Soot

Soot is one of the two central characters in the novel. Like the author Jason Mott, he is an African American man in his forties, a novelist from North Carolina who has won the National Book Award, and a gun owner.

Grief and the aftermath of trauma are the organizing forces of his adult life. His books and public talks place him in direct contact with communities suffering after violence or tragedy, and this work becomes both an expression of care and a method of carrying his own sorrow forward. His presence at the Minnesota school soon after a shooting shows how firmly he has positioned himself inside the aftermath of other people’s pain. He arrives not as someone offering solutions to the political issues that allow these tragedies to occur, but as someone who treats the sharing of grief as a kind of solidarity. The child...