The Marshall McLuhan Challenge with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Rowling, Flynn and Me. Lol.
An examination of page sixty-nine in a few of the best books of all time — and then my own.
I can’t think of a better place to talk about the guy who coined the phrase, “the medium is the message.”
Famed Canadian intellectual Marshall Mcluhan theorized that deciding whether or not to read a book is easy: turn to page 69 and if you like it, read it. I hadn’t heard of this until today so I collected a handful of classic books and a copy of my own to see if the theory held any water.
Authors aren’t supposed to compare themselves to other authors — I’m pitting myself against greatest books of all time to make obvious the results. It should go without saying that my book is not as good as Harry effin’ Potter or The Great Gatsby, only my mom would say otherwise. I’m going in order of release, oldest to newest.
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
We’re off to a great start, page sixty-nine (like every other page) is a home run. Nick Carraway jumps into Gatsby’s “gorgeous” car and has his first real conversation with the enigmatic madman that lives next door. In a few brief passages he’s transformed from human firework to human being in Nick’s mind.
“Well, I’m going to tell you something about my life,” he interrupted. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea of me from all these stories you hear.
That line alone begs you to read the book. So good for McLuhan. So far.
A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway (1929)
Page sixty-nine begins with a medic probing the head wound of the narrator for fragments of exploded mortar shell. This is proof enough but I’ll continue.
“Better not drink too much brandy then. If you’ve got a fracture you don’t want inflammation.”
Oh so the guy with someone’s fingers in his head is drinking, is that all?
“I guess you’ve got a fracture all right.”
Surely the page must be over once the French medic finishes bandaging him.
“Alright, good luck and Viva la France.”
That’s only half the page. This Hemingway guy was pretty good at writing.
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, J. K. Rowling (1997)
Diagon Alley, we have a problem. Harry Potter is wonderful and amazing and the best and everyone should read it but page sixty-nine on its own would not persuade you to, not if you were going in blind.
You’d have to live somewhere outside of our solar system to not appreciate this page because everybody knows Harry Potter’s story, but the idea here is that you’re using page sixty-nine to gauge whether or not you should read the book. By that measure it fails, it’s weird and not good. It’s a bunch of dialogue that paints Harry as a hero in a bar where all the patrons are fawning over him like he’s returned from the hero’s journey a quarter-way through the book.
“Bless my soul,” whispered the old bartender, “Harry Potter…what an honor.”
Let’s say you look at the cover and know he’s a boy, now he’s a boy in a bar. No thank you.
Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn (2012)
The day I finished the first draft of my novel I was elated. I thought the split-narrative(half epistolary) story told from the perspective of a man and woman whose lives were entwined by a common tragedy was sooooo original. Can you imagine my horror after I read Gone Girl a few days later? I’d say 80% got deleted immediately and the other 20 in editing. That’s why they tell you to read your genre kids, because what you think is original might already be done and really, really popular. This quote is all you need to know about Gone Girl’s page sixty-nine:
“Being married to Nick always reminds me: People have to do awful things for money.”
You hear musicians sometimes say that they can’t listen to so and so because their music is so perfect that it hurts their ears and makes them too self-conscious to play. Amy Elliot Dunne is so perfect a female voice that I internally quake any time I dare write from a female perspective. This book will forever be the character design bar on which I can never pull up.
The Girl Who Can Cook, Mike Wehner (2018)
Here’s my page sixty-nine, if it compels you to go read it, fantastic. If not then my book is exactly as good as Harry Potter. #Science.
More than a dozen people were stuffed into a slim formal dining room, the treadmill of the modern home — often owned but seldom used. The furniture was sparse, a sign that her family didn’t care about her. Every good person has an ugly curio cabinet from a decrepit aunt or an oversize coffee table that grandpa made — literal burdens of being close with your family. Gifts so heavy with guilt that you can’t move them no matter how long the giver’s been dead.
The dining table looked like a battering ram, thick rustic beams were bound together with faux-tarnished bolts and metal plates. The wood was worn and beaten and thick beyond purpose. A slice of brilliant polished teak ran down the middle of the table as a trivet.
Some of the guests were cooks while others told me they were chefs, I had trouble grasping the distinction between the two. One guy introduced himself as a cook but I overheard someone call him a chef which was doubly confusing. Erin was too busy playing host to parade me around for introductions and I did my best to keep to myself and observe the strange world I’d worked so hard to be a part of.
Everyone grabbed papers and began to write. The woman across from me tapped a pensive pen on her chin like choosing an entrée was an important answer on an exam. As far as I could tell there were only two people there who didn’t work with food professionally. The first was Erin’s sister, Emily. She was smooth and polished, everything that Erin wasn’t. Her stringy teal necklace matched her nails which matched her shoes. Soup was her favorite food and she wanted to know what my favorite German soup was. I told her French Onion, she laughed and our feet slid together. Emily’s friend Mike wrote with his paper up on the wall behind me. He was soft-spoken and sarcastic, his body loomed large, thicker and more imposing than any modern man needed to be. He kept saying things I knew were funny, but I didn’t laugh out of spite.
This thing will be available for free on Kindle Unlimited until 8/4.
