Search by Michelle Huneven

This was my second reading. The first is here.

I read Search a second time to prepare for interviewing the author after a book reading at my church. My congregation is about to embark on a search for a new settled minister. They will elect a search committee in June 2024 and run the search in the 2024 – 2025 church year. Hopefully, they will find an excellent candidate and when I retire in June of 2025 I will leave know they’ve got a great new minister arriving later that summer. I thought that having the congregation read Search would be helpful preparation for their own search. I guessed that Michelle Huneven lived in the area because her book takes place in Altadena. I found her website online, contacted her, and she responded immediately and favorably to my idea that she come and speak to us about her book, which she did on December 3.

Reading the book a second time, I was again impressed by her skill as a novelist. The characters are extremely well drawn. The plot is tight. The issues are engaging. The timeline of a year and the clear goal makes for a page-turner, as the reader is eager to find out what happens. I read with the intention of interviewing the author so I highlighted passages and made notes in the margins as I read.

Michelle is a delightful woman. She came for worship, then joined our potluck lunch and the program after. She read a scene from the book (the scene where Dana, the narrator, takes Jennie, her nemesis on the search committee, to lunch) then answered my prepared questions and took questions from the audience of about 40, in person and online.

Michelle confirmed some of my assumptions about the book and denied others. The church is based on Neighborhood UU Church in Pasadena. Sparlo Pleasant is Brandy Lovely. But the other ministers in the book are inventions based on the “five ministers she knows” (she says). Michelle invented 17 different minister characters for the search committee to consider, created “dossiers” for each of them by working backwards from reading sermons online to imaging what kind of person must they be to write that sort of a sermon, and even wrote sermons for a few of them. Quite convincing sermons, I must say. She did go to seminary, Claremont, just a few years before me, and it shows in her grasp of ministry.

Many of my colleagues assumed that Michelle had served on the search committee at Neighborhood in 2014 and was horrified at what they assumed was a betrayal of a confidential process. I saw no reason not to imagine she was simply doing an author’s job of creating realistic fiction. I was right. Michelle did not serve on the search committee and said she only knows one person who did serve on the committee. Michelle said that she had already started disassociating from the church before the previous minister, Jim Nelson resigned. The characters on the search committee are fictional. And as to the dysfunction of the search committee, Michelle said her strategy was to start with the recommended process from the UUA outlined in the search committee handbook and then systematically violate every recommendation. So if the recommendation was to have 5 to 7 members on the committee, her novel would have 8 committee members. If the recommendation was to have a retreat soon after being elected, her novel would delay the retreat until later.

I had read Jamesland, previously. Michelle has three other books. And she told us she’s nearly finished another. I’ll look forward to reading it.