everyman: A Novel

everyman will not be to everyone’s taste, and the book all but acknowledges this in the prologue, a hymn to southern slowness. Everything spins out gently, in its own time, forming the shape of the story as it goes.

The story itself is a beautiful amalgamation better summed up by themes than by plot. There is the main plot — a young woman attempting to track down the family she never knew — but more than that the book is a tale of the Great Migration, of Black identity, of lesbianism, of family secrets, buried and brought back to life. An intricately interwoven cast of characters from three generations’ worth of decades breathe life into what would otherwise be nothing but a series of poetic essays. Instead, it is a poetic work of fiction, with occasional dips into the philosophical bent of essays.

My one complaint was that the pacing, while at times beautifully slow, sometimes revealed things all at once. Some things were brought together a little too easily, or in places that didn’t seem quite fitting with the tone of the book. Overall, though, it was a beautiful, aching, almost elegiac, work that I very nearly lost myself in.