When Empire Falls: Talking to George Packer About His New Novel, The Emergency

It feels like we are all lurching from emergency to emergency these days, from climate and humanitarian emergencies, to constitutional emergencies and emergency powers used against our civil rights. But what if it all finally collapsed? What if there was a sudden void where authority, power, and the norms that regulate society once scaffolded our lives?

That’s the question in The Emergency, the new novel by George Packer, set in a fictional world of city folk (burghers), country folk (yeomen), and immigrants (strangers) where one day everyone wakes up and finds the empire has quit—vanished almost overnight. Like prophetic novels by Orwell, Huxley, or Atwood, Packer’s narrative inhabits a fantasy world that parallels our own, while using allegory to get to the heart of the risks humanity has always faced.

Packer, a National Book Award-winning journalist who covers politics, society, and culture for The Atlantic, has written a book that I read over two days, unable to put it down. The Emergency is a literary novel that embraces plot, with nuanced characters in deepening peril. Packer is as good with human psychology as he is with social and political dynamics, thoughtfully exploring the struggles of families, society, and individuals in a time of upheaval. We met at a bar in Brooklyn in late October to discuss the book over a couple glasses of whiskey.

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Andy Hunter: I’ll start by asking about Orwell, because you collected his critical essays in All Art is Propaganda and wrote the introduction to his collected narrative essays, Facing Unpleasant Facts. Orwell, of course, is an essayist as well as a fiction writer who wrote parables that spoke to humanity and politics, like your new novel The Emergency. To what extent is he a role model for you? Did his example have an influence on your decision to write a book like this?

George Packer: I’m embarrassed to say how much of a role model he is and the affinity I have for him. I started reading his collected essays and journalism in my early twenties. I was in a difficult phase of my life, working in construction, and on my lunch breaks I had Orwell’s collected essays and journalism, and it gave me a voice and a way of seeing and thinking that brought me out of a deep funk because it was so lucid, morally clear, but not self-righteous. So, I started writing essays that were Orwellian, at least in the effort. I know they fell well short. But then I took a strange turn and started writing novels. Because to me, a writer was a novelist. He wrote novels too, but I was just thinking, I want to be a writer. What does a writer do? A writer writes novels.

People I used to be able to talk to but can’t any longer. The sense that between the city and the countryside, there’s this immense distance and antagonism and that truth is so unstable.

I did not think of journalism and literary nonfiction. Did you read any in high school? Did they teach “Shooting an Elephant” in high school? No, they taught 1984. I didn’t have any other idea of a writer than a novelist. But it turned out that writing novels didn’t come very easily. I wrote two in my thirties. They were published. They had their merits. They didn’t do well. I became a journalist. And I think 25 years at The New Yorker and now The Atlantic made me a much better novelist because I learned how to pay attention and really listen.

AH: In The Emergency, you created a full-fledged imaginary society with norms, customs, economies, geography… What’s it like to be walking around with that in your head?

GP: It was so much fun. It was like building something every day. Where’s the clock tower? Where’s the hospital? What are the streets like between them? Describe the suicide spot. What does the gallows look like? It was exciting to get up every morning and get to my desk to keep this story. There were difficult stretches and I relied a lot on Laura, my wife, to talk through it with me. But I can’t quite explain why it was so exciting and fun; I’d never found fiction fun before. I found it terrifying. Here’s a blank screen or page. Fill it up. With what? With what? Figments of my imagination? That sounds psychopathic. And it is psychopathic because you’re carrying this unreal world around which is more real than your own life for a little while. But this time it felt natural and I cared about these characters and wanted to do right by them and to get them through the story. I can’t abandon them—that was the feeling I had.

AH: Have you always been writing fiction in the background?

GP: I had given it up. I thought I was a failed novelist and I was happy to settle for literary journalism. This is obviously what I do better, this is what is in my brain, this is what I’m going to do. And I did it for 25 years, but I began to feel like I had said what I had to say. I’ve been writing books about American decline; I wrote four or five books.

AH: We’ve been declining that entire time?

GP: We’ve been declining a long time! But then, I’m sort of pessimistic so maybe I saw it before we were really declining. I mean the Iraq war, I wrote a book about that. Yeah. We’ve been declining the entire time.

AH: It’s like the Hemingway quote on going bankrupt: Gradually, then suddenly.

GP: Well, it’s the way the empire falls, imperceptibly, then shockingly. We have been declining gradually and then suddenly. I wrote The Unwinding in 2013 and now people say, you really saw all this coming, didn’t you? No, I saw social disarray, the social contract shredding, but I didn’t see a demagogue, I didn’t see authoritarianism. I’ve been writing about decline for quite a long time, but I felt like it was all happening at a certain register that can’t get to the deepest feelings.

AH: You wanted to get to the heart of the problem in a way that only literature can.

GP: Exactly. Okay, you said it for me. That’s better. To get certain emotions and experiences that I just can’t in nonfiction. Being a parent during this upheaval. Seeing the world I grew up with kind of disappearing. Trying to accept certain things about the new world. Technology is a big part of it, like the disappearance of reading, or losing basic values but trying not to let the values completely go, otherwise, what have I learned? What’s the point of raising children? What are we giving them, if not something we feel is important for them?

It is a brutal thing for a parent to be rejected by your child when you had invested all of yourself in them.

AH: That anxiety is in the book: My god, I brought this kid into this world and now I don’t know if I’m able to protect them because who knows what the fuck is going to happen.

GP: And now that the daughter in the book is 14 and there’s been this political collapse and a new kind of social vision is arising, and she’s rejecting the father that she was so close to. It is a brutal thing for a parent to be rejected by your child when you had invested all of yourself in them.

AH: But that’s also a universal experience for children and parents. That rejection is a fundamental developmental stage.

GP: It absolutely is. And I think what makes it acute now and in the novel is the rebellion of the children coincides with a genuine social and historical break; like I feel as if there’s a giant chasm between the world my children are coming up in and the world that their generation normally would have, including social and political divisions. People I used to be able to talk to but can’t any longer. The sense that between the city and the countryside, there’s this immense distance and antagonism and that truth is so unstable. What do you do when people who used to see the world similarly can’t even agree on whether this is a table or not?

All those things needed literature for me to get at. It needed a kind of literature that was different from us in time and place because you can get deeper into the feeling if you don’t have the distraction of the proper names, the familiar characters and places. So that gets us back to Orwell, because now we’re in the realm of allegory and parable and fable. Yeah, 1984 had a huge effect on me. Not so much when I read it in high school, but when I reread it about four or five years ago. A lot of writing is just aspiring toward what you love to read. That was a big impulse behind this book.

AH: I can relate to the complexity of the father in the book trying to navigate situations where he doesn’t want to just dismiss the young people. You understand the noble sentiments they’re coming from, and you question, well, the old hierarchy that I was part of, that I may have achieved prestige in, is it actually better?

GP: Yeah! Maybe we failed them. Maybe they’re right.

AH: Maybe I’m not a good dad, maybe I’m not a good husband, or citizen; maybe the world that I was part of deserves to be over.

GP: Maybe I’m a complacent middle-aged doctor who in the end didn’t really want the world to change at all because it was a good life for him and it was not so good for his wife and for his daughter. It now seems like a nightmare. So, yeah. My son said to me when I started the book, “Don’t make the protagonist the hero. Don’t have him be right about everything.” In other words, I don’t want this to sound like you telling the world what’s right and wrong. And I really took that to heart. Instead, the protagonist has a brutal education in how limited his view was.

AH: For the modern white male in our society right now that isn’t really far south.

GP: You’re right. Winston Smith in 1984 is the hero. He’s the last sane person in Oceania. It’s the story of totalitarianism and one man trying to hang on to his sanity and freedom. The Emergency is not a story of totalitarianism. There’s no big brother, no thought police… well there sort of is but it’s not it’s not the state it’s society.

AH: By the middle of the book, it feels like it’s the beginnings of a state. You can feel how it’s gonna emerge. I remember when I first read about the Cultural Revolution, a story of how a sculpture teacher was put in the cage that all the students had to walk past, and I feel like that could happen in your book.

The doctor keeps insisting to his family and his colleagues that the yeoman and the city people, the burghers, have always gotten along and why shouldn’t we continue even though the old empire is gone?

GP: Yes. There is some of that. It’s coming from society, from groupthink, from the disapproval of colleagues and neighbors and friends and your own family. And to me, that can be an even more repressive, effective form of control than the secret police because it plays on shame which is in some ways more powerful.

AH: The thing about that is that it only works on the people who are capable of shame.

GP: Yes, and he is. The doctor is very capable of shame, especially in regard to his daughter. Her opinion of him matters a lot to him. He kind of wants to get back into her good graces, but he also doesn’t trust the cultural revolution that she’s become a part of. So all that’s happening in the city. The city is walled, there are gates. The world out there is a kind of hinterland that isn’t well known. And out there are the yeoman, the farmers and artisans. The doctor keeps insisting to his family and his colleagues that the yeoman and the city people, the burghers, have always gotten along and why shouldn’t we continue even though the old empire is gone?

AH: Like when we first drove to upstate New York after Trump was elected in 2016 and my daughters realized, oh my god, there’s tons of Trump supporters here at the state fair and I was like, don’t worry, most of them are good people.

GP: They’re good people, they’re friendly, they’re very capable, they know how to fix an engine.

AH: There’s NRA gear and tons of MAGA hats and my daughters are just like, what is going on here?

GP: Yeah, “these are the enemy.”

AH: But they’re in 4-H, they’re raising pigs and llamas, you’re like, no, it’s okay!

GP: And we want our kids to feel as if our society is still whole and we can still talk to each other even if we disagree. And that’s sort of where the doctor is. He’s a liberal-minded guy whose kind of lost his place. But his family and his colleagues and everyone in the city has decided that the yeomen out there are the enemy. Because they’d stopped trucks from coming in with meat and produce. Because it seems like bad things are happening out there. Lots of rumors. He doesn’t believe them. He thinks they’re irrational. He’s trying to say, where’s the evidence? But it turns out that they’re more right than he is. And it’s sort of a self-fulfilling view because the city people then retaliate against the country people and it becomes a kind low-grade civil war. He is persisting in his naive view until it’s dangerously late.

AH: To what extent was the yeomen and burghers an allegory for rural and urban America?

GP: I mean, we have all kinds of ways to see our social divisions. Race is one, religion, and the two political parties. But I believe more and more that the fundamental division is between the educated and the not so educated. Between people who think of the future as belonging to them and people who think that they have no place in it. Electoral patterns are showing that education really is, across races, becoming the most significant signal of which way people are going to vote. So, there’s no political parties, there’s no races, and there’s no religions, but there are these two groups that are almost like castes. In the book, in the old empire there was a kind of propaganda of unity which people paid lip service to and maybe even believed, he believed it. But as soon as the empire is gone, all the suspicion and resentment and outright hatred starts to set in.

Our divisions are not the kind of division that led to the Russian Revolution or to the end of the Weimar Republic or the American Civil War.

AH: Do you feel like in our society the empire is gone? Is the empire things like Walter Cronkite telling us what our shared reality is?

GP: You know, here, the one-to-one analogies don’t really hold. America’s still an incredibly powerful and intact country. It’s doing very badly, I think, but in this story, I needed the empire to disappear in order for new things to immediately have room to grow up in its absence. And I have a sort of glib, but not totally unserious explanation, which is that it kind of died of boredom and loss of faith in itself. I do feel like, to some extent, we are dying of boredom and loss of faith. Our divisions are not the kind of division that led to the Russian Revolution or to the end of the Weimar Republic or the American Civil War. I don’t see them as running as deep as that, but we are talking ourselves into it almost as if there’s nothing better to do, nothing else to believe in. Let’s have a civil war.

AH: Talk a little bit about the wife’s character and her perspective.

GP: She’s important. You know, in some ways it’s a pre-feminist family. The empire did not have much of a public role for women. The wife Annabelle grows up under a kind of authoritarian father who nonetheless wants her to follow him into his guild. And she decides she doesn’t want to. Instead she gets married to the doctor and has children. So she’s sort of living a conventional, pre-feminist life of a capable, restless, superficially happy, but perhaps discontented woman. It’s a kind of woman that I grew up around. My mother had more of a professional life than this woman, but there was a lot of that feeling. Capable, but what’s her public role?

When the empire falls and the new order called Together emerges from the young, she’s drawn to it. It offers a place for all the misfits, all the people who didn’t really have a place. So Annabelle, just through her own concerns, becomes responsible for all these migrants who are coming into the city. That’s her role and it gives her a real sense of purpose. But it begins to estrange her husband from her. Because he really can’t get used to a family and a world in which he isn’t the patriarch. And it comes between them as it comes between him and his daughter. He’s sort of the odd man out in this whole new world. He’s ostracized from the hospital and unable to connect with his wife and daughter.

AH: That’s why he risks it all.

GP: Yeah, because he wants to get something back. He doesn’t necessarily demand to become the director of the hospital, which was the path he was on, but he wants the respect of his family and his society. And he makes this quixotic and impulsive decision to go out into the yeoman land to find and rescue this boy as a kind of Hail Mary. He has to do something. He can’t go on like this.

AH: Also he’s motivated by his desire to reconnect with his daughter and still be admired by her, though he ends up putting her massively at risk.

GP: They go out from the city into the countryside. And the reason is he’s been disgraced at the hospital where he’s the chief surgeon because of an incident that led him to kind of denounce the new order in front of his colleagues. He’s essentially been sent home. He needs to redeem himself, and he’s heard of a boy out in the hinterland, in the woods, who is of the third group, who are like the migrants. They’re called “strangers.” He wants to go out there and find this boy who’s been injured and attend to his wounds and bring him back to the city. And at the last second, the night before his departure, his daughter says, I’m coming with you. They go out together. And the whole time they’re out there, sort of the balance of power between them keeps shifting. She begins to realize he doesn’t know what’s going on. He’s in a dream and she feels she sees it.

AH: Even though they both want to be heroes.

GP: They both want to be heroes. And that leads to huge trouble and puts her in grave danger, for which he really can’t forgive himself. So what’s it about? It’s about these bonds that are stretched to the breaking point within a family, within a society, and what it takes to try to hold on to them, what you have to give up, whether you can do it at all. There’s no obvious answer, but he learns what’s important, I think, over the course of this journey. He’s not a hero, but he learns what matters most.

AH: In a way, he goes through a kind of narrowing of his concerns.

GP: Well I think he ends with a lot of his certainties shaken if not shattered. His commitment to his family is now the base of everything; it might not have been before. His place in society mattered more to him, his status. But he also has a talent and a responsibility which is to treat people, and it ends with him essentially taking on anyone who needs help and it’s a very basic moral code. It’s not based on what kind of society you live in, what future you’re building, or what professional role you’re playing. It’s a simple impulse to help the person in front of you who needs help. And you could build a new society on that.

AH: In your novel, in both the city and in the country, the elders are having trouble with the youth.

GP: There’s a cultural revolution going on in the city, but there’s also a kind of cultural reaction going on with the Yeomen in the country.

AH: It seems to me older people are always worried about young people with naive revolutionary ideals taking over, and that’s what’s happening in your book. But in reality, isn’t it mostly people from older generations that are doing the oppressing? I think it’s a fear or expectation of older people, of being supplanted. You consciously leave an absence where the old authority, the empire, had been. What was behind that choice?

GP: Yeah, well I guess because that’s the center of gravity of my feelings as a parent and a citizen. It’s almost a given to me that the old, pious, complacent, progress as far as the eye can see view has failed. I’ve written about its failure a lot in nonfiction. What I poured into this book was more my feeling of what’s replacing it, and how strange it is to me and how I’m trying to understand it. Like the yeoman boys are out in the barn, half-naked, working out, buffing up and wearing animal heads and preparing for some kind of an inchoate battle with the burghers. And they’ve been fed this doctrine called dirt thought, which is a kind of irrational, primitive, throwback idea. Well, what does that remind you of? I mean, to me, that reminds me of what a lot of boys are doing online.

AH: Andrew Tate, or the warrior ethos.

GP: Bronze Age Pervert, even Charlie Kirk to some extent peddled that high testosterone gospel.

AH: People like Bronze Age Pervert are basically like, it’s boring otherwise. Part of their appeal is just, civilization is boring. We’re supposed to be at war.

GP: Right, you guys have been feminized to the point where you have no energy, you have no ideas, you’re living these bug lives. All of this scares me, interests me, obsesses me. Whenever I had an instinct in writing this book, I did not question it. My MO was, I’m gonna create something called the suicide spot because I saw that spray-painted in Washington Square one day. What is that? It excited me. I’m gonna write about the workshop for better humans. I’m gonna do that. I did not check myself the way I might have once done and said, is this going to work? Will anyone understand it? What is it there for? I went with these instincts. And I think the weirder the instinct, the better. Weirdness made the book work better. If the book was too close to our known world, it began to die a little bit.

AH: Yeah, it stops functioning as an allegory. So talk about the shitapult.

GP: Yeah. That’s another instinct.

AH: I wondered at first if it was satire or camp. There’s something about it that’s like a scatological joke, but it’s not comedic at all in the book. It’s presented as the most horrifying thing on earth.

GP: I’m dead serious. The shitapult is a weapon.

AH: But the word “shitapult” sounds funny.

GP: It is funny and in fact the yeoman woman who comes up with it is laughing because she can’t believe what these yeoman are doing. They’re collecting shit from the latrines of all the farms and loading them up. I’m probably giving too much away now.

AH: This will be at the end of the interview, for the people who finished the book and want to understand more.

GP: Okay. Anyway, I finished the book around the end of 2024, early 2025, and I felt this shittification of America coming on with all the appointees.

AH: Yeah.

GP: I mean Matt Gaetz was the one that really inspired this, but you could go down the line of Hegseth and Gabbard and Kennedy and the language of the administration. Trump’s desire, I felt, is to just bring us all low. To lower America to a level where we would all, in a way, be his prisoners, because we would all have been lowered so much that we could never again claim to stand for anything. And what image does that bring to mind? To me it was, if you just throw shit, human shit, on your enemies, you will bring them down. They cannot maintain their dignity. They can’t think straight. So when I thought of that, I immediately realized yes, this has to be the way the book ends, with a shitstorm.

[One month after this interview took place, Trump shared an AI video of himself dumping shit on American cities.]