The Page 69 Test: "Honey"

Victor Lodato is a playwright and the author of the novels Edgar and Lucy and Mathilda Savitch, winner of the PEN USA Award for Fiction. The recipient of fellowships

from the Guggenheim Foundation and The National Endowment for the Arts, his stories and essays regularly appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, and elsewhere. His novels and plays have been translated into eighteen languages.

Lodato applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Honey, and reported the following:

At 82, Honey has returned to New Jersey, after living for nearly fifty years in Los Angeles. For most of her life she’s wanted nothing to do with her mob family, but now, in her twilight years, she feels compelled to reckon with her violent past. Back in her hometown, she rekindles a romance with a childhood friend, Dominic Sparra. On page 69, we find Honey, not long after Dominic’s death, retreating into her closet—a large walk-in where, lately, she’s been spending more and more time.

From page 69:
The nice thing about the closet was that it was absolutely quiet. And since it was enormous, she’d been able to fit a lounge chair in there, along with a footstool, a reading lamp, a small table. It was very cozy, and the smell was always calming: the peat of leather shoes, the fresh milk of clean cotton, the deep green swell of cedar, not to mention the phantoms of old perfume trapped in wool or silk.

From the footstool, Honey retrieved a book she’d recently purchased, a feministic potboiler about women in prison. She settled herself in the chair, but after reading for less than a minute, she stopped, stared, breathed. The breathing took some effort.

At the funeral parlor she’d made light of her position, assuming that at her age she’d be a pro when it came to grief (so much experience!). But now the thought of Nicky collapsed her. He was, she knew, the last romance of her life. Selfishly, she was mourning that as well.

While it was true that Honey had always done just fine on her own, it would be dishonest to suggest that she didn’t adore being in love. Over the years she’d had so many wonderful affairs. Her sadness about Nicky was like a flare, lighting up all her other romances, both major and minor.

The boy in the tweed suit who’d taken her into the hills above campus. Another boy, a biology major, who made his own wine out of rhubarb. And during a summer at home, there’d been Pio Fini, briefly. Many boys, briefly. Then, in her thirties, the curly-headed cherub at the Self-Realization Center, who chanted during intercourse. In New York, the skinny stockbroker naked in black socks; the Polish swimmer with the girlish bottom. California had brought treasures, too. The cat-eyed actor in Laurel Canyon, twelve years her junior. Most of her lovers, of course, had been older—though no one more than Mr. Hal, who’d had thirty-four years on her, and with whom she’d stayed the longest, well over a decade.

“But who was your great love?” Lara sometimes asked, as if life were a novel. The question always annoyed Honey. Why must she decide? They were all great loves, in one way or another. Apparently some gals looked down on such a view—either that, or they felt sorry for Honey.
It’s tricky to say whether page 69 passes the test. What’s slightly misleading is the deep internality of this particular passage. While such interior monologues happen throughout the book, they’re not the norm; the novel is chock-full of action and dialogue and in-the-moment scenes. I’m a former playwright, and my time in the theater has influenced how I work as a novelist. I recall my very first editor saying that she thought playwrights made good novelists because “they know something has to happen.”

Also, this page might lead you to believe that the engine of this book is one of reminiscence. While Honey’s past is an important part of the novel—and we do get several glimpses of that time—most of the book happens in the present. The older Honey becomes tangled up, once again, with her mob family; she also gets deeply involved with a neighbor, a young woman in an abusive relationship.

The last thing I’ll say about how this page doesn’t quite communicate the spirit of the novel is that this passage is more wistful than much of the book. Here, we don’t get Honey’s wit, her humor, her grit, nor do we get an accurate sense of the high-stakes melodrama of the story—which at times made me want to call this book an opera, rather than a novel.

Where page 69 passes the test is that it sets up a few things that are very important to how the story unfolds. Honey’s closet is the location of a pivotal scene in the book—the climax, really—where the past and the present collide in a moment of shocking catharsis. Also, this page, in which Honey muses on her romantic affairs, hints at the idea of the book as a love story—which it is, in many ways. Of course, this passage seems to suggest that Honey’s love story is over—when, in fact, the most unexpected romance of her life is yet to come.