In his nonfiction book The Long Emergency (which I haven't read), Kunstler argues that we are heading for a societal crash of epic proportions. The end of the fossil fuel era is coming faster than we believe, and we're not ready; we should be prepared for wars and a return to an agricultural society when the gas runs out.
World Made by Hand gives us a fictional depiction of American society after that crash has happened. Kunstler doesn't go into great detail about the specifics; we know that Los Angeles and Washington, DC have both been destroyed by bombs, and there are rumors that an American government still exists somewhere -- Minneapolis, maybe? -- but it's too far away and too powerless to have any real impact on anyone. A flu epidemic has killed a large part of the population, and those remaining have scavenged the abandoned homes for whatever useful supplies they might have contained.
The novel's set in Union Grove, New York, a fairly typical small town, where most financial dealings are now done on a barter system. The electricity works only sporadically, and not predictably enough to be of any real use. Former staples like wheat flour and sugar are now luxuries, only rarely available. Transportation is (at best) horse-drawn carriages, and the roads have deteriorated so badly that they aren't always practical.
Our narrator is Robert Earle, once a software executive, now earning a living as a carpenter, and he narrates the events of one summer in Union Grove. There's not a lot of plot, as such; just a series of events, not terribly well connected. A small religious sect has moved into what was once the high school outside town, and is met with a mix of excitement (new faces!) and suspicion (are they going to try and convert everyone?). A gang of would-be warlords runs a scavenging operation/general store out of the town dump and bullies anyone who crosses their path.
There are odd little hints of things that might develop into an actual story, but they never really do. Oddly, many of them are placed in the last third of the novel. There's a visit to the matriarch of the New Faith sect, a morbidly obese woman who seems to have psychic powers; she knows, for instance, that Robert is Jewish and has changed his last name from Ehrlich. There are two dead men who appear to have been killed in identical fashion. But these things are just left hanging. I suppose that's what very well might happen in real life, but real life has the advantage over ficiton of not having to be dramatically compelling; in a novel, you expect there to be a payoff from such teases.
Still, if World Made by Hand isn't quite satisfying as a novel, it's interesting as a portrait of a radically altered America. It's been long enough since the crash that the younger generation -- anyone under 15, say -- has no memory of the old ways, and even older folks have, for the most part, adjusted to the changes. I can't bring myself to believe that things will change as dramatically or as badly as Kunstler thinks they will, but there is an odd optimism to his post-apocalyptic story. Even this, he tells us, we could survive.
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