 of The Swan’s Nest, you would be in Jamaica, in a carriage, with Lenore Goss and her brother, Andrew, who are arguing. Andrew has suggested that Lenore marry one of Elizabeth Barrett’s brothers so that the two families can have a large enough sugar plantation to offset the cost of paid labor (rather than slave labor, which was still used in Haiti, the United States, and Brazil, making sugar from those places cheaper on the world market).

Lenore responds,

“I can’t marry one of them, even if they asked me. I don’t want to stay here for the rest of my life.”

“Why not? There is so much for you to criticize! So much reform for you to recommend.”

“You don’t do any of the things that I recommend.”

“Because I have been here much longer than you have, and you recommend the silliest things.” When she had told Andrew about her grand scheme, a utopia in which the races were equal and Little Egypt was held in common, he had laughed. “You couldn’t kill and cook a goat, Nora. Or wash clothes in the river and wring them out with your soft little hands. Or cut the heads off our dinner fish. And if you say that you could, which I can tell you’re about to do, believe me when I say you couldn’t cut cane for a single week without killing yourself."

The scene represents the nature of the book quite well: a brother is arguing with a sister about what is economically practical. All of the sister-brother relationships in the book have that tension—who is the smart, rational one, and who is absurdly reckless, and what will come of that?

I think this page also reveals what is un-Victorian about my book. In the novels of Jane Austen and the Brontes, which I love and admire, the West Indies are always off-stage. What happens there is unknown to the female protagonists, and money just appears from that place to change their lives for the better. But Elizabeth Barrett knew what happened on her family’s sugar plantation, and she loathed being inextricably dependent on what it earned. She wished the money in her family had come from somewhere else--anywhere else. She was unable to travel, as her brothers did, to see Jamaica and try to behave humanely in an inhumane business, so I invented a female character who could and did: Lenore.

I think of the woman on the cover of the book as Lenore, in fact. So I thank Marshall McLuhan for his weird but bizarrely effective tip.

Visit Laura McNeal's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Laura McNeal & Link.

The Page 69 Test: The Incident on the Bridge.

My Book, The Movie: The Incident on the Bridge.

My Book, The Movie: The Swan's Nest.

--Marshal Zeringue