Book of the week: The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27)

George Packer’s new book could be faulted for failing to present an argument about its chosen subject: the slow dissolution of the civic culture that once defined American life, said Craig Fehrman in CSMonitor.com. But this “masterful” work of narrative nonfiction “offers something far more rare: a political journalist working hard to confront both parties’ pieties, to dig deep into their ideas, and to synthesize the results in a way that’s fun to read.” Packer, a staff writer at The New Yorker, has created his national portrait by interweaving individual stories: We spend a lot of time with Tammy Thomas, a Youngstown, Ohio, factory worker. But we also get drawn into the life experiences of a Washington lobbyist, an energy entrepreneur, and a billionaire who co-founded PayPal. At times, the details of these disparate lives “combine in powerful ways.”

Each story in Packer’s book “is essentially a quest narrative, with the characters searching for both meaning and a secure livelihood in an increasingly chaotic social order,” said Julia M. Klein in the Chicago Tribune. One family, after enduring joblessness, health problems, and a roach-infested apartment in Tampa, moves north to Georgia in an ill-planned bid to build a better life. The lobbyist actually begins his career working his way into Joe Biden’s inner circle only to spend the next three decades whipsawing between idealism, bottom-line pragmatism, and disgust. But for all Packer’s pessimism, he seems to share with his subjects a faith that as long as the nation is home to a fair number of “dreamers and strivers,” a few of them might one day lead America to a better future.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The author’s ambition sometimes gets the better of him, said J.P. O’Malley in NPR.org. Because of its novelistic structure, The Unwinding “feels long-winded for what it has to say,” and Packer’s decision to include brief sketches of such contemporary celebrities as Oprah Winfrey and Newt Gingrich introduces a disdainful tone that fights the spirit of the project. “But as the book progresses, it becomes apparent that a very pertinent question is being asked: What common bond do those who are ostensibly held together by an idea of American democracy actually share?” Packer seems to believe that the allures of unregulated capitalism have, over the past 30 years, torn apart the old social contract. Sadly, the idea that we each are essentially on our own to forge a life destiny might be the one belief that we all agree on.