AM Homes on the Complexity of Contemporary Political Life

Prescient. Ahead of the curve. A cultural futurist. How is it possible that A.M. Homes looked at Obama’s 2008 Election and saw January 6th on the horizon? For a quarter of a century, Homes, the great American novelist, has been dissecting the dark hearts and minds of those living—or perhaps suffering—the American Dream. With unnerving power, The Unfolding, her thirteenth book, morphs fiction into what is now more and more the truth each day. When she first conceptualized The Unfolding, Donald Trump wasn’t even on the horizon. Critical reaction to A.M.’s book, published in 2022, was divided. Homes sees this as a good thing. “There is no such thing as unconditional love. Conformity isn’t my interest. Progress always comes from the edges.”

With the most historic election in my lifetime, it all seems so simple to duck behind a privacy screen, mark a ballot, stuff it in a box and, by midnight, we hopefully have a new leader of the free world. The Unfolding punctures the American dream with the hope of reawakening it. If Homes’s novel had arrived prior to November 3, 2020, she would have been signaled out for having provoked the angry January 6th mob. Her writing is controversial. It possesses premonitions honed to the vibrational wiring of humanity. For example, in 2000, her book Music for the Torching, ending with a school shooting, was launched the same week as the Columbine massacre. Her material confronts what people resist seeing. It’s satirist construct, not to shock or sensationalize, seeks the betterment of society. However today, satire, without irony, is now our actual political landscape.

We are in an era of choosing a world leader when disinformation has become normalized. Facts—drenched in bias—are spun into reckless orbit for television ratings and memes with no consequence for the harm caused to others. In Springfield, Ohio, after Trump’s racist false claim of Haitians eating dogs and cats, a string of bomb threats impacted the city, closed schools and endangered Haitians there and elsewhere.

Homes and I are two years into an ongoing discussion of her novel The Unfolding—its relevance now and into the future. Her exploration of the inner lives of a tribe of old, rich, conservative White men, the forever men, upset about ‘Obama’s win and McCain’s’ loss, and who plot to reclaim their version of democracy, speaks to how we got here. Where we are going glues to the main character, Big Guy’s daughter, Meghan, who votes for the first time. The narrative arc addresses how, in America, it’s become impossible to reach consensus about anything, especially when fact and fiction blur. And—spoiler alert—women are rising up, more than willing to assert their power.

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Yvonne Conza: There’s a line in The Unfolding I can’t unhear: “Democracy is fragile, more fragile than any of us are comfortable admitting.” How did you come to that?

A.M. Homes: When Obama won in 2008 it tripped off a lot of fear, fear especially among white men and along with that the latent racism and sexism that was barely beneath the surface. And, all of a sudden it came back to life. Today, in broad daylight that violence continues to blossom. In the best of worst of ways, I’m a horribly American writer because I’m interested in the idea of America, it’s birth and evolution. I’m interested in the American dream as both a fantasy and a promise.

YC: What most interests you in this regard?

AMH: Artists and writers capture the ethos, pathos, and psychological realities and truths that are not as easy to name in nonfiction—the slippery stuff, the liminal matter of an era. I am finding language for the unnamed and, in a way for the complexity of what it is to be American at this point in time. My interests are in ideas of identity, the invisible competition between people or the way we rank each other, the hierarchical nature of success, all that stuff. The family, the classic, traditional.

I write about human behavior and what compels a person to do what they do. Questions within a person of their own moral quandary. Who am I in this world? Like the guy in The Unfolding, where when he thinks of himself, he can’t bear to think that he’s a jerk, right? He thinks, “I’m a good guy, I’m generous. I take care of my people. I’ve taken good care of my family.” As he begins to realize he might be an asshole, that’s unbearable for him. Even by the end of the book, when he thinks, my daughter, having reconciled that he doesn’t have a son, but he’s going to have this daughter, Meghan, and she’s going to follow in his footsteps, it’s still in his narcissistic point of view that he thinks she’s going to be like him, not she’s going to be like her own self. It’s still all about him, which I think is interesting.

YC: Does a writer have a responsibility to question and expand upon the American identity?

AMH: I always used to ask Grace Paley, my former teacher, who lived on 11^th Street around the corner from where we are now, “Does a writer have a moral responsibility?” She would say, “A writer has no more responsibility than a plumber. Your responsibility is to do a good job.” I always thought that’s interesting. But I would say I think we do have a bit of a responsibility—to bear witness, to document, and to prompt questioning and examination. Fiction and other arts do that through a very different lens than from historians and journalists.

YC: The Unfolding unpacks the darker American Dream.

AMH: I saw the rise of what we also now call dark money into politics in 2008. We didn’t even call it dark money then. If you gave $10,000 or $100,000 to a candidate, it bought you access. Now that access costs exponentially more. Millions and billions of dollars are being dumped into campaigns and that literally changes the trajectory of the political system. Look at Leonard Leo, Chairman of the Federalist Society, with billions to throw around. In general, I’m interested in the people behind the scenes pulling the strings and stuff. All of it can be dated back to the speech that Eisenhower gave when he left office about the military-industrial complex. That moment—the end of the Eisenhower administration, the end of World War II—marks the birth of where this starts to happen, a new and darker American Dream.

YC: How has media become the novel that shouldn’t be the novel?

AMH: I don’t think media is the novel. We are living in a constant breaking 24-hour news cycle. Newspapers don’t come out once a day, they come out all day, every day. And, because of the way the algorithms work, the way that we consume imagery, narrative, you are consuming the thing you want to eat. Each of us are eating our own sugar all day, every day.

YC: Today’s media is fictionalized more than it is journalism.

AMH: It’s skewed. And, with a point of view that it pretends not to have. We all think it doesn’t have a point of view, but we know it has a point of view. It’s telling a story, and nobody acknowledges that everything is a story. Everything is a narrative. Whether or not the narrative is true or based on fact. Then there’s the craziness notion of an alternate fact. There’s not an alternate fact. If a car ran a person over right here, we saw it. Our media is very complicated right now. We don’t acknowledge our relationship to it. And, we don’t really question it too much. We just consume what we consume. We don’t think, who made this, what’s it made out of? You don’t see the media listing its ingredients. And, there’s certainly no calorie check.

YC: Fox 5? They appear to list ingredients.

AMH: The thing that’s interesting to me about Fox 5—it doesn’t ever in any way fact-check itself. It’s not about that, which is scary.

YC: How does The Unfolding implicate itself in the narrative of: Who we are? How we got here? And, where we’re going?

AMH: The ‘forever men’ at the core of the story represent the who we are. First though, let me put a footnote here. Historically, women were always given the framework to write the domestic short story and domestic novel. Males were the ones who wrote the large-scale sweeping social book—everything from Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, to Gay Talese’s The Kingdom and The Power, to Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities—big social books. The women didn’t write those books.

In England, Hilary Mantel and other people have been able to, but we don’t do that here. Women write women’s fiction or small-scale marriage and whatever stories. In The Unfolding, you have the large social-political picture and the domestic picture together in an interesting weave. They’re both separated and not separated. You also see how when the men are left to their own devices, they spin each other up into hysteria. The way that they goad each other on in a certain way. I wanted to show these men, wealthy men with access to a lot of influence, in ways that people had not seen before.

One of the complexities of my book was the inquiry of “Who is this book for?” I remember thinking, “Do you mean who is it rooting for or who is it written for? Who is the readership?” It also begs the question of “Why don’t men read books written by women?” 

YC: In 2016, Talese was asked to name women writers who inspired him and part of his answer was “None.” This prompted the online hashtag: #womengaytaleseshouldread.

AMH: In many ways, The Unfolding is a guy book, although the women’s story in it too, is compelling and complicated as a multi-generational story of women’s lives.

YC: Were you being asked if the book was meant for Democrats or Republicans?

AMH: More of what I noticed was that people on the left responded, “I don’t want to read about them. I don’t like them. They’re reprehensible.” And then, in general, people on the right don’t read literary fiction at all, and so they’re not even aware of my book.

The Unfolding shows a picture of who we are that we have not seen and do not want to see. The how we got there is to say, the ways in which people can look at a win like Obama’s and think, “How do I reclaim democracy?” That was a big thing where my editor in England called and said, “I’m confused because you’re saying reclaim democracy and the forever men in your book seem to want to upset democracy.” And I responded, “Oh, no, you’re not confused because suddenly that word means different things to different people.” That was also a fascinating divide in our history, almost like something that goes back to very early American history when we separated from England. What is a democracy? Who are we and who are we beholden to?

YC: Where are we now?

AMH: When Hillary didn’t win, it seemed like the country was really not open to the idea of having a woman president. The end of The Unfolding, to my mind, predicts a woman rising. The idea that Kamala is rising and that she could become that person, to me is really cool. Also weirdly, when Liz Cheney took a position at the January 6th hearings, and now Dick Cheney, no pun intended, is on the right side of what is true for this country—that’s saying something.

Come on, Liz Cheney, Kamala Harris and Dick Cheney, having anything in common, that’s so fascinating and so cool. That’s exactly what the girl, Meghan, in The Unfolding is all about—the next wave. Our country’s next generation. That to me was very cool. There’s a whole part that I didn’t ever finish writing. It’s called the blow-up. It was really supposed to come after the ending of the book. I don’t know why I never finished it. It’s literally about them blowing up Washington and Meghan rising to power.

The thread of Meghan, the daughter, is not only a woman coming of age, but more importantly, coming to consciousness. In that way that you grow up and you believe what your family believes because that’s what you think you’re supposed to believe. She votes for the first time that year and begins to realize, oh, the world is not exactly the same as it was described to her. She begins to see those differences and she meets people who have different experiences. Meghan becomes aware of her own version of things as she is forming her own voice and point of view.

YC: You have a daughter.

AMH: I do and a million years ago, she came home from fourth grade and asked, “Mom, why were there no women in history?” Traditional American history is very exclusionary and it is not a full story. If you want to learn more history, you take African-American history or women’s history. Those are often only taken by people of color or women. See the mind-boggle?

There is no interwoven agreed-upon narrative that is the true American narrative. That’s what this book is really about. It is the weave of the female narrative of the wife who didn’t, when she was growing up, like many wives of that generation, forge a life of what she wanted to be. Instead, it was what kind of man do you want to marry? But she’s got this daughter who’s living in a different time and stepping into the future.

YC: The book ends in January 2009.

AMH: Exactly. We’re already how far out from there? We’re here now in the moment where Meghan and women of her generation are stepping into power. That’s cool. And, if Dick Cheney says he’s voting for Kamala Harris, we’re living in a different world.