Alex Clark

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

Politics and family drama combine when a group of Republican fanatics conspire to subvert Barack Obama’s victory

A.M. Homes. [Juergen Frank]

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.

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