THE EMERGENCY

A doctor strives to preserve his family in the face of civic collapse.

National Book Award winner Packer—for The Unwinding (2013)—wrote a pair of novels in the 1990s before establishing himself as a prolific reporter on the American scene. For his first work of fiction in the 21st century, he funnels his collected observations of a broken America into a dystopian allegory. Hugo Rustin, the novel’s protagonist, is a doctor and self-proclaimed champion of “humanism” who’s committed to finding common ground among factions. But since an unspecified “Emergency” has disrupted the country, everyone is too divided for such sentiment. The nation is split between largely urban and educated Burghers, rural and rough-hewn Yeomen, and roving Strangers caught in the middle. And the Burghers are internally split among the spitefully unemployed (Excess Burghers), oversharing woke mobs, and those who think high-tech bionics offer a way out (Better Humans). Plotwise, the novel follows Hugo and his 14-year-old daughter, Selva, as they head to Yeoman country to conduct a wellness check on a Stranger his wife had befriended, but it’s a journey into ideological bantering as much as a trip into a forest. As the editor of two collections of George Orwell’s writing, Packer is alert to the clarifying power of a clear allegory as well as potent storytelling. But while the novel is a crystal-clear commentary on a broken America in the Trump era, Packer can’t quite shake off years of operating in pundit mode, which makes for some clunky, declamatory passages: “Some mechanism beyond the timepiece itself seemed to have broken, as if the spirit in the civic machine that attuned everyone to its rhythms and kept the regular hours of their lives no longer moved.” Propulsive closing chapters return him to thriller mode, but he tests readers’ patience on the way there.

A thoughtfully imagined, if not always subtle, critique of our fractured moment.