Emily Maguire's "Taming the Beast"

Emily Maguire's first novel, Taming the Beast, was nominated for the Dylan Thomas Prize and received a Special Commendation in the Kathleen Mitchell Awards.

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

From page 99:

Mike lit himself a cigarette and inhaled deeply. ‘So here’s what I wanted to tell you. Last night, at your place, we got so dirty, right in front of everyone. No one had a clue!’

‘At my place?’ Jamie’s face flushed. ‘What are you on about?’

‘Me and Sarah were going for it, right there at dinner.’

Dinner. Jamie ran the tape over in his mind. Nothing had happened at dinner. Before dinner Sarah had kissed Jamie and flirted with Mike. After dinner Shelley had driven Mike and Jess home and Sarah had ... God! What was Mike talking about?

‘There I am, eating the delicious meal your lovely lady cooked up, and suddenly my pants are open and there’s a hand on my knob.’ Mike shook his head as if he couldn’t quite believe it. ‘There’s Sarah, chatting away about variable loans or some shit, and all the time she’s pulling me off under the table. I returned the favour though. When I licked my fingers after the meal, it wasn’t just the chicken I was lickin’ if you get what I mean.’

‘Sorry, I have to - ’ Jamie bolted for the toilets and made it inside just in time to vomit up what felt like everything he had ever eaten and drunk in his entire life. After a couple of minutes he stopped and rocked back on his heels to catch his breath. Then he remembered her saying I’ve never been so wet in my life and his stomach heaved again.

Taming the Beast is the story of Sarah Clark, a young woman still reeling from an affair with her sadistic English teacher eight years earlier. The book’s action is mostly concerned with the re-ignition of this abusive relationship now that Sarah is an adult with sexual experience and agency.

Page 99 is a glimpse into the effect Sarah’s self-destructive sexual fury has on her best friend Jamie. Jamie’s girlfriend is pregnant and another couple in Sarah’s circle – Jess and Mike- have become engaged. Sarah, comfortable only in the midst of chaos, has taken the opportunity of an engagement dinner to seduce both Mike and Jamie. Mike takes it as a bit of fun, but Jamie has been in love with Sarah for a decade and he assumes her sexual attention means his love is at last being returned.

Page 99 represents a turning point of sorts for the Jamie-Sarah relationship. From here on in, Sarah will charge headlong into a destructive relationship with her former abuser, and Jamie – feeling sexually humiliated but still in love – will cast aside his long-time role of Sarah’s protector in an attempt to become her lover – whatever the cost to his wife and child, and to Sarah herself.

This page is interesting because it shows the effects of Sarah’s sexual relentlessness which is itself an effect of her earlier abusive relationship. The book is, in one sense, about the ways in which a single event can have momentous repercussions and this scene is a glimpse at the hurt that still radiates from the damaged woman at the centre of the story.

Visit Emily Maguire's website and read an excerpt from Taming the Beast.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bruce Western's "Punishment and Inequality in America"

Bruce Western is Professor of Sociology at Princeton University.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his book Punishment and Inequality in America and reported the following:

The page 99 test is stern indeed. I fear that I may have failed. Read page 99, and my book Punishment and Inequality in America comes across as too much social science. It says: "Earlier research on selection and average wages focused on trends from the 1960s through the 1980s. I study wage inequality through the 1980s and 1990s by analyzing data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) and correctional surveys of inmates."

The main message would have fared better with a page 189 test: "In the last decades of the twentieth century, mass imprisonment became a fact of American life. The deep involvement of poor black men in the criminal justice system became normal. Those drawn into the net of the penal system live differently from the rest of us. Employment is more insecure, wages are lower. Families are disrupted as incarceration separates children from their fathers and breaks up couples. Pervasive incarceration and its effects on economic opportunity and family life have given the penal system a central role in the lives of the urban poor."

For better or worse, we need some social science to show that the growth of the American penal system has produced a devastating transformation of American race relations. The empirical story is sometimes dry in its details, but a prison system that now puts 1 in 5 black men behind bars is no less an injustice of historic proportions.

Read the Introduction to Punishment and Inequality in America and learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

K.J. Erickson's "Alone at Night"

K.J. Erickson is the author of four Mars Bahr mysteries.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her most recent novel, Alone at Night, and reported the following:

Interesting idea.

I've always been struck writing a police procedural how similiar the structure is to opera, where arias provide moments of emotion, realization, character development -- and recitatives advance the plot. Page 99 in Alone at Night is definitely recitative: My protagonist, Marshall Bahr, is considering how to handle tips received from a reality television show featuring the case Mars is working on.

In opera, recitative must be well-constructed and intrinsically interesting to create an effective foil for the melodic richness of the aria that follows. The same is true during the recitative sections of a police procedural. There's a substantial amount of detail and action that must follow from point A to point B, none of which has much melody. On Page 99 in Alone at Night, I'm relying on the reader's curiosity re: how information would be handled on a TV show such as "America's Most Wanted" and on the implied tension of how important this information will be to resolving the case.

Page 99 doesn't tell you anything about Mars as a character, nor does it include other characters who are integral to the series, but it is very representative of the mechanical, plot-forwarding aspects of a police procedural.

Visit K.J. Erickson's website and read an excerpt from Alone at Night.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stona Fitch's "Senseless"

Stona Fitch is a novelist living in Concord, Massachusetts, where he also directs Gaining Ground, a non-profit organic farm. He is a former crime reporter and musician with the seminal Boston underground band Scruffy the Cat.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his novel Senseless, which will be released as a feature film in 2007 by Scottish director Simon Hynd, and reported the following:

On Page 99, anti-globalization extremists torture Eliott Gast, an American economist, in a white room near Antwerp, Belgium. One of his captors, nicknamed Blackbeard, removes Gast’s wedding ring and swallows it, claiming to like the taste of American gold. The captors scrape Gast’s hand with a cheese grater and apply biopolymer to deaden his sense of touch. The acrid smell triggers Gast’s memory of building model bombers as a boy. And the whole procedure is broadcast live on the Internet to raise money for the extremists’ poorly defined (and possibly non-existent) cause.

Compact and very disturbing, Page 99 says a great deal about Senseless, a short novel laced with equal parts horrific violence and lush memories of sensory pleasures. This uneasy mix makes some readers throw the novel across the room. Others read it in one sitting. Few look at the household items that are used for torture — the cheese grater, an iron, a coffee spoon — in quite the same way.

I wrote Senseless during the sweltering summer of 1999, deep in thrall to an authorial fever dream — long before September 11th, the ascent of amoralists, online beheadings, and reality television. The book persists, unsettling and resonating, as American appetites and economics continue to do damage on various fronts.

Visit Stona Fitch's website to learn more about Senseless.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ian Patterson's "Guernica and Total War"

Ian Patterson teaches Modern English Literature at the University of Cambridge, where he is a Fellow of Queens’ College.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Guernica and Total War, and reported the following, starting with the text from page 99:

...potent term in the argument against bombing in the 1920s. The most widely-read attack on the official policy, The Great Delusion (1927) by 'Neon' (Marion Acworth), denounced the idea that the British should simply 'take frightfulness as a matter of course'. Was there any moral difference, the author asks, 'between the killing of British women and children by the bombing of London and the recent bombing of totally defenceless women and children [by the RAF] in their native villages in Waziristan?' But in the end the word was used so much that it lost any residual sense of horror it may once have had and became just another technical term, as in this 1938 comment: 'A further development of aerial frightfulness recently perfected in Spain and China is the machine gunning of civilians from the air.'

This impersonal use of language was central to the need that military strategists and some politicians felt to distance themselves from the moral consequences of their policies. Ways had to be found of policing the Empire without bankrupting the armed forces, and the air force seemed to offer the best answers. Not only could it cover more ground more quickly than infantry, regardless of the terrain (as long as it wasn't mountainous or heavily forested — deserts were best), but their real effectiveness was believed to be moral: the fear induced by single acts of violent destruction would, they were confident, have long term intimidatory effects. It was not usually couched in clear terms, though. The public perception of this exemplary violence had to remain politically acceptable. Indeed the very 'impersonality' of air operations (or their 'inhumanity', depending on one's point of view) made them more vulnerable to criticism than the army, which for example used gas shells extensively in 1920 in what is now Iraq. (Many prominent figures supported the use of..."

Ford Madox Ford is quite right, up to a point. Page 99 points to some of the central issues in the book and also, I hope, gives a taste of the moral argument. Although the book is partly about the bombing of Guernica in 1937, that account provides the opportunity to question why the bombing of civilians from the air has been so widespread a weapon of war or 'pacification' for the last century. Influential early enthusiasts and military strategists believed that the unparalleled destruction such bombardment could unleash would destroy civilian, and therefore government, morale almost immediately, making wars extremely short. Despite all the evidence to the contrary — even the most terrible bombing seems to strengthen rather than weaken the determination not to give in — this view is still widely held (and underpins the concept of 'shock and awe' so favoured by the Bush and Blair governments). The book examines the cultural presence of these and other ideas, in popular and serious fiction, poetry, film and a variety of writings about the future of 'civilisation' that appeared in the years between the first and second world wars. Why, I ask, did the fate of that small Spanish town Guernica become such a potent symbol? Not just because of Picasso's painting. The painting became the shorthand symbol of the event, but the reasons for the significance of the event run very deep, and bring together a surprising number of elements. As well as describing the events in Guernica, the book traces the story of bombing from 1911 through two world wars, Abyssinia and Spain, to Iraq, focussing mostly on the first 45 years (limitations of space prevented much discussion of the impact of the atomic bomb, for example). It is a book about the ethics of war, its effects on those who have no interest in it, its place in culture and civilisation, and the creation, through bombing, of a new kind of fear.

Visit the Harvard University Press website for more information about Guernica and Total War and read an excerpt.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tony Eprile's "The Persistence of Memory"

Tony Eprile is the author of Temporary Sojourner and Other South African Stories, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and The Persistence of Memory, which won the Koret Jewish Book Award, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and was listed as a best book of 2004 by the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his acclaimed novel and reported the following:

This page is a somewhat anomalous one, since it happens to open in one of those transitional places in my novel: when I’m moving my protagonist from a sheltered Jewish childhood into his experience as a conscript in the South African army. POM is set in my birth country of South Africa. It’s a sort of fake bildungsroman, its central conceit being that the protagonist has the gift — or, as he thinks of it, curse — of a perfect memory in a society that is constantly erasing and rearranging its history to suit the current ideology. My desire was to see what kind of political consciousness can arise from memory and an interest in memory alone, to explore the various ways that memory is recorded and also falsified, and to comment on three decades of particular turbulence and change in South Africa’s history.

I’m chuckling as I write this, as I just returned from a three-week reading tour in the Middle East, traveling with four other writers. We gave a lot of readings — to students in Syria, Jordan, Ramallah, and elsewhere — and, inevitably, our intros to our own writing started, through repetition, to sound canned. We had been bounced around the back of a van in Istanbul in stifling heat, our guide yelling at the driver who seemed to be taking in ever tighter circles, until we rolled up to Bosporus University and were rushed an hour late into a classroom full of eager Turkish students. Near delirious from lack of sleep, I launched into my spiel prior to reading a short excerpt, only to hear my traveling companion, Daniel Alarcon, crack up. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just that I could complete your introduction myself.” Later, Jane Hirshfield fell asleep while Daniel was reading, to the visible delight of our audience. We gave the Turkish students quite a show — a useful demonstration of the silliness and humanness of writers. Which brings me back to my novel, which I hope includes much silliness and humanness within the dark events of South African history.

On page 99, my narrator recalls biting into a scone that had been invaded by an unseen bee that stung him on the upper lip, “which promptly swelled to several times its own size so I came to resemble one of those primitive tribesmen who has stretched his lips with wooden plugs in homage to some fat-mouthed god.” As a neophyte in the army, he sees himself as one of many “chrysalids in the process of transformation, and it was the army’s aim and delight to beat hell out of whatever personalities we had arrived with….” And there you have the novel, with South Africa’s insect life representing the wildness of its indigenous inhabitants, a bit of anthropology thrown in, and the absurdity of the events leavening the pain and brutality that lies always under the surface of this world.

Read more about The Persistence of Memory at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Vicki Hendricks's "Cruel Poetry"

Vicki Hendricks is the author of noir novels Miami Purity, Iguana Love, Voluntary Madness, Sky Blues, and the latest, Cruel Poetry.

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

Page 99 of Cruel Poetry -- Sexual flirtation between the main character Renata and one of the many men who would gladly succumb to her charms. She’s wearing a translucent leopard print dress with Pepe the anaconda around her shoulders. A blond guy says, “I used to have one like this -- not quite so big.” Renata giggles. “Damn. What happened to it? Oh, are we talking about snakes?”

As Renata spreads her legs, her back to the light, revealing a lack of panties, her breath deepens and a cool streak of wetness runs down her thigh, instant response to the eager participant to her exposure.

Although it’s an exaggeration that you can stick a finger anywhere into one of my books and come up with a sex scene, I guess it worked this time. Page 99 is representative of various moments when the main character expresses the sexual focus of her life and how she entangles those who surround her in danger, body and soul, whether they are men, women, or snakes.

Visit Vicki Hendricks's website and read an excerpt from Cruel Poetry.

--Marshal Zeringue

Dan Kalla's "Blood Lies"

Born, reared, and still residing in Vancouver, Dan Kalla spends his days (and sometimes nights) working as an Emergency Room physician at an urban teaching hospital. He writes novels, too.

Kalla applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new thriller, Blood Lies, and reported the following:

My fourth novel, Blood Lies, is a Fugitive-style suspense thriller flavored with the science of forensic DNA evidence, the Pacific Northwest cross-border drug trade, and my ‘behind-the-curtains’ view of the ER (as a still practicing Emergency physician).

The hero, Dr. Ben Dafoe, is desperate to find out how his blood wound up caked on the walls at the savage murder scene of his former fiancée, Emily. Going on the run from Seattle to Vancouver, the young ER doctor assumes he is looking for his missing-and-presumed-dead identical twin who, like Emily, was another casualty of drug addiction. But Ben’s frantic journey takes him through the underworld of the drug trade on both sides of the international border and deep into a deceitful web where he eventually learns that, figuratively and literally, sometime blood lies.

By page 99, Ben is feeling the noose of suspicion tighten. He is stalked by an anonymous whisperer calling from Canada to warn him that the police already know that his blood has been found at the crime scene. Ben is beginning to wonder if his identical twin, Aaron, might be still alive, and therefore responsible for an indistinguishable DNA blood sample on the wall. The scene on page 99 takes place in the plush office of his high-powered defense attorney, Michael Prince. By this point, Ben’s life is in such upheaval that he doesn’t know whom to trust … including his own attorney.

Page 99:

When I finished, Prince viewed me poker-faced. “And you’re certain the calls originated in Canada?”

“According to my call display,” I said.

“Why Canada?”

“There could be a connection. Aaron had moved to Vancouver about a year before he died.”

Prince’s lips broke into a slight smile. “You mean before he disappeared.”

“I keep forgetting.”

His smile faded. “I won’t let you.”

“Michael, I don’t think I can sit back and wait. The cops aren’t looking for any other suspects. They’re building the case against me.”

“Which may or may not be enough to even lead to charges,” Prince said, relaxing back in his seat. “We can’t stop them from investigating you. What we need to do is to focus on preparing your defense should it become necessary.”

I wasn’t ready to let it go. “Michael, didn’t you once defend the second victim, Jason DiAngelo, on charges of drug possession?”

The skin around his eyes tightened slightly. “And how is that relevant to you?”

“I’m not sure it is, but I’d heard that Philip Maglio hired you.”

“Which of course I can’t comment on,” Prince said dismissively. “Where are you going with this, Ben?”

“JD was a drug dealer who sold Emily black market HIV drugs. He worked for a supposed Seattle mob boss. A few days ago, I saw another drug dealer die in the Emergency Room of the same knife wound that killed JD. Maybe it’s all tied in somehow.”

Prince smiled reassuringly, but warning lurked behind the benign countenance. “Ben, we don’t have to produce alternate suspects. We don’t even have to prove your innocence. All we have to establish is reasonable doubt. And I think your missing brother will offer us that.”

Visit Dan Kalla's website and read an excerpt from Blood Lies.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lynne Viola's "The Unknown Gulag"

Lynne Viola is a Professor in the Department of History at the University of Toronto and author of The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization, Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance, and the new book, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin's Special Settlements.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to The Unknown Gulag and reported the following:

I didn’t know Ford Madox Ford’s statement about p. 99. When I read it, I was sure it couldn’t be accurate for my book. But when I turned to p. 99 of my book, it struck me that Ford’s statement was, perhaps, as much of a challenge as a potential deadly silencer of mediocrity.

So, what is on p. 99 of The Unknown Gulag? In short, the paragraphs on this page tell of the grueling work regimes of adult and child forced labor in Stalin’s special settlements.

In 1930 and 1931, Stalin sent close to two million peasants (labeled “kulaks” — supposedly rural capitalist exploiters) into internal exile as forced laborers in the most desolate and forbidding regions of the Soviet Union. Entire families were banished from their villages, expropriated of their property, and sent into the wilderness to extract the raw materials (timber, metal ores, etc.) so vital for Stalin’s forced industrialization drive. The special settlements were the foundation block for the infamous Gulag and marked the beginnings of Stalin’s infamous reign of terror.

Close to half a million people died in the special settlements as a result of hunger, disease, and sheer exhaustion. “A. K. Rodionova, a special settler in Siberia, recalled that she would be ‘up at 4 and to work at 6. The plan was 3 cubic meters of wood. If you didn’t fulfill it, you didn’t go home — they wouldn’t give you your rations.’ In a letter smuggled out to relatives in Canada, special settler Franz Warkentin echoed Rodionova’s statement: ‘All men over 18 years of age were to work in the forest. Here we were forced to cut trees from early morning until late at night in snow a meter deep. If you completed fifty percent of the required work, you received fifty percent of your food ration.’ The eight-hour work day was never observed. Inspection teams reported eleven- and twelve-hour work days as the norm with no days off. In the Northern Territory, bosses were said to dismiss the very idea of an eight-hour day, arguing that they needed special settlers to work at least eleven hours. Doubtless, most worked far more than this.” (p. 99)

Everyone worked, from children to the elderly. “Rules regulating the labor of children, minors, women, the elderly, and the nonablebodied were routinely violated. According to directives from August 1931, minors under 16 were not to be employed in industry; exceptions were allowed only with a doctor’s certificate and then only if the minor was over 14. Fourteen- to 16-year-olds were to have a four-hour work day, and 16- to 18-year-olds a six-hour day. In agriculture, children under 12 were not supposed to work at all. In fact, as a report on special settlers in Kazakhstan noted, children’s labor was used ‘almost everywhere...equally with adults and without time limitations.’ Iagoda complained that the same norms for healthy men were applied to minors, pregnant women, and the nonablebodied. A report on the Urals also noted that norms were not differentiated by gender or age.” (p. 99) In fact, mortality rates were the highest of all for the children of the special settlements.

Many Communist officials wrote in their secret reports that conditions in the special settlements were worse than in the concentration camps of the Gulag. These conditions are partly reflected in the work regimen. “Special settlers often worked without a day off. When bosses in the Northern Territory were forced to grant their workers a day off, they held back their rations for the day. Many special settlers went for long periods of time receiving no pay whatsoever. As was the case throughout Soviet industry during the First Five-Year plan, there were often long delays in paying workers. In the case of some special settlers, these delays could extend for up to two years. And industrial officials frequently refused to pay special settlers anything while they were building their settlements. By September 1931, over one million rubles in back pay was owed to special settlers in the Northern Territory. When they were paid, their salaries were generally pitifully small because they were based on the fulfillment of impossible norms. In the Far East, for example, daily wages of special settlers rarely exceeded one ruble 20 kopeks, a small fraction of the average working salary....” (p. 99)

So does p. 99 of The Unknown Gulag reflect the overall quality of the book? Although an author cannot be the judge of the “quality” of her own book, I do think p. 99 captures the essence of the story I am trying to tell, a story which must now count among the twentieth century’s most horrific instances of mass repression.

Learn more about The Unknown Gulag at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Dylan Schaffer's "Life, Death & Bialys"

Dylan Schaffer is the author of the acclaimed Misdemeanor Man Mysteries and other works, including Life, Death & Bialys: A Father/Son Baking Story. He applied the "Page 99 Test" to Life, Death & Bialys and reported the following:

I hate to admit it, but I’d never heard about this page 99 business before. I mean, I’ve read a little Ford Madox Ford, but his advice about turning to page 99 to find the essence of a book stuck me, initially, as a little weird. Then I tried it with my latest book, a memoir about how me and my dying father baked our way to truth and reconciliation, called Life, Death & Bialys: A Father/Son Baking Story. And let me tell you, FMF turns out to have been a freaking genius. Here’s a bit from my page 99, which takes place outside the world’s best bialy shop, a place called Kossar’s on New York’s lower east side:

“We walk outside and stand in front of the store eating. Cream cheese would be nice, but I can see how eating it dry is a purer bialy experience.

We hear someone with an English accent say to her friends, ‘It’s just like a bagel, but without the hole.’

Flip [my father] steps over and corrects her, though he’s gentle about it and doesn’t make me want to hide. With his mouth full, he shakes his head a few times and says, ‘Not a bagel, darling. Totally different animal. Baked, not boiled. You see the onions in the middle?’

A few seconds later Flip is part of the gang, telling them how he used to come for bialys sixty years ago, asking about their travels around the country. I stand by, silently, savoring my first Kossar’s bialy, and wondering how a person so close to death can be so cheerful.”

Life, Death & Bialys, as you may have gathered, is about life, death, and bialys. Page 99 nicely (it’s slightly spooky just how nicely) offers a glimpse on each of those topics. The book tells the story of how, just a few weeks before my father died, we took an intensive baking class in New York City. My father left my mom when I was five and we’d spent very little time together over the next thirty years. Flip hoped the class would give us a chance to come to something like terms.

Page 99 offers a nice preview. It demonstrates what a strange and funny and weird and bialy-obsessed person my father was. It shows that, like my dad, bialys are rare, inimitable, and widely misunderstood. And, finally, it suggests that during our week learning to bake in New York, and in the few weeks before Flip died, I stood by watching, wondering, and marveling and how strong life can be, even at the very end.

Visit Dylan Schaffer's website, and read an excerpt from Life, Death & Bialys.

--Marshal Zeringue