The Political Novel Gets Very, Very Specific

In the early months of the pandemic, when anxiety had slowed my thinking to a crawl, I frequently found myself captivated by trite revelations like Uncertainty is torment and Love means living in fear. I hated my useless, corny aphorisms, but couldn’t repress them. I especially could not quit realizing, every time I refreshed Twitter or the news or the COVID-19 dashboard for my current home state of Ohio, that I was living through history. I’d glare at a bleak map or chart and tell myself: All of this will go in books someday.

Of course, I have never not been living through history. The record doesn’t stop and start. But before March 2020, I was very often too taken up with current events to consider , or even how I myself would remember them. So a sprawling, compelling novel set in San Francisco during Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and first year in office.