Alan Furst's "The Foreign Correspondent"

Alan Furst, whom the New York Times calls "America’s preeminent spy novelist," is the author of Night Soldiers (1988), Dark Star (1991), The Polish Officer (1995), The World at Night (1996), Red Gold (1999), Kingdom of Shadows (2000), Blood of Victory (2002), Dark Voyage (2004), and The Foreign Correspondent (2006).

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to The Foreign Correspondent and reported the following:

Let's see, page 99, hmm. Three foreign correspondents -- Havas, Reuters, the London Times -- hiring a taxi to get to Prague for the German occupation of March, 1939, and the line, "When your country is being occupied, best stay home," an observation on the deserted streets.

I guess I'd read the novel, based on this test: I like the period, when it really seemed that Adolph Hitler would rule the world, and my heroes and heroines who, in rather quiet and non-thriller fashion, helped to make that not happen.

I'm best for the sophisticated reader, which is the reader who reads lots of books, so I fall right in with the page 99 project.

Visit Alan Furst's website and read an excerpt from The Foreign Correspondent.

--Marshal Zeringue

Richard Hawke's "Cold Day in Hell"

Richard Hawke is the author of several novels including Speak of the Devil and Cold Day in Hell.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to Cold Day in Hell and reported the following:

So if the question here is, would folks reading only page 99 of my new book Cold Day in Hell be intrigued enough to read the book...? the answer is hell yes! Of course, if I were to choose the most representative page would it be page 99? Probably not, but I am so obsessive when it comes to my writing that I would spend 99 days trying to decide what represents the most representative page. Page 1? The last page? Such a torture! For the record, the scene that shows up on page 99 of CDIH takes place in a lawyer's office. Of the seven books I have published, this is my first lawyer's office scene. So how representative is this of anything? My private eye, Fritz Malone, did some background work on a jury for a big celebrity murder case (no, the celebrity wasn't murdered, he was accused of the murders) and in this particular scene he is getting gently chewed-out for not having dug up some particular info on a juror and her wacko husband that would not only have definitely kept the woman off the jury ... but might have reined in the out-of-control husband (imagine one of those out-of-control fathers who make their son's little league experience a living hell). In this particular case, the husband is emerging as a possible copy cat killer. Interesting? I think so. You won't find this the most colorful or active scene in the book, but insofar as getting a sense of my narrator's voice and how it is that he handles the people around him, it does the deed. If you want to know more about all this ... I think you know what you have to do.

Visit Richard Hawke's website, and read the first chapter of Cold Day in Hell.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Morgan's "Brave Enemies"

Robert Morgan is Kappa Alpha Professor of English at Cornell University. He is the author of numerous volumes of poetry, essays, short stories, and novels; his novel Gap Creek was a selection of the Oprah Book Club and a New York Times bestseller.

Morgan applied the "Page 99 Test" to his novel Brave Enemies and reported the following:

On page 99 of Brave Enemies Josie, the narrator, describes the overwhelming physical attraction she and the young John Trethman feel for each other. As a minister he resists at first, and as a formerly abused woman she is reluctant at the start also. But their growing affection and desire overcome all obstacles.

"He reached his other hand and put it on my other breast, and then he hugged me closer to him.

"It was the first time I really knew what a touch could mean. A touch connects you and makes you feel a part of everything. A touch makes you feel at the center of something."

On page 99 Josie and John begin to celebrate an idyll in the wilderness in the fall of 1780, just before he is kidnapped by the British and accused of being a spy. In these violent times in piedmont Carolina in the American Revolution, Josie dresses as a man for her own safety as she goes in search of her husband. Not knowing if John is dead or alive, she joins the patriot militia pretending to be a man. They march toward South Carolina where Lt. Col. Banastre Tarleton, at the direction of Lord Cornwallis, is conducting a campaign of terror over the countryside.

Meanwhile John has not been hanged, but forced to serve as chaplain in Tarleton's army. Without knowing it, Josie and John are converging toward the Battle of Cowpens, January 17, 1781, one of the most decisive victories American forces won in the fight for independence, leading to the final victory at Yorktown.

In Brave Enemies I tried to make the American Revolution intimate, local, personal, through the lives and love of John and Josie, against the backdrop of raging events that changed our history, at the threshold of the Republic.

Robert Morgan is a native of the North Carolina mountains, where he was raised on land settled by his Welsh ancestors.

Visit his official website, and read an excerpt from Brave Enemies.

--Marshal Zeringue

Dara Horn's "The World to Come"

Dara Horn's first novel, In the Image, published when she was 25, received a 2003 National Jewish Book Award, the 2002 Edward Lewis Wallant Award, and the 2003 Reform Judaism Fiction Prize.

Her second novel, the highly-acclaimed The World to Come, received the 2006 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction, was selected as an Editor's Choice in the New York Times Book Review and as one of the Best Books of 2006 by the San Francisco Chronicle, and has been translated into nine languages.

Horn applied the "Page 99 Test" to The World to Come and reported the following:

A reader opening The World to Come to page 99 would be dropped into a conversation between Benjamin Ziskind — a 30-year-old game-show writer who has managed to steal a million-dollar Chagall painting from a museum during a singles' cocktail party — and Erica Frank, an employee at the museum who has been charged with interviewing everyone who attended the party in order to help track down the thief. On page 99, it's clear that she has no suspicion at all that she's talking to the thief, but it's also clear that she's falling for him.

It seems rather defensive to claim that Ford Madox Ford's "Page 99 test" is "unfair." Reading any single page of any novel would of course be "unfair." The World to Come begins as a contemporary art heist, but much of its plot is also historical, dealing with the life of Chagall, the lives and deaths of Yiddish writers in Chagall's circle, the devastating betrayals of the Cold War, and the story of how this painting came to belong to a particular family whose experiences reveal how much our lives are shaped by those who came before us, whether we want them to be or not. There are portions of this novel that take place in 1920s Russia, in 1960s Vietnam, and, at the end, in a supernatural world populated by souls who have not yet been born. None of this, of course, happens to appear on page 99.

Anyone who merely wants a taste of an author's writing style can use this test quite fairly. My style tends to be very direct, focusing on character and plot rather than on language for language's sake, and this page reflects that. I have great admiration for Ford's The Good Soldier and for other novelists in that tradition, like Iris Murdoch, for whom style is a servant of character and plot rather than the opposite — a pattern which has become less trendy in an era of experimental fiction, but which, for me, matters more as both a writer and a reader. To the extent that a reader opening to page 99 wants to know whether he or she will like the style in which a book is written, I think no writer can ever claim this test to be unfair.

But I don't believe that most readers are truly interested in the style in which a book is written. While it's nice to read something written in a style that you appreciate, the style test is more of a way of rejecting a book you won't be able to stand than a way of choosing a book you will enjoy. I think most readers who open to a random page of a book are actually more interested in what the book is "about" — not its plot (which is usually summarized far more efficiently in the jacket copy), but the particular understanding of the world that will animate the story one is about to read.

If this is what readers are looking for, then I think the "Page 1 test" (or however the first page of text is numbered) would be more useful than Page 99. Page 1, after all, is the page that's consciously written with the knowledge that it may be used specifically for this test by potential readers, and it usually is. I usually write Page 1 last, after having finished the entire book — or at least reconfigure the original Page 1 to suit what the novel has become. One can't capture everything on Page 1 either, of course, but it's the one place where the writer has an opportunity to try. The World to Come starts on Page 1 like this, with three sentences:

"There used to be many families like the Ziskinds, families where each person always knew that his life was more than his alone. Families like that still exist, but because there are so few of them, they have become insular, isolated, their sentiment that the family is the center of the universe broadened to imply that nothing outside the family is worth anything. If you are from one of these families, you believe this, and you always will."

In the next paragraph, the reader meets the thief, and then the story begins.

Dara Horn received her Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard University in 2006, studying Hebrew and Yiddish. In 2007 Dara Horn was chosen by Granta magazine as one of the Best Young American Novelists. She has taught courses in Jewish literature and Israeli history at Harvard and at Sarah Lawrence College, and has lectured at universities and cultural institutions throughout the United States and Canada.

Visit Dara Horn's website and read the first chapter of The World to Come.

--Marshal Zeringue

Donald Harington's "The Pitcher Shower"

Donald Harington is the author of over a dozen novels in addition to several books about artists. (His academic career was in art and art history.)

He won the Robert Penn Warren Award in 2003, the Porter Prize in 1987, the Heasley Prize at Lyon College in 1998, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 1999 and that same year won the Arkansas Fiction Award of the Arkansas Library Association. He has been called "an undiscovered continent" (Fred Chappell) and "America's Greatest Unknown Novelist" (Entertainment Weekly).

Harington applied the "Page 99 Test" to The Pitcher Shower (2005) and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Pitcher Shower just happens to contain two of my "signature" subjects: sex and magic. It is the first time in his life that my hero, Hoppy Boyd, had a "second coming." And it contains a depiction of his girlfriend's "fascinators," a kind of sheer scarf that she uses in dances to entertain the public.

Read an excerpt from The Pitcher Shower, and visit Harington's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Richard Zimler's "Guardian of the Dawn"

Richard Zimler is the author of seven novels over the last decade: The Seventh Gate; The Search for Sana; Guardian of the Dawn; Hunting Midnight; The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon; The Angelic Darkness; and Unholy Ghosts.

His novels have appeared on bestseller lists in 12 different countries, including the USA, Great Britain, Portugal, Italy, and Australia, and he has won numerous prizes for his work, including a 1994 National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Fiction and the 1998 Herodotus Award for the best historical novel.

Zimler applied the "Page 99 Test" to Guardian of the Dawn and reported the following:

My novel, Guardian of the Dawn, takes place in the Portuguese colony of Goa during the early 17th century, and it is an historical mystery that explores the dangers of religious fundamentalism. The narrator, Tiago, is imprisoned as a secret Jew by the Inquisition, which the Church and Portuguese Crown imposed on Goa in order to punish any residents who deviated from Roman Catholicism. On page 99, Tiago is being interrogated by the Grand Inquisitor, and he comes to realize that he can no longer trust any of his friends and family – that one of them must have informed on him. Even the other prisoner in his cell – Phanishwar, an Indian snake-dancer whom Tiago has grown to admire – may have been asked to befriend him in order to learn his secrets and destroy his resolve. And so it is that Tiago realizes that all his ties of love and family are gone, and that he can only count on himself if he is ever to avoid being burnt at the stake. At this point, the Inquisitor promises to let him sign a confession and earn his freedom if he can answer a riddle: “I speak to you on my journey – and only to you – from my departure point to the very end. And though I always die in the same place, you can hear me speaking from my closed grave if you pay close attention. Who am I?”

Visit Richard Zimler's website to learn more about his books, short stories, and reviews and interviews.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christopher Goffard's "Snitch Jacket"

Christopher Goffard is a general assignment reporter at the Los Angeles Times. His first book is the literary crime novel, Snitch Jacket.

Goffard applied the "Page 99 Test" to Snitch Jacket and reported the following:

On Pg. 99 of Snitch Jacket, Gus “Mad Dog” Miller, the magnetic ex-con, is offering some of his deranged theories of life to our hero and narrator, police informer Benny Bunt. Miller explains that two of his greatest heroes are Nietzsche and Jesus Christ – both great Outlaws, in his view, which is how he likes to think of himself, how he adds a mythic burnish to his lonely and feckless life on the fringes. Benny is beginning to understand the fraudulent clutter of Miller’s character, that his notions of Manhood and Cool are cobbled together from half-read books and misunderstood conversations and a thousand other random sources. The scene goes to the heart of one of the novel’s major themes, which is the improvisational and patchwork nature of identity. In the book’s isolated and godless milieu, where the characters grope in the darkness for heroes, any heroes, to emulate, Miller’s reverence for the German philosopher and the Nazarene, spurious as his understanding is, parallels Benny’s hero-worship of Miller himself, of Detective Munoz, of countless TV cops and comic-book characters from whom he’s borrowed his own codes of manhood. So Page 99 gives a glimpse of the psychosis Miller and Benny share, of the basic dynamic that leads to the book’s tragedy.

Snitch Jacket will be released in the U.S. later this year.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jane Austen's "Persuasion"

Deidre Lynch is a scholar of Eighteenth-century literature and Romantic period British literature as well as the editor of Jane Austen's Persuasion for the Oxford World's Classics Series (Oxford University Press, 2004).

She put the novel to the "Page 99 Test" and reported the following:

Lacking (alas) a first edition of Persuasion, I've used the edition that I prepared a few years ago for Oxford's World's Classics series.

As it happens, p. 99 takes us straight to the opening of the novel's second volume and so to a moment when, as seasoned readers of early-nineteenth-century fiction, we are expecting to gear up for transition. We're at chapter 1 again, and primed for a fresh start. Persuasion, however, investigates the situation of a woman who -- older than is the norm for an Austen protagonist -- feels as if change is no longer possible. Persuaded to break off her engagement with Captain Wentworth eight years before the novel opens, Anne Elliot looks initially to be a heroine who already may have missed her only chance at a story, who is forced accordingly to live off and in memory. With the end of a long war, Wentworth returns to England and back into her social circle, but Anne won't let herself re-open the book on the past and let herself hope: "Now they were as strangers; nay, worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted. It was a perpetual estrangement." Still, Volume 1 ends with signs of change. The characters visit the seaside, Anne, revived by the change of scene, seems to start to live in the present -- and then, suddenly, there comes an accident of unexpected, frightening seriousness: Louisa Musgrove (the woman Wentworth appears to be courting) falls from atop a breakwater. As careful readers, witnessing this accident, we will have noticed how at this moment of panic, Wentworth, usually in command, now helpless, turns to Anne for assistance.

Prompted to look hard at this opening to volume 2, I'm struck by how the novel stalls just when we think we are being launched on the plot we've been reading for all along, the plot of Wentworth's and Anne's reunion. This page apparently finds Austen treading water. Her narrator tells us things like "Louisa was much the same"; "every thing was going on as well as the nature of the case admitted." On p. 99 there is little sign of Austen's jubilant wit and not much, even, of the emotional intensity that makes Persuasion's record of its heroine's inner life such a stylistic departure for Austen. Instead, the narrator keeps her distance from Anne's feelings. Page 99 sounds the theme of usefulness that is important in this novel, which locates moral value in professional men like Wentworth and not in the landed gentry: we read that Anne "had the satisfaction of knowing herself extremely useful." But by this point we are well acquainted with Anne's ethos of service and her conviction that she is not entitled to any emotion headier than "satisfaction." I read this page wanting confirmation not that Anne is useful but that she is loved.

Austen is taking her time here -- as if she wanted her readers to feel how burdensome time feels to Anne herself.

Deidre Lynch is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Indiana University.

Her many other publications include The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (University of Chicago Press), which won the Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book, and Janeites: Austen's Disciples and Devotees, editor.

Her most recent scholarly award is a 2007 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ron Rash's "One Foot in Eden"

Ron Rash is the Parris Distinguished Professor of Appalachian Literature at Western Carolina University.

He is the author of the novels One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, and The World Made Straight, as well as three collections of poetry and two of short stories. His poetry and fiction have been published in more than 80 journals and magazines.

Rash applied the "Page 99 Test" to One Foot in Eden and reported the following:

I decided to go back to my first novel, One Foot in Eden, for my page 99, and I found the following sentence. “That witch had caught that baby, pulled it right out of its mother and cut the biblical cord.” That sentence reveals a lot about the speaker, a teenager in 1950’s Appalachia who is terrified that she will be punished by God or the Devil for having a child by a man other than her husband. The “biblical cord” is not a phrase I’ve ever heard, but it reflects Amy’s state of mind aptly, for it suggests her belief she’s cut her links to God and thus allowed darker forces to control her and her child’s destiny. The world Amy lives in is a place where the supernatural is as real a presence as the world of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and like Macbeth Amy can never be sure if the evil that seems to steer some of her decisions comes from without or within.

Visit the publisher's website to read a description of One Foot in Eden and to sample the praise for Rash's writing from Lee Smith, Pat Conroy, and others.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thomas Perry's "Nightlife"

Thomas Perry was born in Tonawanda, New York in 1947. He received a B.A. from Cornell University in 1969 and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Rochester in 1974. He has worked as a park maintenance man, factory laborer, commercial fisherman, university administrator and teacher, and a writer and producer of prime time network television shows. He is the author of fourteen novels.

His most recent book is Nightlife, to which he applied the "Page 99 Test" and reported the following:

I have no doubt that Ford Madox Ford could discern most of what needed to be known about the quality of a book by reading only page 99. He wrote over eighty, at least five of them (The Good Soldier and the Parade’s End books) masterpieces. As for the rest of us, it’s probably best if we take a larger sample before making any pronouncements.

I do agree that a reader should be able to open a novel to any page and find something sensible and fluent that increases his understanding of at least one character and advances the story a bit. If things are going well, he’ll also find an observation or two about the way something in the fictional world looks, feels, sounds, or smells. It should not be boring.

As you asked, I just took a look at page 99 of my most recent book, Nightlife. While the page isn’t a climactic scene (Those tend to come later in novels.), it is a fair sample of the things that go on in Detective Catherine Hobbes’s investigation. She has flown down to Los Angeles trying to find a young woman who was at the scene of a murder in Portland. A Los Angeles police detective is driving Hobbes to the young woman’s last known address, hoping for an arrest. The San Fernando Valley that morning feels alien to Hobbes — all heat, glare, and traffic. She’s feeling growing tension as they approach the address, and we overhear a bit of the banter Hobbes habitually uses to keep the male cops around her at arm’s length so she can do her work. As she talks we learn some of her thinking about the deceptiveness of visual identification of suspects. As for whether a reader would be drawn into the novel by this page, I can only hope so. It’s too late to ask Mr. Ford to decide.

For more about Nightlife, see this post on "the thriller that scared Stephen King."

Visit Thomas Perry's official website.

--Marshal Zeringue