A Novel by James Howard Kunstler

Title: World Made By Hand
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press, 336 pages
ISBN-10: 0-87113-978-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-87113-978-8
Price: USD 24.00
Release Date: February 28, 2008

James Kunstler may best be known nowadays as one of the preeminent voices advocating the adoption of realistic policies designed to address the looming oil shortage we most certainly are facing. In such books as The Long Emergency and The Geography of Nowhere, he has set forth a cogent argument that the automobile culture we currently take for granted is on the verge of disappearing, leaving in its wake a populace stranded in isolated suburban sprawl marked by abandoned strip malls--what he has called "Potemkin village shopping plazas"--cut off from all but their most immediate neighbors. He has been sounding this warning for well over a decade, though I can't help but wonder if he sometimes feels like a voice in the wilderness.

In World Made By Hand, Kunstler returns to the realm of the novel. Using fiction's power to open us up to ideas in ways nonfiction often fails to do, he gives us a vivid depiction of the kind of world he has described in his other works. It's a depiction that rings true.

The story unfolds through the voice of his main character. Robert Earle doesn't seem particularly likeable when we first meet him. A former high-powered software executive, he is now trudging through middle age in a small isolated town in upstate New York, his wife, children and livelihood having fallen victim to the Long Emergency. A series of disasters have rendered America into a virtual Third World country. Epidemics have reduced the population to mere handfuls of survivors struggling to eke out an existence in a decidedly unforgiving landscape, all but cut off from the rest of the world.

Gruff and pragmatic, Earle seems undecided about whether or not he likes this state of affairs. On the one hand, he doesn't miss much of the old order. Passing a dilapidated Kmart sign, he offhandedly remarks, "I wasn't sorry that it was out of business, but I was sorry that the remnants were still there." On the other hand, he is ready to give it all up. "It really is not possible," he says, "to pay attention fully to two things at once--for instance, carpentry and suicide." His ambivalence makes him an unlikely hero--but a full human being. His strength lies in his ardent support of his neighbors, who see him as the perfect choice to help hold things together within the small community. He may not agree with this assessment, but he nonetheless assents to take on some of the hairiest problems facing the town. Community is his charisma. As a result, everyone is drawn to him, the undaunted romantic who still has time for a summer sunset even as the world goes down the toilet.

Yet Robert Earle is not an optimist; neither is he a mooning nostalgic. He knows the world will never return to what it was, and he doesn't waste time pining after what has been lost. He does his best with what he has now. His narrative voice is droll, a little resigned, alternately despairing and determined. He asks nothing more than to be allowed to live out his remaining years in quiet work, all the while striving to maintain a protective barrier against the violence pressing in at the town's borders. He is T. E. Frazier in a Mad Max world.

For Kunstler's story reminds me of nothing so much as Walden Two, B. F. Skinner's 1942 Utopian novel espousing love of the land, a return to true community and an end to human self-destruction. Unlike Skinner, however, who fervently believed the human psyche could be tweaked into virtually mindless bliss, Kunstler offers us psyches scarred by the trauma of civilization's collapse, men and women seeking strength and solace in hard cider, hard partying and hard loving. For me, his is the more believable scenario.

Wrapped around his message is the hero's tale. This for me is the real strength of Kunstler's storytelling. All the elements of the traditional epic are here: the reluctant hero, thrust into greatness; the task, which requires him to set forth on a quest; the saving of the damsel in distress; and the final battle with evil, from which the hero returns, scarred but transformed, to take up his life again, now on a higher level of consciousness than before.

Throughout this quest, Kunstler paints the trappings of life in lush lyrical prose. He has a keen eye for detail and a deep appreciation for beauty, both natural and artificial. His paeans to the rotting infrastructure of material society are every bit as enticing as his delight in the Black-eyed-Susans on the side of the road. I sometimes got the feeling that the plot was merely a backdrop, the excuse for taking the reader on a marvelous scenic tour of a world returning to its natural sanity after the destructive rampages of modern human lunacy. Civilization might be in the throes of dissolution, but Kunstler makes it sound like Paradise. "I couldn't remember a lovelier evening," the story opens, "before or after our world changed." His presentation of the end of the world, filled with rust-eaten bridges, unusable roads and abandoned buildings gutted for their salvageable materials, all of it surrounded by fields of gloriously blooming flowers reclaiming their territory, is perhaps not so much a prediction of what is to come as it is a metaphor for what already is. In its place, he offers us the world as rediscovery, salvation as remembrance, hope as reconstitution.


This book drew me in. The short chapters highlighting specific themes; the concise, well-structured prose; the delectable description; and the classic Everyman-as-hero plot made it impossible to put the book down. That plot clips along at a nice pace, but the story manages to possess a leisurely feel nonetheless. Kunstler is adept at evoking an entire visualization with but a few well-placed words.

For me, World Made By Hand presents Kunstler's thesis more accessibly than in his nonfiction works. Rather than simply warning us of the road we're on as a society, he lets us feel what it's like to be on that road, and to go beyond it. On the way, Robert Earle offers us a hope that is neither forlorn nor desperate; rather, it is possible. And that, after all, is what a hero is meant to do.

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James Kunstler's response, used here by permission:

Trev--
Thanks for the intelligent review.
Being the subject of reviewers has always been weird for me. They rarely "get" what I'm trying to do -- you did, I appreciate that. (They also never notice my books are funny.)

Thanks again !

Jim