Testing the Current

"This is not an easy book to categorize, not that books should be, but it is in ways a John Cheever kind of book, without the diabolical charm, and in others a Salinger kind, though not as soft. Tommy is on the road to maturity or just to being adolescent, but you know he will grow up to be a good and useful person because he is a sensitive, in fact an adorable, boy." - Boston Globe

"William McPherson's first novel is an extraordinary intelligent, powerful and, I believe, permanent contribution to the literature of family, childhood and memory....From the first sentence of Testing the Current to the last, there is not one false note, one forced image. It is a novel written with great skill, and with love. It's what most good first novels aspire to be." - Russell Banks, The New York Times

"I can't remember another novel which captures a Midwestern childhood--that mysterious unwritten-about world....It could have been my town and my life." - Diane Johnson

"It is a rare first novelist who...manages to seize that favorite province of first novelists, the childhood memoir, and make it entirely their own....This is no ordinary novel....Testing the Current is a canvas of social history, a collection of scenes that are as carefully detailed as a Flemish painting, their calm surfaces filled with clues about what's simmering underneath." - Philadelphia Inquirer