This is from Susan Choi’s new novel, A Person of Interest:
[p. 22-23] Lee thought he sensed Aileen recoil; perhaps she was embarrassed by the gathering’s scrappy sincerity, its dowdy religiousness. And these were not even mainstream American Christians, they were marginal evangelicals — but as the car arrived in the parking lot, Lee saw the lot was almost a third full and that men and women and children were ambling to greet each other on the blacktop, clasping hands beneath the afterglow sky. Gaither switched off the engine and turned around to the backseat. “We’re here!” he said. The wind had matted his thinning brown hair, and Lee realized that in this context — in his shirtsleeves in the open air, outside a classroom, but most of all in the midst of his own beloved people — Gaither was a very handsome man. He had a strong-boned but delicate face, rangy arms, at least half a head’s more height than Lee. Lee looked again at Aileen. She was pulling a comb through her hair, without vanity; he winced when he saw her yank hard on a tangle. For an instant the combing exposed shell-like ears and large metal triangular earrings that set off the finely sculpted planes of her face. They struck Lee as an admirably brazen choice for a church gathering. Aileen thrust her comb back in her purse, removed a lipstick, and retraced her mouth quickly in red. Lee realized he was staring, from a distance of inches. Ruth had climbed out of the car without waiting for Gaither, who was standing at the driver’s side with the seat pulled forward, in readiness for his wife.
“You can get out now,” Ruth told Lee. “The car’s stopped.”
Choi writes like this — vividly, unlazily. Her long paragraphs are packed with detail. The most mundane moments, like the one described here, become utterly transformative. “Lee realized he was staring, from a distance of inches.”
Great stuff.
Read a profile of Susan Choi.
This just in, in paperback: 
