Book Focus

 Please Tell Us it's All Fiction

Early in his writing career, novelist John McNally took a turn as a standardized test- scorer in  Iowa City, working his way through thousands of test essays. If his latest fiction book, America ’s Report Card (Free Press), is any clue, the experience must have been terrifying. In the novel, our hero takes a temporary job doing the same work—“All morning long, Charlie couldn’t concentrate on his scoring, so he gave each essay a ‘three.’ Amazingly, his reliability and speed both soared.” But the novel wanders into more nefarious (and sometimes over-the-top) conspiracy plots—is it possible that the federal government targeted an art teacher who hates the No Child Left Behind law? Could these high-stakes tests really be psychological profiles used by the government for shady purposes? Read on for the answers, or at least a few laughs.