Starting on page 69

After a lifetime of reading, I have only now heard of the Page 69 Test.

Proposed by Marshall McLuhan, author of The Medium is the Message, the Page 69 Test is intended as a quick way to determine if you might enjoy reading a book. Instead of reading the first page, as many of us do, McLuhan suggested reading page 69. If you like what you read, take the book home with you. Otherwise, put it back on the shelf and try another one.

Why page 69? It sounds arbitrary, and mostly is arbitrary. Yet by the 69th page the author has stopped showing off, as often happens early in a book, and has gotten into the plot, in the case of a novel, or into the subject matter, in the case of nonfiction. True, the reader will lack the advantage of knowing what has gone on before. Who are these characters? What is going on? What is this book about? Someone reading page 69 before pages 1-68 will have no idea. But at page 69 a reader should be able to tell if the writing a interesting or not. 

Reading the first page first, the question is, do I want to see what happens next? Opening the book to page 69, the question becomes, do I want to find out what happened before? If not, why bother?

But does the Page 69 Test really work? I pulled down some notable novels from my shelves. Let's see what happens on page 69.

Page 69 of The Catcher in the Rye is just dull. Sorry, McLuhan. Holden is drinking Coke and dancing with girls in a bar. Not very interesting. Yet page 68 is terrific. It includes these lines: "That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you half fall in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are." Now that makes me want to read the book — again.

On the 69th page in To Kill a Mockingbird, it is snowing in Maycomb County for the first time since 1885, and the children are delighted, hoping there will be enough accumulation to build their first snowman. Good stuff. This is a winner.

McLuhan wins again in A Confederacy of Dunces. Page 69 finds Ignatius talking about the only job he has ever had. He lasted two weeks pasting labels in new books at the New Orleans Public Library. "On some days I could only paste in three or four slips and at the same time feel satisfied with the quality of my work," Ignatius says.

Page 69 of Brave New World is totally confusing. Much better to start at the beginning of this one.

I am not convinced the Page 69 Test is worth the trouble, although it might be better to try it with a book I have not already read.

A life with Wodehouse

The books of P.G. Wodehouse have brightened the lives of many people over the past century, myself included. In 2015, Faith Sullivan wrote a wonderful novel about it, Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse.

Another in her series of novels set in the small midwestern town of Harvester, the story's focus falls on Nell Stillman and covers most of her life. The novel begins with her self-written obituary, which outlines virtually the entire story, and ends with her death.

Nell is widowed as a young mother and never marries again, though "the love of a good man" she mentions to in her obituary turns out not to refer to her husband. She is offered a position as third-grade teacher, and she continues to teach for decades.

Although the novel covers a lifetime, the small-town characters remain mostly constant, allowing various plotlines to develop. Some of these involve a young woman hired to care for her son, Hilly, while she teaches; her son's life before and after his disabling injury in World War I; a series of poison-pen letters to her that continue for decades; and John, a usually absent politician who becomes the love of her life.

That is, if you don't count P.G. Wodehouse. She reads each night to settle her thoughts after a tiring day, but her favorite books are those written by Wodehouse. "Mr. Wodehouse is my savior," she says at one point. She imagines conversations with him. In time she actually corresponds with the author, and he writes back, sending her signed copies of his books.

Covering a life as it does, the novel contains just about everything a typical life contains, especially in that time and place. The joys, the heartaches, the disappointments, the sorrows, the pleasures — they are all there in this fine novel.

Miracles happen

No miracle happens without a witness. Someone to declare, Here's what I saw. Here's how it went. Make of it what you will.

Leif Enger, Peace Like a River

Miracles, like unlikely coincidences, are generally a turnoff in novels. If it's not a fairy tale, a fantasy or a fable, we want to believe what we are reading. Yet miracles are at the heart of Leif Enger's Peace Like a River (2001), and somehow we believe it.

The novel is narrated by Reuben Land, an 11-year-old boy with a serious asthma condition when the story takes place in the early 1960s. Abandoned by their mother, Reuben, an older brother named Davy and a younger sister called Swede are being raised by their devout father, Jeremiah, a school janitor.

The father catches two boys physically abusing a girl in the girls' locker room and beats them with a broom handle. The boys vow revenge and later kidnap Swede, though releasing her unharmed. Later they break into the Lands' home in the middle of the night, and Davy shoots and kills both of them with his hunting rifle.

Davy goes on trial, and a conviction seems likely. And Jeremiah loses his job. When Davy escapes from jail. federal authorities begin a manhunt for the teenage boy. Jeremiah acquires an Airstream and takes his family to North Dakota in the middle of a harsh winter in their own search for Davy, while a federal agent follows.

Enger gives his readers adventure and romance and some entertaining epic cowboy poetry written by Swede, as well as one miracle after another. Make of them what you will.

Language exchange

Captain Cook

While writing about Captain James Cook's visit to Tahiti in 1769 in Blue Latitudes, Tony Horwitz tells us how Englishmen adopted words from the Tahitian language into English and how, at the same time, Tahitians made English words their own.

For example, two common English words — taboo and tattoo — originated in Tahiti. Tahitian women never ate in the presence of men, Cook wrote in his journal. The reason given was that it was considered tapu.

Tahitian natives used burnt candlenut to tattow their skin, leaving a blueish purple stain. Cook wrote that several of his crewmen underwent the same painful procedure, becoming the first sailors to get tattoos.

Because all Tahitian words ended with a vowel, they brought English words into their language by adding a vowel, Horwitz explains. Thus, a nail became a naero. A hammer became a hamara. The Tahitian greeting yoana is believed to have come from the English phrase "your honor."

As for Cook himself, he was called Toote. 

Rich language

Marshall Sahlins, a 19th century Christian missionary in Hawaii, complained that Hawaiians had 20 words for sexual intercourse. "If one term were selected to translate the Seventh Commandment, it was bound to leave the impression that the other nineteen activities were still permitted," Sahlins wrote.

Of course, the Seventh Commandment forbids adultery, not intercourse, but that would spoil a good story, which Tony Horwitz tells in his book Blue Latitudes.

This reminds me of the story often told about Eskimos having seven words for snow. The actual number varies from one version of the story to another. The point is always that the lives of Eskimos revolved around snow, just as the lives of Hawaiians revolved around sex. Yet stop to consider how many English words, including slang and vulgarities, we commonly use for sex. Or snow, for that matter.

How many words to we have for rain? Downpour, drizzle, sprinkle, thunderstorm, shower, sleet, cloudburst, monsoon, drencher, etc.

Having multiple words for different forms of the same thing demonstrates a richness of language. It is something to celebrate, not complain about.

Success despite failure

The D-Day invasion 80 years ago was a success despite being a failure, as David Howarth describes in Dawn of D-Day: These Men Were There, June 6, 1944 (2008).

The invasion was planned with minute-by-minute precision. This was supposed to happen, then five minutes later this was supposed, and 10 minutes after that something else. Yet almost nothing happened on schedule or as planned. The bombing and shelling before the invasion was mostly ineffective. Paratroopers were dropped in the wrong places. Winds caused boats to go off course, so that troops didn't land where they were supposed to or when they were supposed to. Troops assigned to break through defensive barriers didn't arrive until after the troops who were supposed to charge through those openings. And so forth.

And yet, somehow, it worked. And this success had less to do with the generals who planned the invasion down to the minute than with the men who overcame all those obstacles on their own. And of course, it helped that the German army was surprised, not believing the Allies would invade in poor weather. And fewer lives were lost than the generals had expected if everything went as planned.

Howarth breaks the invasion into parts — the air drops, Utah Beach, Omaha Beach, etc. — and then examines those parts through the stories of some of the men who survived to tell about their experiences. Thus you won't learn about everything that happened on the French coast that day, but you will experience a little of what it was like through the stories of individual soldiers, including some from the German side. The result is an exciting, you-are-there feeling as you read this relatively short book.

Along the way, the author tells us things even experts on the invasion may have never considered. For example, until the invasion most of the British soldiers involved had less experience with war than residents of the city of London, who had experienced almost nightly bombing for a long period. Meanwhile the soldiers were training elsewhere in relative safety, and some of them, Howarth tells us, felt guilty about it and were glad to finally be able to demonstrate as much courage as ordinary British citizens had already shown.

Boldly going

When I was in school we read about Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, Henry Hudson and even Francis Drake, but I don't remember James Cook being mentioned at all. Yet he may have been the greatest sea explorer of all, as Tony Horwitz makes clear in his 2002 book Blue Latitudes.

The Pacific Ocean was still largely unknown by Europeans in the 19th century. Sure Europeans like Magellan had been there, sailing across it, but until Captain Cook no European had actually looked around, visited the numerous islands, looked for the Northwest Passage from that side of America or given names to so many geographical features.

Cook's three long voyages took him from near the Arctic Circle  to Australia, covering more than 200,000 miles. He and his sailors met people from numerous strange cultures, leading in most cases to the eventual spoiling of these cultures. For this reason Cook is controversial throughout the Pacific to this day. There are those who honor him, but mostly there are those who revile him, not so much for the kind of man he was — mostly he was honorable, Horwitz finds — but for the negative consequences of his discoveries.

Horwitz decided to retrace Cook's voyages, traveling to the Aleutians, Australia, Hawaii, Tahiti, New Zealand, Tonga and elsewhere to see how Cook is remembered. His narrative switches back and forth, from Cook's journeys as described by the captain and members of his crew to his own observations centuries later. Roger, a traveling companion more interested in drinking and women than Cook's journeys, adds humor to the narrative.

Roger's interest in drinking and women corresponds with that of Cook's men. They consumed large quantities of alcohol on those voyages, and despite Cook's efforts he was never successful in keeping them away from Pacific women. It didn't help that in these cultures sex was freely given, or if not free was eagerly exchanged for the price of a nail. It's a wonder there were any nails still holding the ship together after leaving places like Tahiti and Hawaii.

It was in Hawaii that Cook met his end. He had been becoming increasingly irrational and erratic on his third voyage, probably the result of an illness. At first he was treated like a god, but gradually that relationship changed. When natives stole a boat one morning, Cook responded violently, resulting in his own death, as well as that of others on both sides.

Explorers, Columbus and Magellan among them, are not as honored as they once were. Cook was never particularly honored even when the others were, but he covered more miles than most of the rest of them put together. Horwitz makes clear that Cook explored the Pacific as no one had ever done before, whatever one thinks of the results of his discoveries.

What survives

A subject I return to again and again in this blog is that of literary survival. Why do some works of literature survive from one generation to another? Take Pride and Prejudice, for example. Or Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. What makes one book or one poem great, while another that may have once been more popular fades into history?

No literary work can be properly judged by its first readers. One just cannot predict what will be considered great a hundred years from now. And what is true of books is also true of movies, paintings and even presidents.

"If you go back seventy-five years, or even fifty years, time has weeded out all manner of insubstantial art that was popular, au courant, or flashy, but it has retained works of great merit," says novelist Amor Towles, whose own works, such as A Gentleman in Moscow, may or may not be read two generations from now.

Yet the judgment of time is not perfect. The good often disappears into history along with the mediocre. As Towles says, "There are novels and symphonies and paintings of great genius that are irretrievably lost. This has happened for social reasons, political reasons, economic reasons, racial reasons — and due to plain old bad luck."

Some books are taught by literature professors, while others are not.

Some books are kept in print by publishers longer than other books.

Some nearly forgotten authors are resurrected by biographers or critics.

The possible factors are many, but Towles is right that luck has a lot to do with what — and who — is later recognized as great.

Oh the relief!

H.L. Menken

H.L. Mencken once explained why he wrote: "I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk."

Writers probably wouldn't like having their life's work compared to a cow being milked. Even so, Mencken's comment makes sense to me. It's the feeling, not the work, that he is actually talking about. It's the relief a writer feels upon getting one's thoughts, one's ideas, one's words on paper. It's more than just completing a task, a satisfaction in itself. The feeling is less of one of completion than of letting go.

Mencken wrote books, but mostly he wrote essays. meaning that this feeling of relief came frequently, not just once a year or so as might be true of a novelist. My own writing, for newspapers during my career and for this blog after retirement, has also centered on writing short pieces, not book-sized manuscripts. I experience this same feeling over and over again, not unlike that proverbial cow.

When a work, however insignificant, is in progress, tension builds. Deadlines approach. Ideas come at random moments, even when one is not necessarily even thinking about the work. Revision can follow revision. Words, even entire paragraphs are inserted here and there. Passages are rewritten. Doubts come. When one is lucky, inspiration also comes. The tension builds until, finally, publication brings relief. One's mind can turn to other things, perhaps family and friends, that have been neglected.

The udder, so to speak, is empty.

Skipping and skimming

I've noticed some readers questioning whether listening to a book being read counts as actually reading the book. I have never had such doubts. I've read a good many books without ever turning a page but simply listening to CDs in my car.

Watching a movie adapted from a novel doesn't count as reading the book, despite what many high school essayists have pretended, but listening to books certainly counts as reading them. Otherwise, those with vision problems could never get credit for reading anything.

A more difficult question, to my mind, has to do with skimming and skipping. Can you claim to have read Moby-Dick if you skipped those many chapters filled with minutia about whales and whaling? If you skim the descriptive passages in a novel to get back to the action can you still say you read the book? Or what about reading a condensed book? (Does Reader's Digest still print these?) With a condensed book, someone else has done the skimming and skipping for you.

Lord Balfour

I tend to agree with Lord Balfour, who said, "He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming."

No reader is obligated to read every word an author writes.  Some passages are simply dull and unnecessary. That's how Reader's Digest was able to cut out two-thirds of a novel while keeping the essential story. Publishers seem to think a book must have at least 300 pages, meaning that many authors must pad their manuscripts, like high schoolers trying to reach 500 words in an essay.

One can, of course, carry skimming and skipping too far. If you read the first couple of chapters of a mystery, then skip to the last chapter to see who the murderer is, it doesn't count as reading the book. But passing over a few words and sentences along the way is not something any reader should feel guilty about.

Secrets and lies

A haunted marriage is just as terrifying as a haunted house.

Alice Feeney, Rock Paper Scissors

In Rock Paper Scissors (2021), Alice Feeney gives her readers both a haunted marriage and a haunted house. In fact, the house is haunted by the marriage.

Amelia Wright wins a free weekend in an isolated Scottish church converted into a home. She drags along Adam, her reluctant husband. They drive there in a snowstorm and are lucky to find the place. Or are they?

Adam, a successful screenwriter, has a rare condition popularly known as face blindness. That is, he cannot recognize faces, not even his own in the mirror or that of his wife. This fact turns out to be central to the entire plot.

Their marriage is on the ropes, and this weekend is viewed by both as the last chance to save it. It doesn't help that they are both driven by secrets and lies, which compound as the weekend progresses.

Nearby there lives a woman named Robin, also motivated by secrets and lies. She is the one who awarded the "prize" of a free weekend. By slashing their tires and performing other acts of mischief, she terrifies the couple.

Little by little Feeney uncovers the secrets and reveals the lies, leading to one surprising twist and turn after another. You will want to read this novel as fast as you can, for if you slow down at all you might realize just how farfetched it all is.

Seemingly true

Isaac Asimov

One reason I loved the robot stories written by Isaac Asimov was his Three Laws of Robotics. Here they are:

1. A robot must not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey orders given to it by a human being except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Asimov's stories are based on these laws and possible dilemmas that could result despite them or because of them. As a teenager reading these stories I wondered if the Three Laws were truth, not fiction. Shouldn't they be true? Decades later, now that robots and artificial intelligence have become a reality, they seem more and more like a good idea.

Kate Mascarenhas does something similar in her much more recent sci-fi novel, The Psychology of Time Travel. Throughout the novel and in a glossary in an appendix she creates time-travel terminology that  carries the ring of truth. If time travel ever becomes real, these seem like words time travelers might actually use. Here are some of them:

Completion — To live an incident you've already read or heard about.

Common chronology — The sequence of events experienced by non-time travelers.

Echoing — Returning to an incident you've already experienced.

Emus — People who don't time travel, and thus pass through time in a single direction. Emus are unable to walk backwards. Such people are also called Plodders.

Silver-me — A time traveler's older self. (As opposed to the younger self, Green-me.)

If Mascarenhas writes other time-travel novels using the same terminology, she may approach Asimov's accomplishment of creating an invented reality that seems, at least to readers, like truth.

Madly through time

It muddies the mind... all that toing and froing hither and yon.

Kate Mascarenhas, The Psychology of Time Travel

Time travel must really be confusing because novels about it certainly are. Such is the case with The Psychology of Time Travel by Kate Mascarenhas (2018).

That traveling through time might affect a person's mental health is an issue not mentioned in other time-travel stories I've read, and I've read quite a number of them. Yet the psychology of time travel, as the title suggests, comes front and center here. Would-be time travelers are given an extensive psychological test before they are accepted, and Mascarenhas actually reproduces this test, covering 30 pages in the appendix. But if applicants are mentally sound when they begin traveling through time, they almost certainly won't be after going back and forth through time a few times, even meeting (and sometimes having sex with) former or later versions of themselves.

Mascarenhas imagines a world dominated by women, even though this world primarily covers the period from 1967 to 2018. Nearly all of the characters are women and all of the sex, what little there is, is entirely of the lesbian variety. Thus her novel is confusing even without the time travel.

At the center of the plot there is a locked-room mystery, which a time-traveling detective solves. Yet the bigger mysteries have to do with time itself. In one case, for example, both parties in a romantic relationship are present for each other's death. Time travelers check ahead to determine who they have had a successful relationship with before beginning that relationship.

Yes, it is all confusing, but sometimes fun and sometimes just weird.

Control over chaos

Henry James

Leon Edel wrote that Henry Janes "joyously engaged in the act of writing. A good day's writing gave him a sense of strength, of control over chaos, a victory of order and clarity over the confused battle of existence."

I like that.

I have sometimes said, only half joking, that I had a disorganized desk and an organized mind. At one time I had three disorganized desks, one at work and two at home. Yet I have a mind that seeks order. I don't know if this trait helped make me a writer or if a lifetime of writing has shaped my mind in this way. But I think the two are related. Writing is all about trying to make sense of things.

This seems especially true of those who write history or biography. So many things happen, many of them all at once, that it can be a challenge to describe events in an understandable way. It requires putting things in order, even if that order is arbitrary.

I have started reading a book, surprisingly short, called Dawn of D-Day. So many things were all going on at once on June 6, 1944, that it must be difficult to describe it all in a meaningful way. What was going on in western Europe that morning could easily be called chaos. Yet David Howarth brings it under control by focusing on individual soldiers doing particular tasks, such as parachuting into France or landing on Omaha Beach. He may not be able to tell the whole story — nobody can — but he tries to tell a complete story with little stories that help make sense of the whole.

Novelists such as Henry James do something similar. They try to tell a story with many characters and many actions and conversations, while bringing it all together in a meaningful way.

I recently reviewed Helen Macdonald's book H Is for Hawk, in which she says bluntly that making sense of her life, especially the death of her father, was her reason for training a goshawk and then writing a book about it.

Writing, or at least good writing, is a struggle to achieve "a victory of order and clarity."