Two Worlds: A Guest Post by George Packer
National Book Award-winning author George Packer returns with a captivating story set in a dystopian landscape. Read on for an exclusive essay from George on what went into writing The Emergency.
Hardcover
$26.00
$29.00
The Emergency: A Novel
The Emergency: A Novel
In Stock Online
Hardcover
$26.00
$29.00
George Packer’s gripping fable of imperial collapse illuminates the crises of our times.
George Packer’s gripping fable of imperial collapse illuminates the crises of our times.
The idea for writing The Emergency came to me at the end of the pandemic, when I was spending a lot of time going back and forth between our home in New York City and a place we have in upstate farm country. The two-and-a-half-hour drive seemed to cross an invisible line between two worlds, each with its own mental atmosphere and sense of reality. I’m a journalist, and I’ve written many books and articles about the way America is dividing and undoing itself. By this point I felt as if I had reached diminishing returns with facts—the same situations, the same arguments, the same names and words, while the country continued its self-destruction.
This journey from city to countryside struck a chord that was connected to my imagination. It didn’t make me want to report a story, but instead to invent one. Many of my favorite novels—1984, The Plague, Waiting for the Barbarians, The Handmaid’s Tale—are in the genre of dystopian fiction, political allegories or fables. I began to think of a novel set in an unnamed place and time: a doctor and his family live in an empire that collapses, creating a vacuum and propelling rebellions of young people in both urban and rural areas, with radical new ideas about humanity. The empire’s two social groups, Burghers in the city and Yeomen in the countryside, begin to believe that the other is trying to destroy them. As the society comes apart, so does the doctor’s family, with the most important fracture between him and his children, especially his teenage daughter. She’s caught up in the excitement of change and utopian dreams, while the doctor can’t accept the new order that’s taking over his city.
There’s a scene early in the novel where the doctor is summoned to appear before the hospital’s “self-org committee” because of an incident in his operating room. The meeting ends in his disgrace and ostracism, which propels the rest of the story, taking the doctor and his daughter out of the city into Yeoman land just as a civil conflict is about to break out. The hospital scene was the first I wrote, and maybe that’s why the early draft felt too journalistic, as if taken straight from current events. I had to set my imagination loose to build a world with its own reality. I usually write with a lot of control and intentionality, but to make this novel work I had to follow intuitions that at first seemed strange, maybe even incomprehensible. For example, one day I saw the words “Suicide Spot” spraypainted on the pavement in Washington Square, and right away I thought: teenagers in the city build a gallows as a place for public therapy sessions.
The further the novel got from the particulars of our world, the deeper it was able to explore the feeling of being alive in America at this moment. That’s what fiction, and especially this kind of novel, can do.