Search
By Michelle Huneven
Salad Supper Too!!!
The eponymous search in this, Michelle Huneven’s 5th novel, is for a new minister for the Arroyo Unitarian Universalist Community Church, familiar to its members as “Awk.” The narrator for the quest is Dana Potowski, a famous restaurant critic and memoirist, who may be ill-suited for the job since she hasn’t attended services recently and prefers leisurely Sunday mornings at home enjoying her recently renovated kitchen. However, she is in search of a topic for her next book and she attended seminary school in her 30s and almost became a minister, so reluctantly she agrees to participate.
The committee is made of eight members, all with different backgrounds and interests, and the disagreements about the candidates reflect those differences. The main conflict in the novel, however, is between the ancients and the moderns—those who want an experienced, traditional minister and those who favor someone with a fresh perspective.
Anyone who’s ever been on a search committee can relate to the difficulties of this search and Dana is a wry and witty though not wholly reliable narrator taking us along for the ride. The descriptions of food in the novel are certain to have us salivating.
This squib is mostly cribbed from the excellent review in The New York Times.