The Evergreen Review, and elsewhere. Previously, he studied economics at the University of Chicago and conducted research for the U.S. government and for the World Bank’s Gender Innovation Lab in West Africa.
Foster applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Circular Motion, and reported the following:
On page 69, the narrator and an intimate colleague -- whom the narrator has, thus far in the novel, courted and then rebuffed -- come close to amending their relationship after a dramatic fight. (To find out whether they do in fact make amends, you'd need to turn to page 70.)Visit Alex Foster's website.
What strikes me most about reading page 69 is that without context, a reader would likely follow the interaction between the characters -- but be completely thrown off by the setting. The characters are said to casually cross paths "on the roof" of their office building, and lines of dialogue are punctuated by setting descriptions like, "a pod snapped into the sky." Why are they on the roof? What is a pod?
The disorientation you might feel by starting on page 69 is actually not unrepresentative of the novel, even when read properly. To be sure, if you started from page 1, you'd know what a "pod" is: In the book, characters commute to work using a high-speed airborne transportation system that drops them down in stations, on street corners, and, occasionally, on the roofs. But even to proper readers of the book, the setting is meant to be a little bit strange, a little foreign, a little dizzying. Products are used without being overly explained (character store their jackets in "coat compactors" and find dates on an app called "MateMe"). Circular Motion is about the alienation and confusion of life in a world where technology is rapidly advancing, where you feel old at 25, and small within global systems that you can never fully comprehend.
The book wouldn't be as effective if the reader understood everything about the world that the characters are in. The characters themselves don't understand the world they're in. Just as we can never fully grasp our own political/technological/economic environment. We learn to function -- to love and fight and make amends -- even surrounded by inexplicable strangeness.
--Marshal Zeringue
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