World Made by Hand: A Novel
by James Howard Kunstler
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Book Reviews of World Made by Hand: A Novel
Book Review: All White, All Male, All Crap
Summary: 1 Stars
I read a lot of post-apocalyptic books. I've always enjoyed being freaked out and scared almost to death by thoughts of the end of the world since I grew up loving films like Blade Runner and The Road Warrior. I've had a renewed interest in reading these books since everything in the world has been unraveling in the past few years (Hollywood has picked up on it too - there are no less that 3 major films coming out in the next 6 months in the post-apocalyptic genre, The Road, 9 and The Book of Eli)and there have been more new books in the genre lately.
World Made by Hand isn't poorly written. That's not quite accurate - the dialogue is poor. The plotting is terrible. The pacing is nonexistent. Yet I read the sample chapter and thought it might be interesting since it was working this whole religious, Amish thing and I hadn't seen that done too often in the genre. It was different so I gave it a chance.
You take a gamble and sometimes you lose.
In Kunstler's near future there have been bombs dropped on LA and Washington that have to do vaguely with a Holy War somewhere else (it is never clear where). There is never any discussion about life outside the US and why no one has helped the US in recovery or what happened to the military and only a passing reference to the government being wiped out in Washington but now set up in Nashville or Minneapolis (but no one knows anything and they don't care - the only thing on the radio is a screaming preacher). Since the falling apart of the US through war and the Mexican Flu, there is only rare electricity and life in upstate NY has reverted to pre-industrial American gothic. Kunstler doesn't seen to think this is a bad idea actually especially if you manage to have a peaceful little town that is filled with white men, subjugated women, no homosexuals, no African-Americans, no people with foreign sounding last names, all Christians and plenty of folks who have old-timey trade skills (how many people do you personally know right this minute who can blow glass? Weave baskets? Identify edible plants? Grow a tomato? Card wool? Light a camp fire? Find fresh water? Fish without a rod and reel? Ride a horse? Yeah, that list was very short for me too.).
This is some kind of whacked out middle-aged male fantasy where there are only middle-aged white men. There are no young men, the only virile one in town is killed off almost immediately and his widow; who is about 25 years younger than the main character becomes ONE of his love interests. It seems everywhere this guy goes, women want him, even though he is pushing 50.
We are supposed to like this guy but he has no soul. No heart. He's lost his entire family but so have most people. He sleeps with his best friend's wife and doesn't feel any moral ambiguity about it. He calls it an arrangement. He ends up shooting some poor bastard and doesn't really have any feelings on that. He starts schtupping the 22 year old widow a week after her husband is murdered in cold blood. No problem with that. He eats lots of meat and is especially entranced with hot dogs, hamburgers and big chunks of beefsteak. In a society such as this meat would be extremely rare since there is NO REFRIGERATION. Things would revert to an agrarian lifestyle.
Many of Kunstler's ideas and background for his world are off the mark.
The people have lots of parties and social events. I had a hard time envisioning this even 10 years or so after the big bombs and mass deaths from the flu. One man in town acts as a robber baron and gentleman farmer with a bunch of serfs/slaves. This seems to be ok by everyone too and this guy has it all, electricity (hydro-electric), music, a concert bandstand, plus plenty of carnival foods.
Yet the town has no electricity and no one seems to want it. They don't want heat in the winter or A/C in the summer? How about refrigeration? They think it is better without cars? Without law and order? Without education? Without emergency medical care? None of these issues are addressed. Kunstler makes his people Amish and they love it. Then he throws in a bunch of religious nutballs who worship a frothing at the mouth fat woman who has seizures and can possibly predict the future. Wow, ok. That ends up being totally left field and makes no sense at all but then Kunstler takes it one step further by making the religious nutball leader uh - something not human. I was totally lost at that point. Was the guy an apparition? Was he a collective hallucination? Was he a messenger of God? I don't know but he named him Job (with an e on the end) so I'm sure to the author it has some significance.
Women in Kunstler's world are nurses, cooks, mothers and whores. Often all at once. They don't participate in local government. They don't have anything to say. They don't read. They don't fight. The young widow sits at home and weaves baskets with her daughter, cooks wonderful meals for the main character, services him with her nubile body and knows how to catch and gut a trout (before she puts it in the smoker).She's like post-apocalyptic Martha Stewart.
The "evil" people in the town live in a trailer park and are rednecks which seems unlikely in upstate NY. They speak like rednecks too saying things like "gol-durn" and "got-dam". Much of the language has reverted to old-timey 19th century colloquialisms. In fact they call the old times "the old-timey times". This use of dialectic made me gnash my teeth. Kunstler probably thought he was being clever but it made for awkward reading. Plus is that very likely coming from the 21st century that people would revert to this country-speak? Ditto that all the music anyone plays in the "good" part of town are folk songs from 150 years earlier. Does anyone in this day and age even KNOW songs from that time period? In the "bad" part of town Kunstler has them play versions of Metallica songs and Nirvana's "Smells like Teen Spirit" to illustrate their evilness.
Kunstler seems to think that once we have no electricity, no fuel and no government we will focus on simpler pleasures and give up trying to have electricity, cars or theme restaurants and malls. I can safely say that is a total and utter crock.
Things in this world do not move backward - they go forward - always. If everything goes to hell in a hand-basket for this country or the world you better believe that there will be someone somewhere thinking - hey, I can make things BETTER. And they will. That is the indomitable human spirit.We pick up the pieces. We move on. We make things better.
Kunstler could have made this book better. Much better.
I wouldn't want to live in his idealized, homogenized white mans world. I'm just too much of an uppity, smartypants female full o' book learnin' who wouldn't be willing to whore herself to some bearded carpenter in exchange for "security". Anyway I wouldn't need it. I know how to use a gun as well as how to open up a can of whup-ass. In an old-timey times way of course.
Book Review: "There is a profoundly discouraging message embedded here."
Summary: 5 Stars
World Made by Hand is a beautifully written novel about a very difficult time, post-Peak Oil. Some books hit you in the gut and force you to think; and this is one of them. You may go where you don't want to go--But it's quite a trip.
The book begins innocently enough. Two men are fishing in a stream near an old railroad bed. They are talking, enjoying each other's company. It is "sometime in the not-too-distant future." And thus does a story unfold over a couple of summer months. The only hint that something is amiss comes when the narrator states that he "couldn't remember a lovelier evening before or after our world changed."
The world changed? Then the two fishermen gather their belongings and walk back to town. They are walking, of course, because there are no motorized vehicles. In this world there is no oil. But the lack of oil is just the beginning of this summer's tale.
Welcome to Union Grove, Where there is No Oil.
No, this is not a story about how the world has "run out" of oil. In the big scheme of things, the world will never run out of oil. The Peak Oil concept means a lot of things to a lot of people.
The key idea of Peak Oil is that output of crude oil will reach some maximum level on a global scale. Then world oil output will decline over time. But in the future there will be oil -- plenty of it, perhaps -- in some parts of the world. And there will be very little oil, or none, in other parts of the world. And that's the problem.
Which gets to the point of James Kunstler's marvelous new book. In the "not-too-distant future" you won't find oil in the small, upstate town of Union Grove, New York. For Union Grove, the Oil Age is over. And in this futuristic setting, Kunstler plays out a prophecy that may be closer than you suspect.
Kunstler's novel falls within a genre called post-apocalyptic literature. The author's premise is that there will be an apocalypse. Bad things will befall mankind. Lots of people will die. And some people will survive. This is the survivors' story.
So in a literary sense, World Made by Hand is similar to some famous Cold War-era novels set in a post-nuclear-war world, such as On the Beach or Level 7. Kunstler is writing fiction about survival and survivors, describing what might happen.
A fictional world creates a new set of boundaries. Some things are not plausible in our "real" world. But good fiction makes possible events and reactions that might not otherwise occur. Within fiction, some events take on a new form of logic or plausibility.
But to be convincing, we have to trust the author or the narrator. With enough trust, we can accept a story based on the narrator's perspective. The narrator becomes our eyes and ears. So the narrator must come across as reliable.
In World Made by Hand, Kunstler's narrator "Robert" -- a former executive at a software company, turned carpenter -- mixes science and technology with well-established economic and political trends.
Overall, Kunstler paints a grim picture of the future. Oil or no, life goes on. It's even sweet. In some scenes this book tells a story that is funny. Yes, you are allowed to laugh as you read this book.
Let's discuss the grim part. What sort of apocalypse occurs? Well, Kunstler never just hits you in the face with it. Like a grand master, he plays his cards subtly. Kunstler offers you only enough information at any point for you to feel the chill winds of a terrible disaster.
Throughout the book, Kunstler tosses out clues. For example, Kunstler spells out how in the past, worldwide demand for oil far outstripped the available supply. So prices for oil began to skyrocket. People became desperate and did desperate things. Sound familiar?
Kunstler makes passing reference to a war in the Middle East. But he never goes into detail. He doesn't have to, really. The details are not critical to this story line. But you learn that during the war, things got out of hand.
On this last point, Kunstler is not just economical in his use of words. Indeed, he's downright parsimonious. But with just a quick bit of dialogue, Kunstler puts a chill into your spine, if not the fear of God in your heart.
Kunstler mentions in passing two horrific acts of terrorism. The bad guys (guess who?) managed to set off two nuclear weapons on U.S. soil, obliterating Los Angeles and Washington, DC. Within a short time national commerce broke down. Communications disintegrated. The economy crashed. The capital city of the U.S. moved to Minneapolis. Any semblance of control by a central government just vanished.
Within Kunstler's deft narrative, things in post-Peak Oil America just fell apart. The center did not hold. Food supplies dwindled. The power grid broke down. Health care stopped functioning. Roads and highways quickly become impassable due to lack of maintenance, as well as marauding bandits. People starved. Population centers contracted, most in a catastrophic fashion.
In World Made by Hand, Kunstler answers the question posed by Rodney King in 1992 during the Los Angeles riots. "Can't we all just get along?" Well, no. Not in an unraveling land of rapidly diminishing resources. It's the same continent, but a different world.
There is a profoundly discouraging message embedded here. For almost everyone in this post-apocalyptic future, life in the U.S. has become, as the saying goes, "a b*tch." And you know what happens next.
Review by a writer for Agora Financial, publisher of economic and financial analysis including Financial Reckoning Day Fallout: Surviving Today's Global Depression, The New Empire of Debt: The Rise and Fall of an Epic Financial Bubble, and I.O.U.S.A.: One Nation. Under Stress. In Debt.
Book Review: Adventures of an honest man
Summary: 4 Stars
Quite late in the story it is revealed, that Robert Earle, the narrator of the story is actually a Jew born as Robert Ehrlich.
As "ehrlich" is German for "honest" (like the author"s name "Kunstler" is German for "artist") it becomes clear at this point that Kunstler hopes that the honest man will survive in the post-oil future and his honesty will be rewarded not only by social status (Earle is elected mayor) but also by personal happiness. (Earle is rewarded with a perfect second family)
The family consists of a young, beautiful, hard-working mother who not only knows how to drag buckets of water from the river so that the homecoming hero can have a well deserved shower but also can get the fishing right, so that the hero doesn't have to teach her, while he will be able to teach the beautiful seven-year old daughter how to play the violin.
I understand that the book is meant to paint a "better than expected" picture of the post-oil future, but Kunstler would have done better not to expose so openly his lack of experience with certain important parts of life.
Many female readers are surely angry how he does not present women as human beings with their own well-developed characters, hopes and fears (instead of just being there to give some more color to the male characters) but most important it is quite obvious that this book was written by somebody who never had experience with children of his own.
Children are mostly not present in his story except as examples how bad some adults care for them or as a reason for grief because they are gone and may be dead. At the beginning a father puts himself into harm's way because of a dog and is shot to death. This is the father of the aforementioned angelic seven-year old. As bad as his marriage may have been, this is not what a real father would do. Especially not in a world like Kunstler describes it, where children are one of the most important things that make life worth living.
This lack of understanding of important aspects of life is one of the greatest shortcomings of this book and more generally also with books like "The Long Emergency". In the end, Kunstler does not seem to care about the fate of future generations, as long as he can have the last laugh at them.
The numerous short chapters at the beginning of the book are obviously meant to teach us something that we do not yet understand. This has been tried before: The German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote a lot of plays with a message to the unenlightened masses of dumb workers. (This was the original "Lumpenproletariat") Unfortunately Kunstler is neither a poet like Brecht, nor does he have messages that can be shouted from a stage to make people feel good about the future (If they only get their act together.)
Despite all these shortcomings "World made by hand" is one of the best books about the post-oil future that is currently available, because despair does not help. "World made by hand" not only carries the message that "we must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately" but also that a lot of things worth living for will be rediscovered, once the collective party of cheap oil is over. Kunstler may lack experience with family life but he makes up for it with his experience from his painting trips so that he can draw our attention to details not visible from the inside of a car or an air-conditioned house.
At the end of his book he also discovers, that the coming hardships will probably lead to a renaissance of some kind of spirituality. This isn't new either: It is a time-tested fact that people who believe in something have a better survival rate in difficult times than people who do not. The supernatural element is more of a guiding force, though, and not something that directly meddles in the affairs of mortals. The wakeup call at the funeral at the beginning is given by Brother Jobe: No community can allow lawless elements to dominate the honest people without risking it's disintegration.
Let's hope that Kunstler is right there. Experience with the disintegration of the Soviet Empire seems to suggest another pattern: Law and Order only return when the first generation of gang bosses grows old and is challenged by the next generation. Then they become the champions of the new order (which is often a quite strict one). Maybe Kunstler should have a talk with his friend Dmitry Orlov on this subject.
If it is true that Kunstler plans some more novels about the post-oil future I hope that these sequels will be as good (or even better) than "World Made by Hand".
If "World Made by Hand" is ever made into a movie I surely hope that the screenplay is supplemented by scenes and dialogue that help to correct the major shortcomings of this novel mentioned above. The world in general and the USA in particular would surely profit from the wider audience such a movie could reach!
Book Review: New Urbanism meets TEOTWAWKI
Summary: 4 Stars
James Howard Kunstler introduced myself and many others to "The New Urbanism" school of land use and architecture in his excellent books "Geography of Nowhere" and "Home from Nowhere." Thousands of people have had eyes opened to the drawbacks and possibilities that current American land use and home building situation offers. Importantly he relates all things to a good appreciation of organic human social life as it can be well lived, in contrast to the socially atomized and mechanistic square boxes into which round edged people find themselves mercilessly shoved by circumstances.
His recent novel called "World Made by Hand" brings his insight and gifted writing style to the post apocalyptic genre. You know the type, "after the collapse," survivalist type books, a breed of book spanning from the well published and distributed Tri-States books to that scary little red book they sell at gun shows, to the recent book by Rawles, Patriots. Books in this vein often run on paranoid energy and liberterian fantasies of escape from intrusive government by the lucky chance of disaster. The genre itself has spawned a subgenre of survival manuals, survival kits, survival forums, survival expos, survival schools, survival reality shows, survival of all things imaginable to a degree the average person neither will experience nor imagine.
This author brings a different perspective. You would rather expect to find someone like Kunstler at a cooperative organic farming venture than a gun show. The different perspective exercised in this boook brings life and positive possibilities to what can otherwise be a tedious genre that is not much better in terms of literature than reading Army field manuals.
This book also goes light on the action. It's there, but it fits into a plot and character development instead of those things seeming like trappings for the action. Again, a welcome change.
People who know Kunstler's editorial writing will find his fictional style more awkward than his deft and stinging satirical prose. The characters are a little odd. The location is a little town in New England, after some combined catastrophes of terror incidents and peak oil have wiped out the fedgov, its standing army, the phones, most electricity, and so forth.
In a way it reads like "my side of the mountain--" remember the book about the kid who went camping for a couple years in the Catskills. How he guts fish, how he keeps his butter, how they barter, etc etc. I found myself thinking of Hemingway's Nick Adams story details of fishing around Petosky Michigan. Kunstler is not the stylist that Hemingway was but he has surely written of what he knows.
Kunstler like most other fictional post apocalyptic prognosticators figures race war into the future equation, tangentially, without integrating it into the plot or narrative of this book. However, on the positive side, Kunstler does show how organic family and ethnicity may resume a higher place of importance in social organization than it has in these politically correct times which regard natural ties of blood as prejudice.
Religion plays an interesting role in this book too. I wondered if Kunstler's own Jewishness might somehow be projected on to his characters. Yet, the characters are mostly Congregationalist Perotestants, a locally governed, decentralized sect that is perhaps appropriate for Kunstler's notion of the world being organized at the hyper-local level; but, I found the total omission of any Roman Catholic Church a very unlikely scenario for the future world. The Roman Catholic Church has survived for over 1800 years and outlived a hundred fallen Empires and I do not expect the fall of the next one will be any different. The Jewish people do not figure much in this book but make a surprise appearance which I will not reveal as a spoiler.
The book does not veer into any kind of utopianism, not any kind of vain hoping for some lost ideal that never existed, which is a nice change of pace from some of this genre. The scenario suggests certain things about government in only the mildest and most moderate manner. Kunstler's editorial voice is surprisingly well muted in this book and yet his insights are delivered aptly as a result.
Best of all the book improves as it progresses. I think it might have benefitted from a little more editing to trim it down a little, but overall this book is a winner and Kunstler has done well with this foray into post-SHTF and TEOTWAWKI territory.
Book Review: Razed, and Confused.
Summary: 2 Stars
It's healthy to include post-apocalyptic stories in one's literary diet. Contemplating what life would be like in a drastically altered world provides substantial food for thought and some wholesome anxiety. A World Made by Hand, though, is junk food. It is a recipe concocted of too many ingredients, as if author James Howard Kunstler opened his idea pantry and swept all the contained ingredients into a stew fit only for unwanted in-laws that are coming to dinner. I like salsa, and I like apples, but they don't go well together, and neither do many of the elements in this book.
In his non-fiction work, Kunstler has a current axe to grind: when we run out of oil, disaster looms. While it is vigorously debatable as to whether we have passed the halfway point on recoverable petrochemical supply (admittedly predicated on increasing environmental costs per barrel recovered), a book set in the very near future based on the premise of a disappearing supply of oil seems somewhat premature. A previous axe that Kunstler ground vigorously until 1/1/2000 was the looming Y2K catastrophe. When it didn't happen, he attributed it to massive spending, much of it "secretly". In his fictional work, World Made by Hand, the United States lies prostrate under the twin assaults of loss of oil supplies and the nuclear bombing of Los Angeles and Washington, DC (we don't know by whom). Small towns in the Northeast begin to try to put themselves back together. Terrific potential as a tale, but in the writing of the story Kunstler falls short in confusing ways.
Post-oil America has streams that are crystalline and teeming with trout, air that is clean, and lots of good wholesome food. It has women (not a single woman has a role other than sex partner, good cook, errand girl)that seem quite content that life has gone back to "the way it oughta' be" from a man's point of view. People of color are virtually absent, absolutely no need to be concerned about bilingual education in Kunstler's new world. America's melting pot has apparently boiled down to a reduction that consists of white people with folksy dialects. The bad guys are whatever is one step down from blue collar: dumb, uneducated, filthy. The good guys are...weird. A religious cult that is a cross between the Amish and Jim Jones' Kool Aid Kids (except, in this case, Jane Jones) moves into town with a mysterious, epileptic Queen Bee.
If you haven't read post-apocalyptic novels before, and want some solid edification, read A Canticle for Leibowitz. If you'd like a post-disaster story that is light fare, but much more entertaining than A World Made by Hand, try Stephen King's The Stand. For an unrelenting "heart of darkness" approach, pick up Cormac McCarthy's The Road.
Kunstler's novel is an easy read, multiple loose and enigmatic plot strands aside. You might even learn a thing or two about post-oil life. For example, if you're a man, and your hands and feet are bound by the bad guy, don't spit in his face unless you want to get an ass-whuppin' extraordinaire. If you're a woman, best be good at cooking and canning. You might also learn that the best way to have a man choose you as a mate has little to do with your brains, your personality, your outlook on life, your talents, or your principals. Rather, place wardrobe malfunction at the top of your list: nothing works quite so well as letting your blouse suddenly slide to the floor. Oops! Marry me!
You can read the book in a day. If you rate books by whether they make you ponder, or whether you can see life in a different light by the last page, World Made by Hand will leave you wondering if it was a day well spent. I'd rate it a slice of Wonder bread with jelly, when what I was looking for was a hunk of fresh-baked multi-grain with a slab of hearty country cheese.