America’s Real (Imagined) Story: Reading "The Unfolding" by A.M. Homes
Is now the right time to go back to election night 2008?
Oliver Sacks wrote, “We ask, ‘what is his story—his real inmost story?’—for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative.” A.M. Homes’ new novel, her thirteenth book, tells the story of one man, Big Guy, but also the story of America. Starting on election night in 2008 and spanning until Barak Obama’s inauguration day, Big Guy’s family drama parallels his response to a perceived crisis in a changed nation.
Big Guy was a large donor to John McCain’s presidential campaign and his response to his loss, the opening line of the novel, is “This can’t happen here.” He comes from a long line of wealthy straight white men. The preservation of his power and legacy is his central narrative. Big Guy hatches a plan on post-notes and gathers a group of similarly pedigreed white men to set the country on the right course. “Our government as we know it” must be protected in order to continue, underscoring the group’s racism in response to American voters electing America’s first Black president.
The men the Big Guy gathers to execute his plan echo the Eisenhower Ten, men who would to be called upon in the event of a national emergency in order to maintain continuity of government, a concept associated with coups seeking to maintain structures of power after uprisings. Midway through the novel the man referenced only as “the judge” responds to Big Guy, “If I’m hearing you right, what you’re outlining is a slow moving wave, a coup of sorts that will sweep across this country largely unnoticed until it is too late—until the American people have been decimated economically, intellectually, and spiritually.” The Big Guy replies, “Yes, and no one will read it as an inside job. It’s the new American dream.” The aim of setting the masses to simmer like a lobster is never explicitly named. The dream seems to be whatever keeps these ten white men and those who mirror them rich and powerful.
Without any heavy-handedness, Homes crafts a narrative in which he who controls the story makes history. By mirroring this American story of loss and shame, of slavery and misogyny, with a family one, of abandonment and betrayal, history becomes personal and therefore a little more understandable. We are entering an autumn in which January 6th Committee hearings unfurl more details of how those in power managed a major threat to democracy (and lives) and face more questions than answers about how we got here.
Big Guy’s wife, Charlotte, a long-time alcoholic, attempts suicide and checks herself into the Betty Ford clinic. Her personal crisis is spawned by her inability to act with agency, “when I was a girl no one asked what you wanted to be; they only asked what kind of man you wanted to marry.” She confronts the Big Guy about having her own life and needing to come clean to their sixteen year-old daughter, Meghan, about the secret they have kept from her her whole life.
The novel offers a lot of dark comedy, including many references to Disney (more source material for the American origin story) to make these rich white characters tolerable. Big Guy’s favorite character is Dumbo, a figure known for being underestimated and winning big in the end. Charlotte, the princess, has everything she could ask for, the prince, the happily ever after. But the surface story is a fraud. In private, Charlotte, on leave from her half-way recovery house at Christmas, and Big Guy tell Meghan that Charlotte is not her birth mother. Similar to territory Homes’ covered in her own autobiography, The Mistresses’ Daughter, Big Guy had an affair with a younger woman and he and Charlotte adopted her. Charlotte couldn’t live with the shame of lying and the lie behind the lie was that they had a baby boy, who died. “None of it has anything to do with you except it’s at the core of what your mother has been dealing with all these years; she’s been sitting with these very difficult feelings,” Big Guy tells Meghan.
What will Meghan’s story be now that she knows that the woman who raised her didn’t give birth to her? She meets with her birth mother and Big Guy, but the earth-shattering moment of self-revelation does not come. In one of life’s rare moments of congruity, her public life and her inner life align: she has always been her father’s daughter. Of the ten Big Guy assembles to remake America, none has a son, a legacy. The implication is that the chance to make their mark on history rests with them.
Scenes of the meetings of the ten weave throughout the novel, though the content of their plot is never revealed. In one hilarious scene at Big Guy’s Wyoming ranch, the men have assembled Charlotte’s mannequins and Styrofoam wig heads and shot at them, mimicking a mass-casualty scene. Homes depicts a technicolor scene of the men shooting these props as snow softly falls and they slowly get stoned on homemade booze culminating to the punch line of the arrival of two helicopters. The General has sent in two ex-military pilots to the ranch without informing them of the play. One of them overcome and vomiting says, “The bodies, I can see the bodies with my night-vision glasses. We fucking tore them apart.” After telling him they are not real heads, the pilot vomits again. The General scolds the pilot saying that such bodily fluids draw the enemy like blood draws sharks, and that he “wants to take out his pistol and put the pilot out of his pain—but there’s an additional fee for that, something like $250,000 for a pilot.”
Without a trace of irony about the theater of war, Homes has put everyone in their place. Meghan, too will find her place, becoming the person capable of confronting her parents’ betrayal. So, too, will America if we are able to confront our past. But, without giving away the novel’s ending, Homes insists America and men like Big Guy must be willing to see past their own glory. There is no bright future in Homes’ imagined American story, only one that is not yet written. Big Guy has the last word on it all, “If it was predictable, it would be boring.”
The Unfolding isn’t boring but it lacks the teeth one might expect from the novelist who wrote May We Be Forgiven’s Harry, whose mistakes were spectacular yet relatable, offering him up for public shaming in order to humble him. In a stylistic coup of her own, Homes pointed a proverbial finger at everyone, including its readers, in Music for Torching, metaphorically burning down everything it had built up in its preceding pages by the very end. Readers could choose to read this novel fourteen years from now and the distance between 2008’s election night might not offer more perspective. I hope readers pick up this book now, though, if not to see inside a nation, then to get a glimpse at one man’s inmost story.