World Made by Hand (2008)
James Howard Kunstler (1948-)
317 pages
Terrorists have exploded nuclear bombs in Washington DC and Los Angeles, severely disrupting both the government and transportation of goods, and quickly leaving the US economy in taters as confusion and security concerns paralyze the country in fear. A war in the Middle East shuts off a significant amount of the oil supply, destroying what is left of both the US and world economies. Appliances and other electronic equipment sit gathering dust as the electricity has sputtered out, cars and trucks that have not been melted down for metal gather rust in the weeds for lack of gasoline and communication even between neighboring communities has become rare in James Howard Kunstler’s vision of the near future.
All this has occurred several years in the past as
World Made by Hand opens. The novel follows the lives of the citizens of a small town in upstate New York, as they come to grips with the new world in which they live. They hear of the violence that has swept through the bigger cities and more populated areas, though their relative isolation from the rest of the country saves them from much of its worst effects; they have less luck when the flu and other diseases spread quickly through the population leaving many dead, as medication now in short supply or out completely.
The residents who have survived find themselves returning to the lifestyles of their ancestors. They learn how to make use of what grows naturally or can be raised in and around their community; how to make the clothing and furniture they used to buy and the now vacant and crumbling stores on the outskirts of town; and how to entertain themselves in a world without the electrical distractions of the past. In Kunstler’s telling, many of the people of this small community, once the turmoil of the transition has been overcome, gradually embrace the new, slower world they have inherited. They may occasionally long for particular aspects of their past, eating a favorite food from a far-away place or throwing clothes in a washing machine, but in general they find that the peace and serenity of their new lives more than makes up for the additional hard work of the highly localized and completely de-electrified new world.
But their isolation is not complete of course, as the townspeople discover when a religious group called the New Faith arrives from Virginia seeking a quieter and safer corner of the country. Taking advantage of the lack of any functioning government in the community, the group buys some buildings and land, and settles in. Although the new settlers bring additional talents and capabilities into the town, their tendency to remain separate from the community, their religious fervor and their distinct manners and habits lead to an on-going, low level tension between the them and the original townspeople.
The New Faith order as a kind of foil for the townspeople. While the New Faith members are tightly organized in their work and their goals, the townspeople have settled into a kind of apolitical and secular stagnation --- they help one another for the common good, but they remain focused primarily on their own lives, no one taking the initiative to create order or structure in the town as a whole. The arrival of the New Faith group forges a sense among the townspeople that they need to pull together to at least meet this new ‘other’ from a stronger position, and thus new leaders to begin this work.
Kunstler builds the plot slowly, introducing the townspeople and their changed world, and then slowly adding in elements that serve both to build tension for the reader, and to shake the characters out of their settled existence. From the sequence of disasters that pre-date the events of the story, to the description of the new life the people build for themselves and the challenges they face, the author keeps the novel grounded in a realism that actually adds an unsettling quality for the reader, as it becomes easy to imagine oneself in the new world he has created. The one false note for me then, comes very near the end, when the author introduces a bit of the supernatural into the story; it seems to come out of nowhere, and feels out of place. (Having now later read Kunstler’s follow-up novel,
The Witch of Hebron: A World Made by Hand Novel, it becomes clear that the introduction of the supernatural in
World Made by Hand serves as a set-up for a storyline that will apparently be followed in a series of sequels to this opening novel.)
In
World Made by Hand James Howard Kunstler presents a startling vision of an all too easy to imagine future. Unlike other apocalyptic stories, the apocalypse here comes from events that could be ripped from today’s headlines --- no world-wide nuclear war, or asteroid slamming into the Earth, just a relatively isolated series of events that jam the gears of our extremely complex modern society.
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