Page One

Much has been made of the first lines of novels and their respective power or skill—-Call me Ishmael, Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins, and so forth—-but what about first pages? What can one learn from the first page of a book? Enough to get a sense of the novel to come? Enough to draw you in? What elements does a good page one need? We know how important Page One is in a newspaper – does this apply to a novel?

To try an experiment, I read only the first page of the next novel in my Sneak Peek book discussion class, West of Here by Jonathan Evison (due to be published by Algonquin Books in February ’11). Here’s what I think I can guess at just from page one (Note: the opening section of the book is only two pages, but I’m being strict and have only read the first):

The chapter is called “Footprints” and the chapter head tells us it’s September 2006, so we’re in contemporary times. We’re in Port Bonita, which I know from the map that faces the opening page is in Washington State on the north side on the coast at the Strait of Juan de Fuca (it must be on the Olympic Peninsula).

The scene: a keynote address is being delivered in an outdoor setting and suddenly it starts to rain, and everyone runs for their cars, leaving litter and wilted candy behind. The band starts to pack up as soon as the rain begins in earnest, and particular note is made of the tuba player getting wet, which amused me, since my husband played tuba in his college band (not every reader will have this same sympathy for the tuba player, one supposes!)

On the stage, the keynote speaker, who is named Jared Thornburgh and about whom we know nothing, delivers the line: “There is a future, and it begins right now.” These inspiring words are delivered to no one, and after pronouncing them the speaker makes a run for it too. The only one left on stage is someone named Krig, who is wearing a Raiders jersey (which I guess makes sense given their proximity to Oakland. He’s not a fan of the nearby Seattle Seahawks, clearly, or maybe he’s not originally a local. Perhaps if I knew more about football allegiances I’d know even more about Krig due to his being a Raiders fan. Back when Jim Plunkett was their quarterback -70s? - I think they had a rep for being something of a tough team – maybe they still are kind of rough.) Krig is also described as having a hairy stomach, although the Raiders jersey, one presumes, covers this.

Not wanting to rush to his own car with all the others and get stuck in a traffic jam (like salmon swimming upstream), Krig meanders over to the rusted chain link fence that overlooks the dam and the gorge. He looks over the canyon “a hundred feet below,” which sounds dangerous to me – maybe someone will fall in during the course of the novel? He watches “the white water roar through the open jaws of the dam,” which definitely sounds threatening – nature as a force to be reckoned with. Someone somewhere in this book is going into the water!

Krig then looks at “a beleaguered run of all Chinook [a fish in the salmon family] spring from the shallows only to beat their silver heads against the concrete time and again.” So again, the image of salmon swimming upstream, continually banging their heads against an immoveable obstacle in a stubborn refusal to learn or to give up, or perhaps just unable to controvert their natural instincts. Obviously we are meant, or will be meant, to draw parallels to human behavior. This is reinforced by the book’s epigraph, which is a snatch of an old Potlatch song about “salmon panting as they fight the swift current.”(Potlatch defined by Wikepedia as “a festival ceremony practiced by indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast.” Ooh, maybe that’s where “potluck” comes from? But I digress…)

As Krig watches the Chinook bash their heads, it says: “As a kid he thought it was funny.” One therefore presumes Krig has had some experience in his life that taught him that suffering is not funny. Krig must be meant to be our central character. We don’t know much about him at this point, except for his sports allegiance and his hairy belly (perhaps a beer belly that goes with the football-watching?), and his unwillingness to follow a crowd, choosing instead to stand out in the rain.

I’ve now written an analysis of page one that is longer than page one itself. I’m such a good English major!