America's Report Cardoffers a brilliant vision of contemporary American life that is frightening, darkly hilarious, and tinged with satire. John McNally tells the story of two unlucky people who forge an improbable yet possibly life-saving connection in a world overshadowed by the Patriot Act and No Child Left Behind -- a world in which hulking government bureaucracies and vast corporations join forces to numb the populace into apathy with various standardization and surveillance programs. But McNally sees hope in the daily experiences of his characters: sometimes, haphazardly, by going about their own very particular lives, people circumvent the official program and begin to actively claim lives of freedom and dignity.America's Report Cardis an arresting and humane portrait of life taking place in the margins, outside the stunted imagination of government and media. As in his critically acclaimed novelThe Book of Ralph, McNally dazzles with characters like Jainey O'Sullivan -- a lonely, confused, purple-and-green-haired sometime truant, Jainey cares so little about high school that on her final standardized test, she writes an essay heaping scorn on the test administrators even as she asks her faceless reader for help. Charlie Wolf leads a fairy-tale graduate student life, with just enough money and clout to keep him in books, vodka, a threadbare apartment, and a beautiful, intellectual girlfriend. But the bohemian dream starts to crumble when Charlie takes a job scoring standardized tests and finds himself surrounded by people who are either plodding blindly along or caught up in wild conspiracy theories. When Charlie and Jainey stumble upon one another, they also stumble upon their own bravery and compassion. They try to protect each other from their habitual bad luck and the shadowy threats lurking at the edges of their lives, and what ensues doesn't follow any prescribed course. The official version of American life today may get the broad strokes and primary colors right, butAmerica's Report Cardreveals how the government and the media overlook the corners and shadows where our individual realities unfold all too often in chaotic, precarious, and bewildering ways. This wholly original, wildly entertaining novel mirrors our part in the dark but frequently redemptive comedy that is life.

John McNally presently teaches at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.

From Part One The Test 1995 Without fail they arrive every year. Dozens of men in black suits unfurl themselves from white panel vans parked in front of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Grade School. The mornings they arrive are usually overcast, sometimes rainy -- typical fall weather for this southwest Chicago suburb. There are five men to a van, and each man carries a heavy box into the school. Together, they wait in the lobby for the principal to greet them. These men are test administrators sent by the United States government, and they will spend the entire day here, distributing thick booklets and then, every half-hour or hour, imparting new information for yet another test. These tests, which will be evaluated at secret locations across the nation, will reveal critical information about the education of our country's children. How, for instance, does one state stack up against another state? How do entire regions of the country compare to other regions? How are our country's children doing this year compared to four years ago? This test is America's Report Card -- a massive, ongoing project that costs millions, if not billions, of dollars. What's at stake is the nation's future. And this is exactly what Jainey O'Sullivan's third-grade teacher, Mrs. Rutkowski, has told her students: that if they don't do well on the test, the Russians will take over, and if not the Russians, then the Chinese. If they think life is tough now, just wait until the Chinese take over. When the Chinese take over, Mrs. Rutkowski says, there will be no more Art class, no more Music, nothing fun, and all of the boys will have to join the Army. "No more cheeseburgers," she says. "No more pizza." Furthermore, they will no longer be allowed to speak English. They will have to learn a new language or suffer the consequences. Have they ever heard Chinese or Russian spoken? It's no cakewalk, she tells them. It's no day in the park. Jainey sits quietly at her desk, ten perfectly sharpened Number 2 pencils lined before her. Her palms are as moist as her tongue. Jainey watches a lot of reruns on TV with her father, and the men who come to her school remind her of the men onDragnet. This year, the man assigned to her classroom, who looks like the man who came to her second-grade classroom last year (and who could very well be the same man, for all Jainey knows), heaves his heavy box onto Mrs. Rutkowski's desk. He tells the students that they should relax, that there are no winners or losers, but how can Jainey relax, knowing that if she gives the wrong answer, the Russians or the Chinese will bomb the country and take over? Furthermore, the man in the black suit doesn't look relaxed himself. Beads of sweat appear on his forehead, and Jainey can smell his sour breath each time he walks by. Jainey is a good student -- not the best student but better than most -- so why is it that she doesn't understand most of the questions on the test? The reading passages are too long to read within the time permitted. The questions for each reading passage are even more troublesome. Often, every answer seems to be right. For other questions, none of the answers appears correct. She can't remember if leaving the answer blank is better than filling in a bubble for something she clearly doesn't know. The Math test is even harder. Nothing looks familiar except for the numbers themselves. Why are there tiny numbers sitting on the shoulders of larger numbers? Why are there letters where there should be numbers? Jainey is so angry at her Math teacher for not teaching her what she needs to know that she breaks the tip of her pencil while filling in one of the bubbles.