“The Small Hours” and the American Tradition of Families Under Pressure
Edward Averett's new novel
A review‑essay for the Trueman–Triola Newsletter
Edward Averett’s The Small Hours (2025) enters the landscape of contemporary American fiction with a quiet confidence, the kind that comes from knowing exactly where one stands in a long lineage of novels about families navigating the tremors of their historical moment. Averett has always written with an ear tuned to the emotional frequencies of ordinary people under strain, but The Small Hours feels like his most deliberate engagement with the American tradition of domestic fiction shaped by the pressures of its time. And we’re once again in a period of American history where we’d better pay fuckin’ attention to the impact of our insane cultural amorality, now is that time.
What follows is not simply a review but a placing of The Small Hours into conversation with the works that precede it—novels in which family life becomes the stage on which national anxieties, economic shifts, and cultural transformations play out. We’ll address the danger of misguided assumptions about family values and their perversion in reality at another time.
The Family as a Barometer of Social Change
Averett’s novel centers on a Pacific Northwest family whose internal tensions mirror the instability of the world around them. The book’s title refers to those liminal hours before dawn when fears sharpen and truths surface—an apt metaphor for a family living through a period of cultural and economic uncertainty. Averett uses this domestic space as a diagnostic tool, much as earlier American writers have done.
Echoes of John Steinbeck’s Social Realism
Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) famously uses the Joad family to register the seismic economic shifts of the Great Depression. While Averett’s scale is more intimate, The Small Hours similarly treats the family as a microcosm of broader social pressures. The economic precarity that shadows Averett’s characters—rising costs, unstable work, the erosion of community institutions—recalls Steinbeck’s insistence that personal crises are never merely personal. As in Steinbeck, the family’s struggle becomes a commentary on the fragility of the American promise. And never before in most of our lifetimes have we seen a clearer presentation of the great lie that the American promise is.
The Domestic Sphere as Emotional Weather System: Toni Morrison and Celeste Ng
Averett’s attention to the emotional climate of the household places him in conversation with Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You (2014). Morrison shows how historical trauma infiltrates the home, while Ng reveals how unspoken expectations and cultural pressures shape the lives of children. In The Small Hours, Averett similarly explores the unarticulated tensions that accumulate in families—grief that goes unaddressed, secrets that distort relationships, and the quiet ways parents and children misread one another. Edward Averett understands grief.
Averett’s prose, like Ng’s, is marked by a psychological realism that refuses melodrama. Instead, he allows the reader to feel the weight of what is not said. A scene in which a parent lingers outside a teenager’s closed bedroom door, unsure whether to knock, carries the same emotional charge as Ng’s depiction of the Lee family’s fragile communication patterns.
Capturing the “New Events of the Times”
One of the novel’s most compelling achievements is its ability to register the texture of contemporary life without resorting to topical gimmicks. Averett threads into the narrative the kinds of “new events” that define the early 2020s: shifting work patterns, the lingering psychic effects of the pandemic era, the rise of digital isolation, and the erosion of shared public narratives. Never mind America’s fast and horrifying march into fascist madness and moral imbecility
In Conversation with Richard Russo and Elizabeth Strout
Like Richard Russo’s Empire Falls (2001), The Small Hours portrays a community in transition, where economic decline reshapes family roles and expectations. Averett’s characters, like Russo’s, are caught between nostalgia for a more stable past and the uneasy improvisation required by the present.
Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge (2008) offers another point of comparison. Strout’s work captures how national changes—economic downturns, cultural shifts, generational divides—filter into the daily lives of ordinary people. Averett’s novel shares this sensibility. His characters are not reacting to headlines; they are living inside the slow, cumulative transformations that define an era.
The Pacific Northwest as Historical Mood
Averett’s long residence in the Pacific Northwest gives the novel a sense of place that is both specific and symbolic. The region’s shifting industries, environmental anxieties, and cultural hybridity become part of the novel’s emotional architecture. In this way, The Small Hours aligns with works like Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (1980), where landscape and history shape the inner lives of characters.
Averett’s Distinctive Contribution
What distinguishes The Small Hours within this tradition is its blend of psychological intimacy and social awareness. Averett writes families not as isolated units but as porous systems, absorbing the pressures of their time. His characters are neither heroic nor tragic; they are recognizably human, navigating the “small hours” of doubt, fear, and hope that define contemporary American life.
The novel’s structure—moving between perspectives, lingering in moments of quiet revelation—recalls Averett’s earlier work, but with a deeper philosophical resonance. The book suggests that understanding a family requires understanding the era that shapes it, and vice versa.
Conclusion: A Novel for Our Moment
The Small Hours stands comfortably alongside the American novels that have used family life to illuminate the shifting ground beneath the nation’s feet. Like Steinbeck, Morrison, Ng, Russo, and Strout, Averett understands that the home is never sealed off from history. It is where history is felt most acutely.
For readers of the Trueman–Triola Newsletter—readers who appreciate fiction that bridges the personal and the philosophical—Averett’s novel offers a rich, resonant exploration of how families endure, adapt, and sometimes fracture under the weight of their times. It is a book that invites reflection not only on its characters but on the world we are all trying to navigate. Such a guide may start as a discretionary escape but is clearly moving into a must-have guidebook for surviving the American nightmare.