"Jean"

Madeleine Dunnigan is a writer and screenwriter from London. She was a Jill Davis Fellow on the MFA at New York University. While there she was awarded a GRI Fellowship in Paris.

Dunnigan applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Jean, and shared the following:

On page 69 of Jean, readers are thrust into the end of a scene in which our protagonist Jean is breaking rocks. This, we are told, is a punishment he must serve, having hit Tom, another boy in the school. Jean considers the material he is breaking: it is Wealden Clay, which dates back to the Hauterivian and Bavarian times. As he breaks rocks he thinks about this: how he is ‘literally’ cracking through time. This sparks another thought about a letter he received that morning. The postage stamp is from a week ago, which means the letter is something from the past. Thus Micky, who wrote it, has already enacted what in the letter was only a promise. He has already gone away.

Now the narrative jumps backward from 1976 to 1969 when Micky, or rather Mick Caro, a famous rock star, moves onto Jean’s street in Holland Park, London. Mick Caro’s arrival causes a buzz a half-mile radius around. Jean, who asked for Mick Caro’s latest EP for Christmas, plays it all day. Rosa, his mother, mutters that the area is going downhill now the celebrities have moved in. Then the builders arrive, whole droves of them, to begin construction on Micky’s new house and it is this that sends Rosa ‘crackers.’

The Page 69 Test makes for an interesting read of my novel… This page is split between the end of one scene and the beginning of another, leaving many questions for the reader. Who is Jean and where is he? Who is Tom? Who is Micky? Where has he left and where is he going?

A little intuition might serve her well – clearly Tom is someone Jean shouldn’t have hit, and Jean is breaking rocks as a punishment. Such punishments happen in places of authority, like schools. Jean must have strong feelings about Tom in order to hit him, she might assume. Indeed Jean is set in a hippie, rural English boarding school for boys with ‘problems’. Jean is our antisocial and violent protagonist. The novel centres around his relationship with another boy in the school, Tom, and their burgeoning romance. Although this doesn’t come through strongly on page 69, there is at least a hint that something is going on between them.

The other person mentioned on page 69 is Micky. Clearly, Micky is also someone important to Jean if he is thinking about him. The slip into backstory tells the reader that she is about to find out who exactly Micky is and why he is important to Jean.

Yet I fear that the lack of context on page 69, and the shifting between so many characters and settings might confuse the reader. At its heart Jean is a boarding school novel about a boy, Jean, who is at odds with the world around him. Tom offers him escape in the form of love; yet Jean’s complicated past (of which Micky is a part) prevents him from true intimacy. Yet on page 69 none of these things are obvious.

In short, there are hints at the larger themes of the book – Jean’s violence, his repression at school, his complicated relationship with men, his broader existential musings, his difficult mother and his troubled past. Perhaps these will confuse the reader, or perhaps they will be just enough to wet her tastebuds and encourage her to read more…

Visit Madeleine Dunnigan's website.

My Book, The Movie: Jean.

--Marshal Zeringue