Ayana Mathis’ new novel, The Unsettled (Knopf, Sept. 26), is a bracing tale of generational and geographic fracture. Set in the mid-1980s, part of the story follows Ava as she’s forced to escape an abusive relationship and enter a shelter in Philadelphia with her 11-year-old son, Toussaint. Meanwhile, Ava’s estranged mother, Dutchess, is trying to hold on to the remaining parcels of Black-owned land in the hamlet of Bonaparte, Alabama, before developers take them over. The novel is at once a nuanced and realistic study of survival and a powerful allegory of the pressures that threaten to undermine Black families and communities.

Mathis’ debut book, 2013’s novel-in-stories The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, was a critical and commercial success, selected by Oprah Winfrey for her book club. A Philadelphia native, Mathis now lives in New York City, where she teaches at Hunter College’s MFA program. In this conversation, edited for space and clarity, she discusses the long gestation of The Unsettled, her literary inspirations, Black liberation politics, and why she’s skeptical of easy heroism in fiction.

It’s been a decade since The Twelve Tribes of Hattie was published. Have you been working on The Unsettled ever since?

Most of the time. A good eight years, I would say. It took a really long time to understand what it was about and what its central concerns were. I got a real gift in Dutchess. She was like a radio broadcast. She came through really strong and clear early on, but everybody else was staticky. I found myself judging them, or I was too close to them, or I couldn’t figure them out well enough. Even in terms of her name, Ava kept changing, and I really couldn’t kind of get a bead on her.

And then, of course, in the middle of it there was a global pandemic. There was a lot of lost time there, a lot of inability to focus on work, and a lot of questions about whether or not it was even a valid thing to be doing, given the fact that there was all this carnage around.

Second books seem to be a challenge for a lot of writers.

I was in grad school when I wrote my first book, so there was a lot of feedback. You constantly rub up against other people’s opinions, which really helps you define your work. But for second books, it’s like, OK, now you’re a real writer, you’re on your own. You’re bouncing around in your brain for a very long time. I think it makes the process slower in a certain way, which I’m grateful for, actually—it does sharpen, rather punitively and painfully, your sense of discernment.

Dutchess is a retired blues singer. Why is that important to her character?

It’s hard to spend any time reading in the African American canon without there being a lot of jazz and blues influences, whether in terms of the rhythm of the language or historical influences. I became particularly interested in Black women singers like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, who were pioneers. I was really interested in what it meant for a woman who in other spheres would have been incredibly vulnerable, who would have been understood as being powerless and being on the margins. Female blues singers were exercising a sort of personal and spiritual power. They were heroes in their communities. Their performances were cathartic—they were singing to the people about their troubles, about their pains. People are dancing, people are crying—they provided a huge space for Black expression.

The book is set in the ’80s in Philadelphia, where you grew up.

Yes, and that was a little selfish, because I was a kid there. But what particularly interested me about that period in Philadelphia is that in the general cultural imagination, there’s a lot about New York. But Philadelphia was a city that was very, very active. It had a huge Black population. It was super active in the civil rights movement, and in the Black power movement and Black liberation movement. I was really interested in what happened after that. Reagan arrives, and all of the ideals of the ’70s start passing away. So there’s this clash, and folks are falling through the cracks. What’s going on?

The community that Ava becomes involved in, Ark, seems inspired in part by MOVE [a Philadelphia Black liberation commune whose headquarters were bombed by police in 1985, killing six members and five children].

Absolutely, but I don’t in any way want to lay claim to MOVE’s story. This book is more in conversation with, or an homage to, a series of questions about that what happened there, this horrific explosion that displaced 60 families and killed 11 people. Why is it that so often movements that seek to carve out a different sort of way of living, a different way of existing in a capitalist moment—why is it that those movements are so often met with violence? When those movements include Black women, they’re almost always met with violence, state violence in particular. What are the threats to those movements internally? What are the threats externally? I was interested in exploring the experience inside a community. What does a woman’s life look like in this thing?

The question that floats over this book is how much of the challenge is ego and internal conflict and how much of this is the downward pressure that comes from outside forces.

MOVE was complicated. They weren’t necessarily the best neighbors. Now the fact that they weren’t the best neighbors certainly does not translate into let’s kill them. So there’s something that I wanted to explore there, too. The thing about a character like [Ark leader] Cass is that he’s right about a lot of things but he still is a terrible liar. I always push a little bit against the idea that Black people have to be heroes, that if I put Black characters in a situation where history is exerting horrible pressures, that people have to be superheroes. They’re just people, and some of them are really awful people. Some of them are really great people, and some are just average kind of people. That seems to me to be a way of honoring one’s humanity. If you have to be a villain or a hero, you don’t get to be a human being. I’m interested in people being human.

Bonaparte and Ark, to an extent, recall other fictional Black communities, like Eatonville in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and the Bottom in Toni Morrison’s Sula. Were you consciously trying to write into that tradition?

I was, but not just fictional communities. I did a bunch of research about independent Black communities in the South, and what happened to them and why it happened. With Bonaparte, I was definitely writing into that tradition in the literary sense, but also that kind of historical reality. And then it just met this kind of strange twist of my imagination. As much as Bonaparte is a physical place, it’s also kind of a spiritual home, and also kind of a myth.

Do you have a third book in the works?

I don’t. I’m a one-book-at-a-time kind of person. But hopefully it won’t take a decade.

Mark Athitakis is a journalist in Phoenix who writes for the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere.