“It’s like the rules don’t apply anymore,” Willa says. Upheavals in publishing and higher education have knocked their income back to starting-level salaries. Willa and her husband, a college professor, worked hard their entire lives but are now close enough to retirement to realize that no retirement awaits them. As the novel opens, this extended family has just moved to Vineland, N.J., into a collapsing house that serves as their precarious shelter and a very sturdy metaphor. The heroine, Willa Knox, is a freelance journalist burdened with the care of her baby grandson and her right-wing father-in-law. The contemporary story in “Unsheltered” offers a collage of Democratic talking points acted out in the lives of a middle-class family slipping down the ladder of success.
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