BLURBS FROM GARY Shytengart, Nathan Hill, Michael Chabon, Salman Rushdie, Phil Klay, and Jonathan Lethem--we are obviously dealing with a "writer's writer" here, but it would be a boost for the republic for this novel to find a wider audience. It's a perceptive analysis of our current malaise.
The Unfolding presents itself as the view from Bohemian Grove, where the very wealthy hang out with the very powerful and kick around ideas about how to keep the wealth and the power under their capable management.
The novel's main character (last name is Hitchens but typically referred to in the novel simply as the Big Guy) is present at a special party for major McCain donors on the night of the 2008 election, and is so shocked and dismayed at the outcome that he decides he has to do something. He assembles a group of like-minded and similarly wealthy and influential men, their object "to get back to our roots, to what makes us strong." As one of them puts it, "America is in the crapper and we need to do something about it. We're not going to stand by and wait to see what happens; we're going to make something happen and we need someone to put that idea out there in front of people." The novel ends on Inauguration Day, 2009, with a big dinner at which the group, now named the "Forever Men," is officially launched.
The novel's great insight, I'd say, is that while Propertied White Men (PWM) love to praise the Constitution and the founding fathers, they do so out of a sense that the Constitution was drafted to preserve and protect the interests of PWM. When the Constitution turns out, in the fullness of time, to have the potential of constraining those interests or taking into account other interests, the PWM begin to see the Constitution as broken, no longer doing its job, in need of "extraordinary measures," as one of them puts it. "It will look like a natural occurrence, a call for security, a return to our core values. That's our sweet spot," as another one says.
Serious as it is, the novel also has some outrageous satirical humor (reminiscent of Dr. Stangelove in that regard), a lot of it about male posturing--from that angle, the many scenes of the Forever Men's meetings are as hilarious as they are scary.
We also get a deep look, thanks to the Big Guy's interactions with his wife (at the Betty Ford Center) and daughter (at a tony finishing school in northern Virginia) that gender can make a big difference in how white privilege works. The "M" in PWM is always under scrutiny in the novel, and among the novel's slier touches is that one of the Forever Men, a "confirmed bachelor," in in the closet.
The bone-deep anxieties within white privilege may be the novel's other core insight. It presents the election of Obama as a psychic disturbance in the GOP that could boil up into a major breakdown, which maybe it has. Would MAGA have happened without the election of Obama?
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