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.