The emergency A novel

Packer, a journalist and winner of the National Book Award for The Unwinding, delivers a propulsive Orwellian novel set in a strange future world known as "the empire." The story's beleaguered hero, Dr. Hugo Rustin, chief surgeon at a hospital in the empire's unnamed capital city, initially brushes off the Emergency, which begins when the city's ruling elite flees and teenage looters take to the streets. "These things never last," Hugo reassures his wife and their two children. "We'll go about our normal lives." But the empire collapses and after Rustin's misstep during a surgery leads to his suspension from the hospital, he's forced to confront the new order taking shape. In the vacuum left by the empire rises an egalitarian youth movement called Together, which elevates the formerly disenfranchised Excess Burghers, who scored too poorly on their exams to join a guild, and romanticizes a nomadic minority group called the Strangers. Tensions escalate between the Burghers, the urban middle class the Rustins belong to, and the less educated rural Yeomen who farm outside the city walls. Rustin, feeling adrift in a world that no longer values experience, embarks on a "humanitarian mission" to treat an ailing Stranger boy. At the last minute, his 14-year-old daughter insists on joining him, triggering a chain of events that will leave irreparable damage. Packer writes with spare elegance and mounting urgency, and while the depictions of rising class and intergenerational conflicts have clear parallels to real-world matters, the novel never loses its taut dramatic edge. It's a knockout. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (Nov.)

A doctor strives to preserve his family in the face of civic collapse. National Book Award winner Packer--forThe 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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.