Adeste Fideles: A Mall and the Afternoon Visitors

ADESTE FIDELES, or A MALL AND THE AFTERNOON VISITORS, is both a novel and a “movie in the form of a novel.” It unfolds in cinematic fashion, following, like a roving movie camera, the intermingled stories of a number of mall shoppers and employees, which play out over the course of two hours in a crowded suburban Memphis, Tennessee shopping mall on Christmas Eve afternoon in 2007. Along the way it explores moments both tragic and comic, pedestrian and wholly consequential, involving its over 100 primary characters, some of whom celebrate the imminent holiday, others who rue it, and still others who use the season to take stock of all those things that define them as vulnerable, needful, and inescapably interactive human beings. Set in the American South in an era of recent and still redolent past, ADESTE FIDELES’ collective voice is quirky, drawling, middle-class suburban and warmly and identifiably familiar. Its characters are people who exhibit various forms of religious and conscientious faith, faith in themselves and others, and faith in the promise of a holiday happy ending.