The Unwinding, by George Packer – review

The Unwinding is a rather classy addition to the thriving genre of American apocalypse porn. The basic thesis can be found online in Jim Kunstler’s The Clusterfuck Nation Manifesto, which runs to a few thousand words, but over hundreds of pages George Packer gives it the full literary treatment. He signals his ambition by taking as his model the USA trilogy of John Dos Passos, which spliced mash-ups of newspaper cuttings and pop lyrics, brief lives of public figures and longer episodic biographies of obscure ones, into an indignant portrait of America in the first three decades of the 20th century.

Packer’s book is non-fiction, and his ‘obscure Americans’ are real people — Tammy Thomas, a laid-off factory worker in the Midwest; Dean Price, a doomed entrepreneur in the rural South; Jeff Connaughton, a disappointed apparatchik in DC — but he has adapted Dos Passos’s method to portray the past 30 years, during which ‘the coil that held Americans together in its secure and sometimes stifling grip… gave way’, and the country was utterly changed.