Lacking in vision and insight: a review of The Emergency

The Emergency is a very smart, thoughtful, poignant, biting, and well crafted story about how people respond to collapse of social order. Few are prepared for this collapse, referred to vaguely as "The Emergency." Even fewer are prepared for what comes afterwards to fill the power vacuums. Sometimes upheaval bring out the best in people, but more often, it seems to do the exact opposite. The writing is proficient, and the character work is strong, effectively portraying how diverse people might react differently to chaos and catastrophe. They rarely find unifying principles to bring everyone together, and George Packer resists offering easy answers to tough questions. As a result, there's a perpetual sense of unsteadiness and alienation that should resonate with most people in the world at the moment.

At first, I saw similarities to Animal Farm and 1984. Those comparisons would normally be high praise coming from me, but the more I think about it, I realize The Emergency rubbed me the wrong way. When a book portrays a series of movements focused on making the world safer and fairer, I expect their attempts at building a utopia to not be laughably flawed, whereas Packer seems more interested in exposing how narrow-minded, undercooked, and lazily cobbled together their ideologies are. No utopia is easy to build or maintain, so I understand if a novel can't be set in a cozy hopepunk anarchist cooperative or a fully automated luxury communist solarpunk society, but I wish efforts at reform and revolution in The Emergency had at least been taken seriously. While George Packer is allowed to be cynical and skeptical of change, he doesn't have to dismiss it entirely as juvenile. Dystopian fiction obviously should be cynical and bleak, but the bleakness here comes without being earned. There are missed opportunities to say something inspiring as the narrative shies away from urgency, always retreating into platitudes about what happens when different demographics don't have meaningful dialogue. I don't mean to minimize the value of dialogue, but it's only one small and rather trite piece of the puzzle. I wanted The Emergency to be more ambitious. It has the trappings of ambition, but lacks the necessary vision.

There's also something incurious about the book. Various interdependent interest groups are introduced as automatic enemies without ever interrogating why upbringing alone might cause them to be drawn to diametrically opposed worldviews. It relies heavily on mapping these groups onto real-world counterparts. The thing is that the world of The Emergency is different from reality. The real world has power hungry demagogues, profit motives, and things like religious dogma to reinforce division. In the book, however, there aren't as many clear motives for why people are drawn to specific national narratives, why false and inflammatory versions get propagated, why outsiders always end up othered as a result, and why no one can find common ground. The novel just assumes that humans have the unalterable character flaw of being fundamentally vulnerable to brainwashing, which feels defeatist and unimaginative. The Emergency is not the type of speculative fiction that requires detailed or sprawling worldbuilding, but without even hinting at explanations, the novel is blind to the systems that perpetuate social divisions.

To be as politically insightful as this book thinks it is, it truthfully needed some sort of equivalent for talk radio, cable news, social media, and other platforms used for spreading information, misinformation, and disinformation. (There is arguably a social media equivalent, but it isn't used for algorithmically spreading content. It's just used to numb people to reality.) It also perhaps needed a slightly clearer sense of whether anyone benefits from disinformation or from the resulting fear of others. It's possible to address these issues without worldbuilding (like in I Cheerfully Refuse by Lief Enger). It would be fine to keep things vague, but what The Emergency is doing goes beyond vagueness. It not only fails to answer whether anything or anyone is behind these divisions, but also neglects to even make the question feel relevant. The result is a story that is likely to capture a lot of what Americans already feel about politics without articulating something useful, new, or profound about those feelings, what caused them, and whether there's any way to respond.

I still don't want to turn fans of literary dystopia away. I think it's important to read about these more skeptical and cynical approaches to change and chaos, and I legitimately enjoyed the challenge of figuring out what exactly about this book didn't work for me. I also think The Emergency does shed its skepticism at times. It might not have faith in humanity as a whole, but individuals in the story do grow, learn, and change for the better. If you like character driven books that feel relevant to what's happening in real life, this one might work for you, regardless of how you feel about the underlying skepticism.