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When a massive explosion destroys an American office building and images of innocent civilians dead or maimed hit the news channels, accusations and conspiracy theories—about Arabs, Jews, Christians, the FBI, the government—start flying. Breaking and Entering depicts an America divided by religion, sexuality, and fear, its coasts and heartlands talking at, not to, each other. It’s 1995: Timothy McVeigh has just bombed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, and Louise Shapiro, a school counselor who has recently moved from California to Michigan with her husband Richard and their daughter Molly, is trying to settle into a town where her neighbors believe the government to be the enemy and her students consider homosexuality the work of Satan. Breaking and Entering brings a range of wonderful characters to life, telling with warmth their trials with accidental forest fires, mixed-religion marriages, and running away from home.

The Shapiros buy a house near the Wolverine Sportsmans Club Keep Out; their only neighbors are brain-damaged Em, a practicing Wiccan, and the Bankses, mother-and-son farmers who make ends meet by holding Easter Egg hunts and selling fireworks and Bill Clinton-shaped targets. The Bankses are members of the Michigan Militia, whose meetings McVeigh once attended. Can Louise trust Em to look after Molly? Can she have meaningful conversations with the Bankses, given the Militia Babes calendar on their porch and that hulking Matt sees Tax Day as an excuse to use his 1040 for target practice? Just how different is Matt’s anti-tax stance from Louise’s California friends who protest nuclear armament by mailing in blank 1040s? Breaking and Entering challenges the stereotypes we hold about our fellow Americans while reminding us of the unexpected bonds that can form across the divide between so-called Red and Blue states.

Breaking and Entering is vital reading for this coming election year, a reminder of how much we’ve forgotten since the Oklahoma City bombing, a warning of the dangers of only telling East and West Coast stories. Pollack’s America is divided and splintered, yet she writes with hope and humor, offering alternatives to “end[ing] up with two Americas, neither of which could tolerate, or even understand, the other.” Breaking and Entering perceptively observes the challenges of America today; its great success is that it leaves you rooting for America, ready “to stick around to see [the] changes through.”

Breaking and Entering tells a gripping story about people failing to communicate—and not even realizing they’ve failed. As Louise struggles to understand why her formerly observant Jewish husband has taken up shooting, hunting, and outdoor survival, befriending people she is sure would have sided with the Nazis who tried to exterminate his parents, she grows increasingly distant from him, and increasingly attracted to the dashing Unitarian minister, Ames Wye, who fights to ban creationism in local schools and to provide safehouses for local residents with HIV and AIDS. After McVeigh’s bombing, Michigan becomes a testing ground for the cultural tolerance so central to American identity. Louise realizes that “America is a lot more countries than she thought it was. And even within those countries, there are other, smaller countries, some of which are so tiny and isolated they appear to be inhabited by only one or two citizens.” She also discovers her own need to listen, to Richard, to Molly, to Dolores Banks, who fights to talk through a mechanical voicebox, the legacy of the thyroid cancer that nearly killed her.

Writing with as much urgency as Philip Roth, depicting characters as contemplative as any created by Don Delillo, Eileen Pollack reminds us (where no reminder should be needed) that women novelists are insightful, inspiring commentators on America today, worth at least as many column inches as their male counterparts routinely receive. Breaking and Entering helps us realize that we often don’t understand our fellow citizens, that we’re not listening to them—and that we need to listen, now, before the house burns down.