Search

I have friends who have served on search committees at churches looking for new pastors and priests. I thought of those friends and those churches as I read this entertaining, original, and sneakily substantive novel. I’ve told a few of these friends about Search, but always a little cautiously; I can’t decide if I think they’d find it cathartic—or retraumatizing.

Search is written from the perspective of Dana, a food critic and author who gets tapped to join the search committee at her Unitarian Universalist church in California. Her Sunday attendance is spotty and she’s reluctant to be part of the process, for all the understandable reasons. But ultimately she decides to make the most of it by surreptitiously writing a book about the wild characters who constitute the committee. Let’s just say no two people in the room can agree on anything. Some candidates are deemed too male. Some are too inexperienced or too old. Some, God forbid, are too religious. (Remember, these are Unitarian Universalists we’re talking about.)

I didn’t read a lot of funny books in 2023, but this one made me laugh. It also made me hungry. For all their pettiness, as well as the bureaucratic frustrations to which they are subjected, the committee members eat and drink well. And Dana is there to capture all of it in vivid detail.