Mad men plotting: The Unfolding, by A.M. Homes, reviewed

Fifteen years ago, A.M. Homes published The Mistress’s Daughter, an explosive, painful account of how she met her birth mother, Ellen, who had placed her for adoption as a baby when, as a very young woman, she became pregnant in the course of an affair with an older, married man. Perhaps the most memorable scene depicts her mother, who had instigated the contact between them when Homes was in her early thirties, appearing without warning at a reading Homes was giving in a bookshop. The writer’s panic and discomfort at this unexpected ambush, and her sense of what it might foreshadow, were palpable (and she was not wrong. Ellen’s desperate, misplaced attempts to forge a connection included ringing Homes to berate her for not sending her mother a Valentine’s Day card).

Homes reconfigures elements of this story – including her adoption by a couple who had not long previously lost their infant son – in The Unfolding, where they sit, with no apparent affinity, in the middle of a frantic and surreal exploration of the embryonic days of the MAGA movement. What has a story of a group of wealthy, privileged men so horrified by Barack Obama’s victory over John McCain that they immediately form a secret cabal to right this wrong to do with the complex intimacies of a family tragedy?

Everything, as it turns out. The Unfolding is a novel about how trauma and its repression will wreak havoc when it inevitably returns; how a failure to acknowledge it will distort and disrupt one’s actions, possibly in perpetuity; and how such a state of affairs might apply just as well to the development of nations and societies as of families. Like the sinkhole that opens up in a rich man’s lawn in Homes’s novel This Book Will Save Your Life, published the year before her memoir, the psychic chasm will swallow everything.

Not that this is how ‘the Big Guy’, The Unfolding’s central character, would see it. As the novel opens, he sits distraught in the bar of the Biltmore Hotel in Arizona, the site of McCain’s results party, drinking whisky and plotting ‘a forced correction’ to the nightmare from which there is no waking. By the end of the evening, he is asking the bartender to rustle him up soft-boiled eggs and toast soldiers.

What he and the bizarre crew of conspirators, who egotistically model themselves on Eisenhower’s emergency committee for the continuation of society, fear that they are on the brink of losing is never made explicit. It might include a threat to their own opportunities for personal enrichment and advancement; but their fears are also – clearly and obscurely at the same time – linked to fantasies of political, social and racial supremacy. Every cloud, though, has a silver lining: if a catastrophe is brewing, only the right sort of men – and naturally they are men – can stop it.

Homes is a funny, funny writer: her wild and satirical imagining of the group’s planning meetings leaves you in no doubt that you wouldn’t trust them to change the oil in your car, let alone a regime; they all seem quite mad. A particularly unhinged scene has them conducting target practice on some old dressmaker’s dummies belonging to the Big Guy’s wife, now safely tucked away in the Betty Ford Clinic. Unsurprisingly there is a weird erotic charge to the whole tableau, made even odder when a private militia turns up in helicopters and mistakenly believe they are responsible for the strewn heads and torsos on their makeshift landing patch.

Funny, of course, until it’s terrifying. The Unfolding runs from election night to the inauguration, by which time the group have begun to hit on the idea of birtherism, and the power of conspiracy more generally. The reader knows where this leads: straight to the Capitol on 6 January last year and QAnon and dangerous dimwits in antlers.

Where it has come from, and how this relates to the novel’s other strand – the slow awakening of the Big Guy’s daughter Meghan to the fractures in her family and the cover-ups that have ensured that they haven’t healed – is a more subtle unfolding. Telling yourself, or being told, a story about your parentage, your origins, your identity, Homes seems to say, is all very well until someone pulls the rug. Whether you choose at that moment to look at what’s beneath it or simply write a cheque for a larger, better one is up to you.