The Unfolding by AM Homes

The Unfolding
By A. M. Homes
Viking, 2022

The Unfolding was published in late 2022, so once again your reviewer is belated because he waited his turn for the novel at the local library.

This time my belatedness fits the book, for its characters have delayed reactions to recent history and its author comes late to a watershed American election—not Trump’s but Barack Obama’s in 2008—that causes Republicans in Arizona to weep at a John McCain election-eve event that begins the story. Homes’s protagonist--known only as the “Big Guy,” a 60-something man with a huge fortune and super-sized ego—is particularly upset that a Black man will be sleeping (with his wife) in the White House. Although a Bush donor of long standing, the Big Guy believes—too late—that he has not done enough to save the American way of life depicted in old-line Republican iconography. He begins his soteriological mission by scribbling his ideas on bar napkins, the ur-text for the other old white wealthy conservatives that he invites to his Palm Springs home to plot a long-term, invisible disinformation campaign that—Homes and the reader but not the Big Guy know—will eventually vomit forth Donald Trump and ultimately cause the January 6 insurrection.

The plotters, like the Big Guy, often speak in vague patriotic abstractions but do have various expertise or distinguishing passions. “Bo,” the son of a spy, specializes in angry let’s-do-it vulgarity. The accountant Kissick knows how to manipulate tax laws to finance the group. What appears to be a veteran P.R. man can disseminate what used to be called “hidden persuaders.”

The men, including a former judge and retired doctor, sound a bit like podcast cranks until they are joined by an old General (code name “Mt. Baldy”) whose disquisitions on the military deep state scare some bloviators. A younger historian named Eisner is brought in as scribe and as Homes’s provider of rather thin cultural context. In the months between the election and the inauguration (the time frame of the novel), the men do little but eat, drink, and talk—and Homes’s satire of “The Forever Men” (as they call themselves) becomes repetitive and bloated.

Given all of the extant knowledge about Trump’s election and then defeat, The Unfolding needed to be a non-fiction novel to have the bite that Homes would probably like it to have and that informed readers would almost certainly welcome. Show us their faces before they were familiar—the Koch brothers, the Federalist Society, early William Barr, the old provocateur Roger Stone, the real scary general Michael Flynn, the Catholic nativist and fake narrativist Steve Bannon. Perhaps legal constraints prevented Homes from going the full Robert Coover route in his masterpiece of political satire, The Public Burning, where Richard Nixon is sodomized by Uncle Sam.

Maybe Homes wanted to imply that the now visible anti-democratic conspiracy was hatched by faceless money men. Or possibly, written over the last ten years, The Unfolding just couldn’t keep up with real revelations.

In an excellent New Yorker essay about the report of the Jan. 6 House committee, Jill Lepore laments its obsessive focus on Trump’s actions and its neglect of the cultural background that brought him to power—and to humiliation. Homes’s background is not too far removed in time but is too distant from the specificity now needed to present a rigorous unfolding of the recent past.

The belated critic can snoop around a bit in earlier reviews, many of which praised Homes’s depiction of the unfolding of the Big Guy’s family while he obsesses about bringing back Eisenhower America. His alcoholic wife checks into the Betty Ford Center where she becomes intimate with her roommate and demands that the Big Guy buy the roommate an expensive car.

Not exactly a reckoning for a person in his income bracket. Their daughter Meghan, a senior in a Washington boarding school where she rides her own horse, also has a belated sexual awakening when she realizes her father’s best friend and aide to George Bush is gay. Meghan gets some new political knowledge from a car service driver who voted for Bush, some from the historian Eisner, hardly radical sources. Her father’s plotting never gets to unfold, and Meghan, along with her mother, don’t really get outside the fold—which originally meant “pen” or “stable”—of wealth, ignorance, and entitlement. It’s unlikely that Meghan will grow up to be Liz Cheney.

The Unfolding has on its back cover blurbs from Salman Rushdie, Gary Shteyngart, and Jonathan Lethem, all of whom have written novels critical of Trump and the MAGA phenomenon. Despite their enthusiasm, I couldn’t figure out what Homes was up to in her odd alternation of the vague political plot and the stereotypical personal story--until I reached the very end of the book with its long author’s bio that lists Homes’ considerable work for film and television.

Written almost completely in dialogue, The Unfolding seems designed to be a popular miniseries on one of the streaming platforms, not too heavy in its satire, not too light in its family troubles, some cameos by historical look-alikes. Of course, the men are stupid, the women are victims. Maybe in the next season, they will all be more active and effective, more audacious like the new president.

In the novel’s last lines, the Big Guy says his daughter will one day “’be the president of the United States.’” A fellow plotter says, “`That’s not what I thought you were going to say.’” The Big Guy replies, “`If I was predictable, it would be boring.’” After a hundred of its 395 pages, The Unfolding becomes predictable and boring, even for this reader who can’t get enough fiction about twenty-first-century politics. The people who “inspired” Homes’s male characters deserved—not better—but worse, more exacting, detailed unmasking: not unfolding but shredding.

Tom LeClair is the author of eight novels and Harpooning Donald Trump (essays).