Campaign for the American Reader: Pg. 69: "The Washington Story"

Saturday, November 11, 2006

Pg. 69: "The Washington Story"

Adam Langer is an author, journalist, playwright and filmmaker. His books include the novels Crossing California and The Washington Story, and three nonfiction reference works, CitySmart Guide to Chicago, Film Festival Guide, and The Madness of Art.

I asked Adam to apply the "page 69 test" to The Washington Story; this is what he reported:

Funny you should ask me to do this. After all, while I was senior editor of Book Magazine, faced at times with the unenviable task of opening the mail and trying to determine which books merited review coverage, I occasionally resorted to a self-explanatory critical technique that I called “Page Sixty-Seven, Paragraph Four.” A character in my next novel, Ellington Boulevard (Spiegel & Grau, 2007) is a literary critic who uses the same technique.

Is it unfair to judge a book using this sub-Cliffs’ Notes form of review? Probably. Though, since we were woefully understaffed at Book, I suspect that our editorial staff was reading at least one more paragraph than most other book review staffs. At any rate, now that I have the responsibility of analyzing my own book using the similar, though significantly more accurate measure stick of an entire page, I can say that the “Page 69” tool is useful yet entirely misleading for my novel The Washington Story.

A reader of Page 69 would learn the following:

* An aspiring filmmaker named Mel Coleman had made his living directing low-rent industrial movies.
* He has cast a woman named Michelle in his latest industrial flick.
* He will most probably have some sort of relationship (possibly romantic) with Michelle with whom he has a history dating back to her sister’s Bat Mitzvah.
* He has a foul mouth.
* And an attitude.
* And lousy fashion sense.

That’s not a bad summary for the interaction of the two major characters in my novel. Mel and Michelle’s romantic desires and their artistic ambitions form one of the major conflicts here. And, there’s a fair amount of dense character detail and Chicago-specific trivia on Page 69, which is representative of the book as a whole.

The only problem is that I structured my novel as five separate-but-interlinked novellas, loosely based on the Five Books Of Moses. The above analysis works fairly well for Book II, but comes up short when providing information about Book I and Books III-V, each of which has different characters, tones, moods, rhythms, and so forth.

Perhaps a new sort of test is needed: Allow me to recommend the “Page 34./Page 69 /Page 213/Page 341/Page 409 Test.” Although, just for the record, I tried the Page 69 test on the most-recent draft of Ellington Boulevard; it works a whole lot better.

Many thanks to Adam for the input.

In The Washington Story, "Langer has produced a tender and generous book... ...pleasurable a read, for its wit and its eye and its capacious heart." -- Chicago Tribune

To read more reviews of The Washington Story from the Los Angeles Times, Kansas City Star, Miami Herald, and other major newspapers, click here.

For more reviews, interviews, articles and multimedia by and about Adam, click here. For information about and excerpts from Adam's many plays, click here.