A sad, uplifting look at recent history

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 448 pages, $27

George Packer’s new nonfiction book, “The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America,” has many of the qualities of an epic novel.

Packer’s subject is the last 35 years of U.S. history, the decades that gave us the conservative “Contract With America,” an Internet boom and bust, two wars in Iraq and a Great Recession. They were the best of times, and they were worst of times, and in Packer’s able telling it’s as if Dickens himself were taking a first crack at fitting all that history into a book.

Packer, a staff writer at the New Yorker, begins with a series of newsreel headlines in the fateful year of 1978 and follows the stories of several Americans to the present. It’s a book about all sorts of people, rich and poor, getting caught up in a constant storm of economic upheaval and social revolution. Everything around them is changing, and much that’s dear to them is being destroyed. Packer tells their stories in a thoroughly professional work of journalism that also happens to be more intimate and textured — and certainly more ambitious — than most contemporary works of U.S. fiction dare to be.

“His mind filled with visions of a decadent kleptocracy in rapid decline,” Packer writes, describing the thoughts of one of the many people whose story he tells — in this case, Matthew Weidner, a small-time Florida attorney waging a solitary fight against the faceless corporate lenders foreclosing on overextended homeowners.

The modern U.S. isn’t quite a kleptocracy, but it is a country spinning out of control as its leaders embrace the notion that what’s good for Wall Street must be good for Main Street. Packer’s other subjects include a Youngstown, Ohio, factory worker; a family on the verge of homelessness in Tampa; a gay, conservative Silicon Valley entrepreneur; and an idealistic lawyer whose earnestness takes him, fleetingly, to the highest circles of political power.

America’s decline, in Packer’s telling, isn’t the result of a conspiracy but rather the natural consequence of the collective, individualistic fever that’s taken hold of the nation’s psyche. It sweeps up Newt Gingrich at a young age, who transforms it into a series of simple and powerful ideas.

Oprah Winfrey gets swept up in it too, her megalomania rooted in a deeply seated sense of powerlessness: “She was so big she owned the letter O. … Anyone allowed into her presence had to sign away freedom of speech for life.”

Packer’s subjects don’t give up on their visions for themselves and their country. And in the end “The Unwinding,” is a book that manages to be both sad and uplifting, much like the turbulent times it describes.