A sharp new satire ... Homes captures the flora and fauna of America’s aristocracy with exquisite precision. Her descriptions of these shiny people, so casual and friendly in their tightly choreographed habitats, reminded me of when I moved to Washington ... There can sometimes be a Franzenesque quality to Homes’s family satire — a bitter skewering of parents’ pathetic pomposity and melodrama ... Jane Mayer and other journalists have exposed in alarming detail how the Koch brothers and their ilk have stealthily pulled the country to their private advantage. Homes is working in the same dark territory, but The Unfolding provides a different kind of insight into this privileged species — and a lot more comedy ... The dialogue in these cringingly hilarious scenes sparks off the page with such vibrancy that I felt as if I were in the room where it happened. As funny as it is, though, there’s an unsettling quality to the comedy in The Unfolding ... The Unfolding suggests no solutions to this plight, but it offers irresistible reflection on how the audacity of hope got pushed off the rails and fell into the slough of despond.
A sharply observed, wickedly funny political satire by the reliably brilliant A.M. Homes ... Homes is a gifted satirist, a keen observer of bourgeois manners and mores. Here, she nails the psychic particularities of the politically conservative American male ... Homes puts her finger on the fault line, giving voice to the nebulous fears and fantasies of the old Republican plutocracy ... [The Big Guy's] racism is presented as fact but never explored — a missed opportunity and ultimately, the novel’s greatest failing. From the outset, Homes walks a fine line between realism and caricature. By choosing not to examine her protagonist’s racism, she denies us full access to his psyche ... Instead of a deeply imagined, fully human character, rife with complexities and contradictions, The Big Guy is reduced to a type ... The Unfolding — Homes’s first novel in 10 years — reads like a story conceived in another era.
... entwines political subterfuge and intrigue with a painful family saga. It’s a propulsive book of conversations and confessions that reveal brittle truths about the ways politics and history divide our country ... Using time stamps and locations to mark each chapter of the book, Homes dispatches her writing with an air of classified information ... With dialogue reminiscent of David Mamet, the scenes with these idiosyncratic characters snap with terse, data-driven, wildly imaginative verve. They’re so strange, you know that Homes has done her research. It takes a shrewd eye and a wild imagination to cook up these men of limited vision and limitless means ... But this novel isn’t just political satire. It’s a deeply felt family drama about the disconnect between spouses, as well as with their children ... a riveting political novel framed by family and devotion.
There is nothing subtle about Homes’s novel. It is a big, brash book that looks to examine issues of identity, freedom and democracy from the perspective of a group of millionaires who feel they have been weakened by Obama’s win ... To call it a plot is perhaps overstating things. The bigwigs hatch a morally dubious plan but the plan never gets under way ... To be commended for its ambition ... The chief success of The Unfolding is the way in which Homes merges her personal and political plots ... The Unfolding is an unapologetically political novel that pushes back against that idea, an impressive read by a female writer daring, as one of her character notes, 'to insert words into the mouths of powerful men'.
Ms. Homes is good at exploiting holiday gatherings for seriocomic set pieces. Along with the political events, the one-two punch of Thanksgiving and Christmas plays a big role here. Scenes with Charlotte and Meghan are rich in outbursts and bewildered reconciliations ... There are oracular moments when their covert scheming about media manipulation and societal fracture darkly foreshadows our current political miasma. But just as often the gang comes off as bickering, over-privileged cranks playing at being power brokers to divert themselves from personal problems. Ms. Homes restlessly shifts between serious political critique, rollicking Pynchon-style absurdity and unabashed displays of sentiment. If the mixture leaves The Unfolding feeling somewhat gangly and unresolved it also saves it from falling into the ruts of ideological narrative. Beyond being good or bad, the characters in this impressive book are, above all things, unpredictable.
There is a good, though not excellent, short story hidden somewhere in the four hundred pages of A. M. Homes’s The Unfolding ... But on balance, The Unfolding is depressingly shallow, arriving too late and with too little intelligence, humor, wit, or insight to be useful or entertaining ... The plot is simple ... The structure—dilating and contracting across a narrow band of time—works best in subtly paralleling personal and familial breakdowns with national upheaval, but at its worst, the form makes this novel feel interminable ... Homes is dedicated to the idea of these men as so pickled by their own vice and privilege that there’s not an intelligent thought to be found among them. They remain static in their grumbling and their vague schemes, which prevents the irony from deepening or sharpening its critique. What ought to be a central driver of the plot or the evolution of the novel’s themes becomes an inert gimmick ... Homes trades away her characters’ convictions and depth for attempted comedic effect. No contrast. No pathos. These men are hollow, which makes the story itself hollow ... Homes for some reason describes any surface or object that comes into contact with her characters as though she were writing about the contours of the human soul. Do we need to know what the taxi seats feel like? ... I was bored by this book. By its lazy stances, its lax politics, and its rote writing.
A frantic and surreal exploration of the embryonic days of the MAGA movement ... The Unfolding is a novel about how trauma and its repression will wreak havoc when it inevitably returns ... Homes is a funny, funny writer.
An exceptional display of style with muddled sense ... The opening whiffs of a political thriller soon disperse. Focusing on the family, the novel reveals itself to be an awkward marriage of two mid-twentieth-century genres: paranoid conspiracy and wealthy suburban malaise ... In their subtlety, the family dynamics offer clearer indictment of the callousness at the heart of a certain brand of conservatism than the overt political scenes. That may be why they take up most of the novel. Long stretches pass where one might forget a conspiracy plot is afoot ... Homes has often tried to shock before, and succeeded. But, a decade and a half after these historical events, our shock receptors are worn out. The Unfolding flops when trying to muster our last reserves ... Yet underneath this wobbly scaffolding is a finely wrought depiction of people attached to an ideology that hasn’t served them well.
This is all delivered in long scenes of trivial, roundabout dialogue that never go anywhere. It goes on and on and on for an eye-watering 400 pages ... There is some funny and well-observed stuff ... Yet it’s all buried beneath the landfill ... When reading The Unfolding, I felt as divided as the American electorate. Above my head a presiding spirit kind of admired Homes’s boldness with all this conversational minutiae, and nodded at the hidden literary nuggets of goodness. Yet down on the sofa, my bum was getting numb waiting for something to happen ... Peppered throughout the book are references to other writers who addressed the dark side of the American dream — Tom Wolfe, John Cheever, Shirley Jackson — which just reminded me how much I’d rather have been reading them. We could really do with a meaty, entertaining, horrifying novel about how America got from its first black president to its first orange one. But The Unfolding isn’t it.
There’s little or no foreshadowing and the resulting story twist seems to have arrived from another book ... What’s more, the time setting seems strange on two counts. Yes, Christmas 2008 was a political shock – but the far bigger shock reverberating round the world at the time was surely the financial meltdown. These people are all super-rich, so why isn’t there a single mention of what it might be doing to their trust funds? And then there’s the conspiracy itself: in interviews, Homes tells us it was conceived and written before the Donald threw his comb-over into the ring. So, with her storyline undercut by events, we seem to be left with a nostalgic plea for ordinary decent plotters who might have had the decency to seize power the old-fashioned way with tanks and marines instead of mesmerising half the country with Twitter and then sending in shamans and Proud Boys to storm the citadel.
A strange, scary, often very funny mashup of political thriller and family melodrama, although at nearly 400 pages, it drags a little at the end ... Homes, a fluid writer and brilliant thinker utterly besotted with American politics and history, deftly weaves actual historical facts and personalities into the fictional fabric of the novel. Unfortunately, the political story overshadows the personal one, and many of the characters, including Meghan and Charlotte, never truly come to life on the page.
Homes specialises in the insecurities, deceits and emotional desolation of America’s elite, with a particular interest in affluent older males in the aftermath of cataclysmic events ... While another novelist might have turned Republican plotters into monsters, Homes treats them as the tragic cast of an Arthur Miller play ... But while Homes nails her characters’ unease, she fails to give us the full-bodied state-of-the-nation novel she hints at. The story fizzles out.
A jittery tale of crisis and opportunity ... 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 ... Homes whisks through the intrigue with a cool eye and a keen ear, animating Hitchens’s clandestine meetings with whip-smart, affectless dialogue ... Homes’s rueful prehistory of the Maga movement ultimately risks feeling like a book caught between two eras: a state-of-the-nation novel from the recent past.
Reflects the instability and uncertainty of its times. This isn’t necessarily a good thing. Because although interesting as a study of character and excess, The Unfolding is a frustrating, unsettled book, never knowing whether it wants to be a satirical thriller, a state-of-the-nation novel or something in between ... Are we supposed to cringe as hard as I did at all of this? Reader, it remains unclear ... Homes has never quite been a straight satirist, but she is interested in extreme situations and characters, creating caricatures to locate the borders of social acceptability ... The novel seems in sympathy, if not with the politics of its characters, and certainly not with their racism, then with their reverence for American political exceptionalism.
... my frustration with The Unfolding has everything to do with simply, desperately, craving a break from the tantrums and revenge ploys of old white men—a reprieve Homes denied me. The book, which imagines an underground band of bros coming together in the wake of Obama’s 2008 win to plot a rich, white reclamation of power, has been called prescient. But it doesn’t feel prescient. Billed as satire, The Unfolding doesn’t feel satirical. What it feels like is a mirror. Cracked and ugly and magnifying the dire state of our country ... Funny, sure. But it all felt too close and too soon ... The book is a study of white privilege, a reminder not only of the insidious power structure undermining our democracy, but at its very origin and root. The problem is, these bros, who consider aprons 'feminizing,' are cast largely as bumbling buffoons, when in reality, they are lethal ... To be fair, so is Homes’ humor ... Yet I couldn’t help but feel that Homes, who built her career around risk, played it safe by merely holding up that mirror. These blowhards, they talk and they talk. For pages and pages ... with all the stories out there vying for our attention, it’s tough to muster the bandwidth to invest in this ridiculously cushy family’s plights, no matter how sharply parodied ... One of Homes’ theses is that the same rhetoric uttered through different ideological mouthpieces can have diametrically opposite effects. It’s an incisive point deftly woven, but, rhetoric is rhetoric, which can be…fatiguing. Where was her signature subversion? I hungered for schadenfreude, poetic justice, for the Forever Men to go down in some explosive cook den of fire. I should know better: Homes is not here for your morality ... Homes never falters on the level of craft. She is a master of scene and dialogue at cross purposes. The novel brims with razor sharp prose and zings with her sensibility ... Which is why I’ll always devour Homes with ravenous, reckless excitement. That voice, yes.. And this: She’s not afraid to show seams. This is what it means to be a human writer capturing a hopelessly flawed humanity. If you’re not in the mood, well, tough noogies ... This is an indictment. We’re in deep, deep shit. Which is her whole point: There’s no escaping it.
... a fable for the ages ... there is a sense of Homes as a great overseer of history, taking a look at one particular generation gap to represent the bigger gap that has led to the tumultuous America we know and live in today ... a wise book, finding the inner demons of a few and forcing us to look closely at how these situations have exacerbated the hidden but divisive problems of our country all along. It is an unusual and perhaps controversial attitude to consider the Obama-McCain race as a wakeup call for people on both sides of the aisle. My tired old brain would have thought that the Reagan era would be the start, but Homes proves me wrong. The racism and conflict that have wrested our attention in the larger American scene today certainly have a foothold in many eras of American history, but this is a warranted background to the story ... The book is deceptively easy to read, with a breezy, quiet style. Homes brings us one family’s journey to the two versions of America we see today. Along the way, we follow the hearts of two very different people who may actually want the same thing but have very different ways of finding it. The miasma of this literary America marches on in a far more entertaining and interesting way than does the real thing.
Provocative ... Biting ... Homes’ novel smartly imagines the machinations of a shadowy group of rich and powerful men who organize for action in the aftermath of Barack Obama’s election in 2008 ... The Unfolding is a novel that cries out for a sequel. On the other hand, Homes cannily suggests, maybe that sequel is playing out right before our eyes.
With her imitable command of fast-breaking dialogue, pinpoint description, caustic wit, keen psychological perception, and wise attunement to the zeitgeist, Homes channels the reckless rage fueling the right-wing backlash now threatening the very foundation of our democracy ... Homes’ incisive satire is galvanizing in its insights, sharply hilarious, and thoughtfully, even hopefully compassionate.
The book offers a through line of old white men fretting that old white men will soon be obsolete, but little sense of the visceral feeling, the lived experience of it ... Maybe only the most daring, or reckless, or naive white writer would undertake such a project these days, but this caution leaves a hollow at the core of The Unfolding, and the novel suffers for it.
The fact that the subtlety and pathos provided by these two women are eclipsed by the Big Guy is unnervingly appropriate. If nothing else, The Unfolding powerfully captures something of how nuance and complexity are all too often pushed aside by those who talk the loudest in a fractiously partisan political landscape.
... unfortunately not her best ... Despair at this turn of events galvanizes a group of rich old white guys to form an alliance to take back America...The reader gets to hear their thoughts on this topic in truly stultifying detail ... Meghan and Charlotte are both interesting characters and the book is at its best whenever they are on the page. As for the rest — well, though the ad copy for The Unfolding calls it a 'prescient' 'alternative history,' it seems more informed by hindsight than prescience; since the Right actually did take back the country after the Obama years, I'm not sure what's so alternative about it ... When the excitement over a new book from a favorite author ends in disappointment, it is not fun to write about. Let's hope we don't have to wait another 10 years for better news.
[A] jejune and tedious primary storyline ... The reality of how we got here has already been extensively reported elsewhere to eye-popping effect and is far more shocking than anything here ... If truth is stranger than fiction, this makes a strong case that it’s also a better read. Stick with the news.
A satiric misfire ... Homes injects her signature wit... but most of the supporting cast are caricatures, and far too often...they ramble on interminably. Homes loses the balance provided by the three family members, and though she makes a stab at tying up loose ends in the final pages, it’s too little, too late. While the novel sparks when exploring the political underground, it never fully ignites.
