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THE WONDER TEST by Michelle Richmond Atlantic Monthly Press, July 1970 448 pages $27 ISBN: 0802158501 Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Lina Connerly is an experienced and able FBI agent who specializes in international counterspying. She is having a very bad year. Her husband has been killed in a random auto accident, her father has died of natural causes in California, and on the job she herself acted in such way that a needless death ensued. She did nothing culpable, but she cannot forgive herself for what she sees as a lapse in both judgement and professionalism. She cannot lift the pall of grief that surrounds her. Believing that a change of scene will help, she takes a leave of absence from her job and sets off with her teenage son Rory westward to Silicon Valley where she grew up, to settle her father's estate and recover from her losses as best she can.

The town where she grew up has become far more affluent than it was in her childhood, and a real estate boom has made her father's house surprisingly valuable.

Certainly there are any number of real estate agents clamouring for the chance to put it on the market for her. But first she and Rory must settle into a town that bears little resemblance to what these New Yorkers are used to. Oddest of all is the local high school where Rory is enrolled, technically "public," but more like an elite private school, where all the parents are perfectly comfortable paying some thousands of dollars to ensure that their kids have the best possible chance of getting into the college they deserve.

The route to this reward is something called the Wonder Test, which can perhaps be described best as SATs on steroids. The school year is devoted not to classes but to prepping for the test, which sets questions that are essentially unanswerable and that will be graded by AI. These sound like questions produced by a high-tech engineer under the influence of a practising Zen master. For example: "Is man merely a mistake of God? Or is God a mistake of man? Identify the author, answer the question and then answer the question that the author has not asked."

Very quickly, however, a more pressing question will present itself to Lina. Over the past several years, three students have disappeared for some weeks only to return, heads shaven, stunned, and unable to explain where they've been. Lina's professional instincts are aroused and she undertakes an unofficial but determined investigation into what is going on.

It is not easy to slot this book into a sub-category of thriller, primarily because the author effectively raises echoes of various sub-genres - simple horror, the paranormal, solid police procedural, organized crime, and general Shirley Jackson - all of which may be acting as red herrings. Just as the reader maybe thinking, "Aha! - now I know where this going," Richmond shifts gears and offers another possibility. It is an interesting way of maintaining suspense over more than four hundred pages, but occasionally it risks jolting the reader into some confusion about what is going on.

There is yet another kind of novel at the heart of this one and it is this that salvages what might have been a trick as unsatisfying as the questions set by the Wonder Test. Lina is still dealing with loss and with her duty to her equally grieving son. The dead husband and father remains a constant presence in their

lives as they struggle to find a way through to living without him. As the suspense mounts and the danger thickens, mother and son are brought simultaneously closer to and further from one another. No resolution here, but a sensitive and convincing portrayal of the grieving process.

THE WONDER TEST engages in various ways. The social satire of life and child-raising in Silicon Valley is either entertaining or appalling, depending on the reader. The description of the art of detective surveillance is convincing and seems well grounded. If the villain of the piece seems a bit over the top, he is the more engaging because of it. And the presence of two characters struggling to cope with loss provides emotional weight. Most readers will find, as I did, quite enough here to satisfy.

§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal. She's been editing RTE since 2008.