The Unwinding
by George Packer
Summary
The Unwinding is George Packer's inner history of America from the late 1970s to the aftermath of the financial crisis, the decades in which, as his opening pages put it, the coil that held Americans together, the institutions, the factory jobs, the local banks and newspapers and party machines, came loose, and everyone was left to improvise a life in the open. Packer borrows his form from Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy: long braided narratives of unfamous Americans, interrupted by collages of headlines and song lyrics and by short acid portraits of the era's celebrities, Gingrich, Oprah, Sam Walton, Robert Rubin, Jay Z, the icons who filled the space the institutions vacated. The recurring lives carry the argument. Dean Price, a dreaming entrepreneur in the North Carolina tobacco country, chases a biodiesel future through the ruins of the old rural economy; Tammy Thomas, a Black factory worker in Youngstown, watches the mills and then the neighborhoods disappear and remakes herself as a community organizer; Jeff Connaughton, a Biden loyalist turned lobbyist, tours the inside of Washington's money machine and leaves disgusted; around them Tampa's foreclosure courts and Silicon Valley's serene secession, embodied by Peter Thiel, fill in the map. Packer imposes no tidy thesis; the book's power is accumulation, the slow felt sense of one era ending inside particular kitchens, foreclosure courts, and statehouses. It won the 2013 National Book Award for Nonfiction, and when the political earthquakes of the following years arrived, it read like the warning that had been filed in advance.
Historical Context & Significance
Packer wrote The Unwinding out of a decade of New Yorker reporting, publishing in 2013, in the wake of Occupy and the Tea Party, when the language for institutional collapse was still being invented; after 2016 the book was universally reread as prophecy, its Tampa and Youngstown chapters cited to explain an election it never mentions. The 2013 National Book Award recognized the formal gamble of resurrecting Dos Passos for nonfiction. Critics argued about the missing analysis, David Brooks most prominently, and Packer answered that the form was the analysis, that the lives themselves were the theory. His later portrait of Richard Holbrooke, Our Man, confirmed the method's range, and the book was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, a second measure of how widely its portrait of institutional collapse was read.