One voter’s dream is another’s nightmare, especially in the fevered, tribal world of 21st-century US politics, where the House is divided and the red states and blue states pull in opposing directions. As AM Homes’s seventh novel opens, it’s 4 November 2008, and Barack Hussein Obama has just been confirmed as the nation’s 44th president. Inside the Biltmore hotel in Phoenix, Arizona, the Republican high command is in a state of full-body recoil. Its members are doubled over and sobbing, vomiting on the carpet and blaming the crab bisque. These people need comfort, reassurance, some faint hope for the future. They need to believe that America can be made great again.
The Unfolding is a jittery tale of crisis and opportunity, tracing that liminal period between Obama’s election and inauguration which doubled as the GOP’s long dark night of the soul. Homes’s tone is similarly discombobulated, veering between barbed satire and nuanced domestic drama like a train clattering over the points as it homes in on DC. Her protagonists have lost their bearings and mislaid their schedule. It is their outrage and confusion that provides the book with its fuel.
