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: Flawed dialog and plot, but powerfully imagined scenes make for a rewarding read
Summary: 4 Stars
"World Made by Hand" is a post-apocalyptic novel written by an author known for his non-fiction works on oil depletion and the unsustainable arrangement of America's cities and suburbs. This novel shows what the world might be like if the worst-case scenario involving Peak Oil and societal collapse comes to pass. In most cases, novels written by pundits are bare-bones plot boilers with poorly-imagined settings and shallow characters who spend most of their time delivering homilies about the author's pet causes. But Kunstler wrote several novels before becoming a pundit, and has real literary skill. This novel stands on its own as a worthwhile read, independent of Kunstler's non-fiction work on suburbia and peak oil.
The novel concerns the survivors of an apparent avian flu epidemic living in a small Adirondack town, Union Grove, following a catastrophic decade in which America's wars in the Middle East result in nuclear terrorism which wipes out Washington D.C. and Los Angeles. Oil might still exist in the world, but the American infrastructure has collapsed so thoroughly that none of it reaches New York. The town is composed almost entirely of white, formerly middle-class people who are raising gardens and animals while waiting to see if the United States will re-emerge from its downfall. Hopes for such a resurrection are fading fast. The one remaining institution in the town is a United Church of Christ parish whose minister has secretly lost his faith and no longer lives a particularly virtuous life (his wife is involved in a type of swinger arrangement with a former marketing executive turned carpenter, who serves as the book's narrator), while trailer park denizens on the outskirts of town have banded together as a violent tribe and intimidate the more gentile townsfolk. When the tribe murders a young man from town in a moment of confused panic, it becomes clear that there is no functioning law remaining - and it is at this moment that a nomadic religious cult reminiscent of the 19th century Mormons arrives in town, determined to settle down and build a New Jerusalem in Union Grove. The largely demoralized and aimless towns-people find themselves caught between a gang of sociopathic thugs, both in the town's former trailer park and another gang down-river in the brilliantly-imagined ruins of Albany, and a tough, determined brigade of true believers who at times seem to be townspeople's savior, but who also seemed determined to impose their views of right and wrong on the town. It's like the Hell's Angels verses the Taliban, and it's an intriguing premise.
Unfortunately, this book is merely good when it could have been great. Kunstler tries to reproduce the upstate New York and the Appalachian dialects in his dialogue, and the resulting dialog tends to be more awkward than charming. The cult's leader, Brother Jobe, talks in a kind of revivalist argot that strains the ear. Kunstler has admitted that he originally intended the cult to be the villains, and the early chapters present them as a sinister presence, while the later chapters present them in a more heroic light. There is a truly bizarre scene that suggests the cult possesses psychic powers - it ties into one of the novel's themes, that in the new post-oil world science is no longer the raining paradigm in people's minds and that wonder and mystery exist in the world again, but the conclusion of the battle between the trailer trash tribe and the cult suggests that the cult's leader won using psychic powers, which strikes me as an unsatisfying deus ex machina conclusion of the novel's plot.
This novel would have been truly great if Kunstler had taken another month to write one more draft, smoothing out some of the awkward dialog and exploring the cult's mentality in more detail. Brother Jobe speaks in an odd mish-mash of revivalist cliches, but we never really know how the cult emerged or how they interpret religion in light of the times they live in. They seem to have emerged from Pentecostal Christianity (in his non-fiction books, Kunstler openly worries about Pentecostals and Fundamentalists who believe in the Rapture reacting to oil shortages and climate change by proclaiming the End of Days), but they seem keen on building a New Jerusalem on earth rather than waiting for a divine rescue from Heaven. Their leader, Brother Jobe, seems too comical to be a genuine religious visionary capable of articulating a new spiritual vision.
But despite these flaws, Kunstler's book stands head-and-shoulders above "The Road" or other recent apocalyptic books both in quality and in plausibility. Kunstler excels in describing a crumbling suburban landscape reverting to nature, and the scenes he describes linger long in the reader's mind after the book is closed. What makes "World Made By Hand" so compelling is that its society hasn't collapsed due to some fantastic calamity like solar flares (the apocalypse suggested in "The Road") or a bio-tech experiment gone wrong (like in Stephen King's novel "The Stand" or the more recent films "28 Days Later" and "I Am Legend"), but because of resource depletion and the global wars it causes, things we read about every day on news sites. "World Made By Hand" is a plausible speculation about what life may be like in 15 years, and its warning should be taken seriously. The book's literary quality is high enough that those who want to warn others about the seriousness of our current predicament can recommend it to their friends based on its literary merit alone.
Note: Many of the reviewers on Amazon react negatively to the book because it shows women losing their hard-won equality with men when modern technology fails. A few have also noted that Kunstler depicts today's tattooed, hopeless slackers as tomorrow's violent thugs. These reviewers would prefer that Kunstler painted a more left-leaning picture, where women establish a matriarchal society and the obsese, tattooed addicts of fast-food and Internet porn rise to the occasion once they have "the man" off their backs. These reviewers are misguided. The simple fact is that women's equality with men depends greatly on our modern society's amenities, and if the lights were to go out, women could easily lose all they've gained. There is little reason to think that the demoralized, poorly-educated youth clogging our malls today would suddenly turn into model citizens once the Wii goes dark. In fact, in the novel these people arguably did rise above their current laziness and did establish a kind of society - just not a society guided by our best democratic traditions. Kunstler is depicting a dystopia here, warning us of a future that we must avoid, and feminists and those sympathetic to today's under-educated, under-employed lower class would do better if they spent time figuring out how to maintain a just, egalitarian society in the face of the steep challenges we face in the years and decades ahead, rather than criticizing someone who warns that these things are fragile and could easily be lost.
Book Review: Review of World Made by Hand
Summary: 3 Stars
I can't say that the book is a great work of literature but it was interesting and problematic in ways that are difficult for me to overlook and, unfortunately, will forever color how I read Kunstler's other writings.
When we read we bring our own identities and experiences to what we're reading so of course I kept that in mind. But as a woman, the book was highly offensive and as a Black person, it was equally offensive. In this work that imagines a post-oil future, the world has returned back to the way things were in the early 1800s. Women are only good for sex and domestic duties. This is a male-dominated world where women are only valuable for what their bodies do not for who they are. Even to this day, this is a struggle women are still fighting but without all the modern living distractions and societal emphasis on inclusion, equality and political correctness, it just intensifies things. Apparently, no female doctors, lawyers, law enforcement, engineers or high level corporate executives have ever existed or else they were all wiped out by the flu. Hell, even a women being able to skillfully angle a fish gives the main character some pause. Women are notable because of their beauty (or once being beautiful) and their ability to bake bread and cook well. Black people are only relevant as participants in race wars. Seriously, there are NO BLACK PEOPLE whatsoever in Kunstler's futuristic imaginations. So, the only people who really matter in this futuristic world are White men.
Otherwise, the story was just okay. It lumped along in some places and beleaguered some points to the point of exhaustion. Kunstler keeps on referring to "the old days" and trying to remind the readers how totally different this world is from the one we are living in today. Unfortunately, for any of us who have traveled to third world nations, especially if we've visited remote villages, the world Kunstler imagines is one that already exists there. Maybe a tad bit better. In this town, at least, there's running water and the soil is fertile enough where anyone with some gardening know-how can grow something. Electricity is not a given but it flickers on every once in a while (eventually it goes out permanently). I was not impressed by "difficulty" of this world Kunstler imagines and, as the main character states toward the end, things did fall back into normality. To be fair, it seems that this town where the story takes place is one of the more fortunate areas of the country where some semblance of order exists. Elsewhere there is pure chaos, violence and, of course, race wars. (Ah, those pesky Negroes.) But this town has held their little society together and at the end seems to be on it's way to getting better.
I couldn't help but to draw comparisons between Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and this novel. Parable of the Sower is ten times more brutal yet, in my mind, the writing is much more artistic and skilled and inclusive. Even though these books both imagine a world so totally different than the one I live in now, it's just so interesting to me that White male privilege would still carry over in Kunstler's futuristic world while in Ms. Butler's futuristic world, those privileges are hardly relevant anymore. It seems the futures we imagine are informed by our current realities.
Some interesting similarities were, of course, the obvious absence of cars. In WMbH, all cars have been stripped for their metal in the "Great Collection". In PotS, they're just gone and the protagonist marvels at a world where one person had to have a 3 car garage to house the cars. In both stories, self-sufficieny in food production is a must. The fruits and vegetables they eat, they plant and I for one, take some small joy in the fact that in both these stories, the Earth is still giving, still producing. The meat they eat, they catch or raise and butcher. Ironically, in both books, wheat is a difficult grain to come by. In WMbH, the people substitute corn bread for wheat bread/cakes and in PotS, there really are no substitutes except for acorn bread which it doesn't seem many people know how to make. In both books, community is essential to survival. Those who are not part of a strong community are doomed--no way around it. Community is the only thing that provides safety and some security. Another interesting similarity is that religion and questions about God feature regularly in both books. In WMbH, there's an enigmatic, ultra-religious sect that moves into town with plenty of loyal, hard-working followers. In PotS, the main character is obviously going to be the originator of a brand new (and equally enigmatic) religion, builds followers and eventually settles on some land that will clearly be the religion's headquarters (I haven't read the sequel to PotS and I'm not sure I will).
I enjoyed World Made by Hand for what it was. It was a creatively written and well-rounded story despite its problems. It was funny at times (like when the main character tries to describe to a young child what a car was) and made you really think at others (because there was indeed brutality and violence and makes you hope that the changing times will bring out the God in people and the Devil in them). Overall, especially compared to Parable of the Sower, the futuristic world of Kunstler's is not that bad. It's livable or at least I could imagine myself living in it. Not so with Butler's future world where gated communities provided a only a semblance of security. That security only lasts for about a quarter of Butler's novel and we are plunged right into the violent, chaotic world outside of the gates. Kunstler keeps his entire story, for the most part, close to the fairly orderly town.
Anyway, I'm ready to read a novel that imagines a post-oil future that hasn't gone to hell in a hand basket. I hope to stumble across one.
Book Review: A great read
Summary: 5 Stars
James Kunstler's (http://www.kunstler.com/) novel World Made by Hand is about the end of the world as we know it; it's a must-read, and I hope everyone I know reads it so we can have a big argument about it!
In the near future (by around 2015, it would seem) both Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. are destroyed by nuclear weapons. As a consequence of this, oil no longer flows to the USA, and therefore fertilizers, insecticides, plastics, petroleum-fueled vehicles, and, generally, modern life, are all swiftly defunct. The power grid comes on only a half-hour a day; the only radio transmissions are the rantings of preachers. The Internet has become a fairy tale.
The story focuses on a small upstate New York town that has the good fortune to have its water supply gravity-fed, and to be populated by a number of residents skilled in the essentials of nineteenth-century living: a doctor, a dentist, a minister, a carpenter, etc. Despite the great changes in the world, they live on. Their population has been decimated though, from flu and encephilitus.
The novel explores the kinds of groups that populate this new world. There are roughly six factions: First there are the townspeople: the remnants of a middle class and "normal" life: the novel is narrated by Robert Earle, who was once a manager at a Boston-based high tech firm. Robert has lost his family to illness. Then there is a Mr. Bullock, who is a de facto plantation master, whose peasants work for him in exchange for stability and a top-down collective economy; Bullock has accomplished some remarkable things, such as getting a small hydro generator going. Another group is the hive-like New Faith Brotherhood, led by Brother Jobe -- they've arrived recently from Pennsylvania, which they have fled due to race-based fighting among the refuges from D.C. and Baltimore. Wayne Karp is the top dog in Karpstown, a loose-knit cabal of scavengers who live near the town dump, which they excavate for spare parts from the past. Further afield in Albany is Mr. Curry, who runs the docks. Finally, there are those who live outside these groups in isolation.
What Kunstler does is spin these characters and groups into a ripping yarn that wouldn't be out of place in a nineteenth-century novel by Twain or Dickens. There are a couple of levels to this: At the level of individual characters, the novel is a bit of a soap opera, with hair-raising escapes, romance, sentimentality, tears and even some laughs. All this will keep you turning the page. There's also some solid scene-painting of the post-oil remnants:
The once meticulously groomed grounds of the state capitol building, an impressive limestone heap in the Second Empire style, were now choked with box elders, sumacs, and other woody shrubs. Knapweed, vetch, and blue chicory sprouted from the cracks between the broad front steps where a few ill-nourished layabouts sat listlessly surveying the scene. Inside the grand old building, every surface had been stripped down to the bare masonry. Carpets, draperies, chestnut wainscoting, metal fixtures, all gone, probably long gone. The stink of urine and excrement told the rest of the story. I would have turned and left had I not heard a familiar tapping sound seeming to come from distantly above somewhere up the southeast stairs. (p. 166)
On another level, though, he's posing a great sociological question: Can civilization survive after this disaster? What combinations of these groups might balance one another into a kind of stability? It's a little hard to know how serious Kunstler is in this orchestration, because the last few chapters of the novel veer into some weird territory. But I don't want to give away the ending. For exploring social organization through fiction, he's right up there with Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein, and I'm a sucker for this kind of speculative fiction that works its way through problems via believable characters.
Some readers are going to wonder how the world could go to pieces so quickly after the destruction of two cities. After all, the United States has recently suffered the partial destruction of New Orleans, an important port city. But Kunstler knows whereof he speaks: He's the author of an important book The Long Emergency which is about the consequences of "peak oil" that moment when the maximum rate of oil extraction is reached, and it becomes increasingly hard to get it out of the ground and run society. If even 1/10 of what Kunstler reports in The Long Emergency comes to pass, then the story of World Made by Hand won't be fiction, it will be fact.
Kunstler was born in the late 40s, so he came of age in the 1960s and 1970s. One thing that amused me . . . somewhat . . . is that once the power goes off, people revert to a stereotype of . . . hippies! There's a lot of pot-smoking, long hair, and mate-swapping; taste in music tends towards folk. A brief mention is made of "Smells like Teen Spirit," but the characters in the novel make fun of it. I wondered at times if Kunstler was having a bit of satire with his melodrama.
But this is just quibbling. It's a good book, and if you believe "it can't happen here," then go read The Long Emergency as a followup.
Book Review: Good Read, But A Bit Shakey In The Details.
Summary: 5 Stars
I recently read JHK's "World Made By Hand", and liked it for the most part. It was a good read, except for some very annoying glitches. I'm one of those people who gets turned off when the cowboy pulls out his six-gun and blasts off 8 rounds without reloading, or the story took place in 1911 and the guns the people are carrying haven't been invented yet.
Like on page 126 of "World Made By Hand", where JHK says "Even the few pigs running in the street seemed mostly skin and bone." He very obviously knows nothing about pigs - which are an extremely resourceful animal. In any place like upstate NY and in any season of the year when they ground isn't frozen solid, any pig that is allowed to run loose is going to be as fat as - well, as fat as a hog. Hogs are never without food if they can forage on their own - they will root up a lawn and eat not just the grass but also the roots, and the roots of the trees, and anything else they find. They also literally can eat dirt, and thrive on it - they get much sustenance from the micro-organisms that live in the soil, not to mention any worms, gophers, moles, etc that they come across. In fact, hogs are such great foragers that in much of the Midwest now we have a serious problem with feral hogs, and I mean clear up in the farthest reaches of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota - they do great, even in the frozen northern Winters.
But there are other mistakes in the book as well. JHK doesn't explain just how long it has been since things went bad, but the idea that people wouldn't have been building things like wind-generators is just plains silly. Even now people are building very efficient and effective wind-generators out of scrap and powering their homes.
Check out http://www.otherpower.com/ People can even make their own deep-cycle batteries to use with them by melting the lead from old car batteries and casting new, big thick plates. I've got a book from the early 1900's that details how to build batteries from scratch and maintain them - with wooden cases, no less. So their total lack of power is just silly.
As is their total lack of fuel. Sure, I agree with JHK that biofuels are not going to replace fossil fuels for the masses, but anybody with a few acres will sure find it easy enough to set up a still and make all the fuel they need for their pickup, their rototiller, tractor, generator, what have you. I can make 1500 gallons of ethanol a year from just one acre of cattails and the spent mash from that gives me enough food to raise at least 100 pigs to market. If you live in a drier area, you can do the same thing with crops like buffalo gourd. And these are permaculture crops that need to only be planted once, and need no fertilizer or herbicides or pesticides.
Another thing I found annoying was JHK's idea that these people would have no ammunition for their guns. Being from NY, maybe he doesn't now much about guns, but look - fired cartridges are easily reloadable. The commercial equipment to do so is available everywhere, as are the components, millions of people in the US do it regularly as part of their sport, but cartridges are also reloadable with almost no equipment, or with just simple tools and ersatz parts made from scrap. Likewise, bullets are easily cast from lead - junk car batteries work fine, so do wheel weights. Gunpowder, at least the old time black powder, is also easily made by hand, from potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulfur. Potassium nitrate is easily made by mixing urine or liquid manure with wood ashes and collecting the salts that drip out. Charcoal is also easily made, and sulfur is widely available from farm and garden supply stores, or can be dug from the ground in old volcanic areas. Primers can be renewed with the tips of strike-anywhere matches, or even by making your own mercury fulminate, or sodium or potassium chlorate. For that matter, muzzle-loaders are pretty ubiquitous these days, and can be easily manufactured, including flintlock and matchlock firing mechanisms.
Again, I did like the book, but I think JHK paints too dark a picture in some respects. I do think there will be a lot of starvation by people in cities, the inept and impaired, the clueless. But a lot of the rest of us will do just fine. I know that my family will always have plenty to eat, live in a warm house (in the far north), and have plenty of lights and fuel for our machines.
Book Review: Nope. It is NOT a realistic depiction, nor is it a good read!
Summary: 1 Stars
To mix metaphors - I had great expectations and instead found a shipwreck on the island of apathy.
First, I will give credit where due - the protagonist is well described and I can empathize with his feelings, depression and apathy. That's basically it for the positive.
It's as if Kunstler did a minimal bit of research and then zero critical thinking on how a society would revert to a more primitive form of social organization once the technological foundation of that modern society was completely removed.
The entire premise of the story revolves around apathy - personal and societal. I find that not only abhorrent, but also unrealistic. If - or maybe it's when - our technology and oil based society fails because of lack of cheap oil and its benefits - travel - long and short distance, cheap heat, chemicals, electrical generation etc., we will find alternatives - whether it's coal derivatives, electrical or some other technology that will only be viable when oil is expensive and scarce.
Does this mean that society will keep up its frenetic pace of change and "progress"? Not at all. Especially if one adds into the mix terrorists with nukes and rampant epidemics that destabilize world society and kill hundreds of millions, if not billions. Society will most likely have to revert to an earlier era where technology is much simpler and supportable for those needs that are "Made by Hand". But that does not mean that some semblance of `modern' technology won't remain and be maintained as viable - steam trains is but one example.
Another example - Kunstler has most (an implied ~99%) of the cars recycled for their steel. Ok, not a bad idea if there isn't any gasoline from foreign oil fields being imported any longer. But... it's fairly simple to convert a gas engine to run on alcohol or even "wood gas" (Google that and you'll be amazed). So there'll be some sort of short range transportation made possible by individuals with an engineering proclivity. Will this sort of thing be wide spread like today's trucks and autos? Not likely nor practical. But it will exist in some form. Why? My answer is human nature. Find the unknown and unworkable and make it work.
Another glaring hole in my opinion is the fact the Kunstler allows the electricity to come on at random intervals and for short random times. If trains, planes and automobiles are non-functioning and non-existent, then where the heck are the electrical generators in this grand scheme? If society can't make a wood fired steam train work, how can a complex power grid be maintained? If apathy is the watchword of the decade, then who the heck is climbing the power poles to connect the power lines? Furthermore, if most of the trucks and autos have been recycled for their metal content, why haven't the power lines been recycled for their copper and aluminum content? I can't willingly suspend my disbelief to cover that large and glaring of a gap.
Guns. Though never specified, it's implied that this story takes place 10 to 15 years after a `crash' where the whole world just stops functioning. Given the number of guns in America in 2008, given the rural setting depicted in the story, the near absence and rarity of guns is one more point where it appears that Kunstler has discarded critical thinking. Even though the population has been devastated by virulent disease, gun violence seems out of the norm and relatively rare. Rare enough to shock the protagonist when it appears early in the narrative. I'd posit that regardless of the number of people that succumbed to the uncontrolled diseases, gangs of thugs would have been, or are still, ravaging the country far and wide, scrounging for food, more guns and women to rape. Survivors would have had to deal with these gangs of thugs time and again - or be killed by them. I would suggest that violence would remain distasteful to thinking and feeling humans, but it would not be as shocking as Kunstler has portrayed it.
I could detail a half-dozen other oversights or outright goofs, but suffice to say that this was not an enjoyable post-apocalyptic story. Way too many gaps of logic to be remotely probable. And for my money that's what makes these sorts of tales enjoyable or not. And this one was not either probable or enjoyable.