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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. On which of the following roads does Fife note having driven with Nick Dafina on their teenaged road-trip?

2. Which of the following is the subject of Fife’s work on priestly misconduct?

3. Which of the following banks is recommended to Fife?

4. How much money does Fife carry to make a deposit on a house in Vermont?

5. As which of the following genres does Fife describe the narrative he gives on camera?

Short Essay Questions

1. How does Fife define innocence?

2. How is Stanley described when Fife arrives at his home?

3. How does Fife explain his teenaged road trip with Nick Dafina as “clean and honorable” (188-89)?

4. What does Fife muse that Renée does for him?

5. What does Fife note is his common public image?

6. What comments are made regarding Fife’s dormitory room in his first collegiate attempt?

7. Why does Malcolm note he means to keep in his film Fife’s narration about dropping out of college?

8. How does Malcolm note Fife’s filming of Joan Baez and others at her headline event differs from other depictions?

9. When Fife is asked about Joan Baez and Malcolm comments, “That’s a heartbreaker, man” (130), to what does Fife note the comment refers?

10. What sentence is noted for the guilty party in Fife’s work on priestly misconduct?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Does the epigraph from Pessoa connect to the novel? If so, how so? If not, what purpose might it serve, and how might it serve it?

Essay Topic 2

Ultimately, is Fife a sympathetic protagonist or not? How does the novel present him as such?

Essay Topic 3

Consider the following passage:

There’s no such thing as the end of childhood, [Fife] says to Emma. It’s only innocence—infancy—that actually comes to an end. That’s when childhood begins, and childhood is a region, not a marker. And it is vast and extends even into old age and death. It’s like a coastal marsh between the land and the sea, he explains. It’s a zone of dwarfed trees and mudflats and estuaries, where waters flow back and forth in opposite directions following the pitch and fall of the land and the phases of the moon and the shifting patterns of the winds. (179)

Do your experience and observation support Fife’s assertion about the nature of childhood? How or how not?

(see the answer keys)

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