Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew's 3 favorite reads in 2024

One of my perpetual critiques of American fiction is its hyper-focus on the individual, usually within dysfunctional family systems and always isolated from broader community networks and political systems. Have we lost the capacity to know ourselves in relationship to one another? Artists mirror our world as it is, but we also have a responsibility to imagine our world as it could be. Contemporary novelists could, if we choose, shine the spotlight on our interconnections.

There's no main character in HEAVEN AND EARTH GROCERY STORE. Instead, McBride depicts the community as a whole--the poor hill and wealthier town, the white descendants of early settlers and the more recent immigrants, the Black folk and small Jewish population, the traditional southern Blacks and the ambitious, integrating Blacks, even the town government and the county hospital, all an interconnected organism--as the book's focus. Wow. Here's a multiracial story told with immense compassion, a fearless look at hardship, and great humor. McBride traces the consequences of individuals' actions on this web of relationships, for both good and ill. We need tales like this to remind us that we're not alone, that our presence and actions matter in others' lives, and that together we can generate hope. Hats off to McBride.

Here's one of my favorite passages--perhaps a bit of a soapbox, but I'm tickled by both the content and the technique. Chona has just died, and her odd collection of loved ones leaves the waiting room to approach her deathbed:

The collective history of this sad troupe moving down the hospital corridor would become tiny blots in an American future that would one day scramble their proud histories like eggs, scattering them among the population while feeding mental junk to the populace on devices that would become as common and small as the hot dog that the dying woman thought she smelled; for in death, Chona had smelled not a hot dog but the future, a future in which devices that fit in one's pocket and went zip, zap, and zilch delivered a danger far more seductive and powerful than any hot dog, a device that children of the future would clamor for and become addicted to, a device that fed them their oppression disguised as free thought.

A vaguely futuristic, mildly dystopic Odyssey set on Lake Superior with a decidedly human protagonist--and the best novel I've read in ages, perfect for sweating out Covid in a porch hammock. The heroes in this tale are ordinary, the natural world fickle, fierce, and magnificent, the evil believable, and prescient. Each sentence is a gem. This book is a praise-song for kindness.

"Lark's theory of angels was that they are us and we mostly don't remember."

Talk about the perfect escape! Vampire novels aren't usually my thing, but when the witchy main character is a medieval manuscript scholar who falls in love with a vampire hundreds of years old in a cross-species Romeo and Juliet scenario, written by an author who's both a historian and fantastic writer of sex scenes, and the plot hinges on a lost book, what's there not to like?