The Unwinding is a rather classy addition to the thriving genre of American apocalypse porn. The basic thesis can be found online in Jim Kunstler’s The Clusterfuck Nation Manifesto, which runs to a few thousand words, but over hundreds of pages George Packer gives it the full literary treatment. He signals his ambition by taking as his model the USA trilogy of John Dos Passos, which spliced mash-ups of newspaper cuttings and pop lyrics, brief lives of public figures and longer episodic biographies of obscure ones, into an indignant portrait of America in the first three decades of the 20th...