In a familiar-yet-distinct world cleaved into factions of city-dwelling Burghers, rural-living-Yeoman, and migrant Strangers each distrusting of the very language the other uses, The Emergency –or conspiracy—begins in a moment eerily similar to our own. The fall of an unnamed empire starts with “reports of an impasse at the top of government,” whose effects continue to sprawl from the city to its more remote provinces, like “an outbreak of a new disease.” In the novel’s first two paragraphs, celebrated non-fiction writer and The Atlantic columnist George Packer at once conjures the too-recent specter of the Covid-19 pandemic and presciently signals the 2025 U.S. Government shutdown.
Despite The Emergency’s proximity to our present, in our recent interview Packer muses of the novel’s world-building that “the further out it goes, the better it is. If it feels too much like ‘that’s wokeness’ or ‘that’s MAGA’ then I haven’t really done what I wanted to do, because I wanted to be more universal than that.” At the same time, the strains of universality that he signals or articulates to me—failing leadership, class and racial conflict, youth rebelling against parents, the “complacent, satisfied, middle-age pillar of the city” protagonist Dr. Hugo Rustin represents—are deeply informed by the author’s celebrated non-fiction work, for which he has won the Hitchens award, National Book Award, and has been a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
To a reader familiar with Packer’s political journalism, The Emergency draws much poetic license from the author’s clarion observations about American political division in Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal (2021). For the novel’s central conflict examines politicized factions so deeply divided by different versions of the facts that “they no longer inhabited the same world.” Though Packer may not want the world of The Emergency to feel too much like the American present, he explains that Last Best Hope’s four distinctly different Americas (Free, Smart, Real, and Just) were developed somewhat concurrently with The Emergency and inform the world he develops in the novel. “The four Americas in Last Best Hope are very much a kind of guidepost or a framework that helped me think about The Emergency,” Packer explains. The idea for the novel took shape during the pandemic, when he was “going back and forth between New York City” and his family’s “place in Upstate” where “it’s rural…farm county” with “a lot of Trump supporters.” The experience gave him “just a glimmer of an idea of a character who had to do that, who had to go from one to the other, and [recognize] how different those worlds could seem,” as if they were “almost…two different countries.” For Packer, “that feeling of estrangement is at the core of the story…in The Emergency.”
The Emergency presents as a dystopian work of speculative political fiction, where the genre’s typical features of estrangement, familiarity, and travel from one world to another guide its plot. The novel’s central storyline focuses on Hugo Rustin’s and his daughter Selva’s self-imposed “humanitarian mission” into Yeoman territory to save a Stranger’s injured son. The Burghers, who have come under the control of the young, zealous Wide Awakes after the empire’s collapse, still offer humanitarian aid to the novel’s Strangers (the novel’s often troubling stand-in for Migrants, Immigrants, and those of color). By the novel’s close, the Wide Awakes are converting Stranger hostels into training facilities and Strangers into soldiers for an impending war with the Yeoman. By contrast, the rural Yeoman, who believe the emergency is a “conspiracy” imposed by the Burghers, have been overtaken by their own zealous youth. This sect of hypermasculine “Manimals” parade in animal hides and espouse Dirt Thought, a “discovered” counterfactual to Burgher histories of the Yeoman, but which is actually covertly written by their leader, Gard the Strong.
Even for one coursed in obscure nineteenth-century history who might recognize the “Wide Awakes” as a faction of youth zealots in the antebellum north, it is difficult to unsee the dynamic between the American Left’s mobilization of “wokeness” amid youth-led protests for racial and social justice in contrast to the Right’s notorious QAnon Shaman or the white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017 (there is even a scene in which the Yeoman, carrying torches, encircle Rustin and Selva).
I asked Packer, no stranger to critique from both sides of the political aisle, about anticipating criticism for the novel’s suggestive polarities. While Packer rightly notes “there’s not one-to-one correspondence,” he openly acknowledges that the novel “has elements of social justice” and of the “violence that you find in elements of the extreme right, especially among young men.” And, as any prolific political journalist might, Packer responds honestly and with a bit of a chuckle “you know, I always anticipate criticism because it always comes, and at a certain point you have to accept that it will come and not try to head it off unless to head it off is the right thing to do.” While the lesson in Civil War history may stave off some critics, Packer recognizes, too, that his “name is a bit of a target for some people who think that the left should be immune from criticism,” adding that while “most of my work criticizes the right” it seems “the left doesn’t register that.”
While language is an epicenter of conflict between the Burghers and the Yeoman likely to resurrect criticism of his earlier article The Moral Case Against Equity Language, Packer hopes the novel won’t be “so obvious and predictable to criticize.” When I asked Packer why he returned to the novel as a genre after nearly thirty years, he admits that “it was scary at first…because those other two novels I wrote in my 30s [The Half Man (1991) and Central Square: A Novel (1998)] were not happy experiences.” In fact, he describes that earlier novel-writing experience a bit like George Orwell did in Why I write: “a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.” Though he credits Orwell as an inspiration (notably, Packer has edited collections of Orwell’s essays), Packer’s experience writing The Emergency was vastly different from that of his earlier novels.
Writing The Emergency, which he quips first felt like “returning to the scene of a bit of a literary crime” was a different experience entirely. Packer soon felt “stronger and more and more excited and by the time I was well into it, it was really exhilarating.” While it took “active effort every morning to get out of the world of news and media and phones to write fiction” he describes it as a necessary effort. “I felt I had come to diminishing returns with journalism”; Packer asserts that “the idea of changing anyone’s mind or even establishing what’s real and what isn’t in the minds of readers after January 6, 2021, which briefly forged a consensus” felt impossible. “I felt exhausted at the repetitions, the efforts, the same old arguments,” he explains.
For Packer, at that moment, “the language felt dead.” The Emergency, though, offered him an escape, though not an escape entirely. He quickly adds, “I wasn’t prepared to just escape reality altogether, but I wanted to maybe even get below the surface of it by escaping from the names and the particularities of reality and tell a story that was entirely of a world that I had to build.” As for choosing to write “dystopian fiction or a parable or a fable” or “whatever name you want to put to it” Packer says he’s “always had it in his head because I love reading them” just before naming 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale, and the play Waiting for the Barbarians as among his favorite works.
Although Packer recently recounted in an article for The Atlantic a number of reasons effectively explaining why one should not write a novel—readers’ lack of attention span, the waning number of Americans reading daily for pleasure (only 16%), and the fact that “the novelist as voice of a generation no longer exists”—he has nevertheless given us The Emergency, a novel that asks for our attention and may seek to reclaim a bit of that lost voice. While the ending is far from happy (a civil war has erupted between the Burghers and the Yeoman), it is also far from bleak. In the novel’s closing scene, Dr. Rustin has returned to his chosen profession and his home, which has become a makeshift field hospital, the door to which, Packer writes, “would go on opening” to whomever might arrive, regardless of faction. For Rustin, Packer tells me, it is an “impulse toward common decency and humanity” that will allow them to find a way back. I strongly suspect Packer feels quite similarly about our own fractured nation.
George Packer will be in conversation with Adriana E. Ramírez at Pittsburgh’s City of Asylum, November 17, 2025, 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm EST as part of their On Topic series. Visit City of Asylum for free tickets to the in-person or livestream event.
