Hand Me Down World: Book Notes On "World Made By Hand"

This is a book review of "World Made By Hand" by James Howard Kunstler. It (my review) is not a story, but there was no other, more relevant choice available among the "Type" categories.

In World Made By Hand (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008), James Howard Kunstler presents a fictionalized account of how the world will operate based on changes he foresees in his earlier, non-fiction work The Long Emergency.

The novel is set in the near "post-peak-oil*" future, perhaps the 2020s. The world in World (www.worldmadebyhand.com) has grown much bigger again. It has undergone enormous change. The U.S. has been involved in a protracted war in the "Holy Land", in an attempt to safeguard access to a dwindling supply of petroleum. The results have been predictably disastrous, precipitating cataclysmic terrorist attacks on this continent. Influenza and encephalitis epidemics have ravaged the population, which has had to become radically more self-sufficient.

The protagonist, Robert Earle, had been a computer industry executive before the collapse. He and his family had lived in affluence in the Boston area, but, when his company goes belly-up due to economic collapse, they sell the big BMW and move to Union Grove, New York, his wife’s hometown, to live with her father, who is glad to have the company in shaky times. But in fairly rapid succession, Earle’s father-in-law dies, followed by his wife and daughter (in one of the disease epidemics which become more prevalent). Soon thereafter, his grown son decides to hit the road, seeking adventure, or at least a change of scenery. Earle hasn’t heard from him since.

 

Because he has some experience and possesses some hand tools, Earle becomes a carpenter. This skill allows him to trade out his work for tender, goods or services necessary in day-to-day living. Others in the community are not so lucky. Some move on to destinations unknown. Others put in with different "strong men" in the area.

 

One of these "strong men" is Wayne Karp. Karp is a menacing thug, whose equally-menacing minions run an operation at the old landfill, which they dig up and sort through to retrieve materials of value. They then sell those materials to the community through an institution known as "The General". The community needs these things, because manufacturing of new goods has mostly ceased.

 

Other powerful men (in the societal shakedown which has occurred, the power is all with men; women have reverted to "traditional" roles) run large farming operations. The land, which during the years of cheap energy had been used more and more for residential and commercial developments, increasingly further from city cores, has been returning to agricultural use. These large farms utilize the labor of many people and animals, because mechanization has become rare.

 

One of the large farm operations is run by Stephen Bullock, who had been a wealthy landowner before the collapse. His operation now resembles a sort of feudal manor, with Bullock as the lord, and the scores of the displaced who live on Bullock’s farm, people who were otherwise occupied before the collapse, as serfs.

And Union Grove has recently become home to a mysterious religious sect, known as the New Faith congregation, or the New Faithers. These folks, who follow a man known as Brother Jobe, are a bit of a mystery, and a bit of a worry. They have been on the move to escape troubles - violent upheaval - in Virginia, which generally follow the pattern of troubles throughout the southern U.S., where the mayhem has been more severe than elsewhere in an otherwise embroiled nation. At the center of the New Faith congregation is a very peculiar woman known as the Queen Bee; she and Brother Jobe, and another New Faither, Brother Minor, seem to possess supernatural powers. And while they represent a possible source of trouble, they also seem to be generally cooperative and neighborly.

 

In World Made By Hand, Kunstler’s boogie, as it were, is to throw these, and many more characters into a stew. They are put into a situation in which they are all tested by events and circumstances. The sport lies in how everyone reacts.

 

Kunstler, who has also written extensively on the folly of modern residential/commercial/city design, spins a tale that is by turns riveting, informative, and horrifying - sometimes all at once. And while Kunstler does mix in a good supply of humor, it is typically of a more subtle variety than the acerbic wit he displays in some of his non-fiction work, and on his website (www.kunstler.com).

 

The New Faithers, for example, are turned less threatening in part by the humor with which they are presented. Brother Jobe’s mode of speech brings to mind a slightly more intelligent Jethro Bodine, which is quite amusing, and disarming. And while Earle and a squad of the New Faithers are returning to Union Grove from a mission down the Hudson River to Albany to look for a missing boat and crew sent by Bullock, they come across an old man driving an automobile. It is the first functioning motor vehicle any of them have seen in years, and the description of this fellow’s determination to move about on wrecked roads in a wreck of a vehicle is both funny and illustrative of a culture which stubbornly continues to pursue a "psychology of previous investment" policy which no longer makes sense. Earle’s offer to a houseguest of a linty hamburger purloined from a party and pulled from his pocket is pretty hilarious, too.

 

And in an otherwise harrowing passage at Karptown, the area near The General where Wayne Karp and his henchmen reside, wherein Earle and Loren Holder, the Union Grove Congregational minister who has been named constable, have gone to confront Wayne Karp regarding some of Karp’s unsavory actions, the humor serves as a salve. As Earle and Holder arrive, they witness a man playing a tune which is at once familiar and remote. After some time, Earle remembers the name of the song: Smells Like Teen Spirit. And a bit later, when the tension has ratcheted up even more, Karp’s group is putting on an unintentionally-hilarious talent show. One of the acts at this show is a group of young brothers who perform Metallica’s "Creeping Death" (a potent metaphor if there ever was one) on a guitar, a piece of sheet metal, and bongo drums. The image provides a rich contrast, and works wonders in the context.

 

Quibbles? Yes, there are a few. As mentioned before, World has a lot of characters. Some of those characters feel a bit under-explored. In Kunstler’s defense, he may have meant to keep the page count down, knowing that, given today’s short attention spans, and that books don’t sell as they once did, it wouldn’t due for him to put out a 900-page tome on the order of something by James Michener. On the other hand, it would have been nice to develop some characters more fully. The passage of time in the story can seem irregular, or distorted. It almost feels that all of the events took place in a matter of a very short period of time, say two weeks, when it is apparent that it should be longer. In the book, Kunstler writes that people don’t keep many pets any more, because of food shortages. It seems a good bet, however, that folks in this sort of situation would find a way to have cats around, in order to affect rodent control. And it seems off that, just because the pace of life has slowed to something more reminiscent of the 19th century, the people would decide to listen to the same sort of music popular at that time. Even though electricity is scarce, here’s guessing that folks will be playing, on acoustic instruments, the same music they were enjoying before the loss of a professional entertainment class, whether that be Smokey Robinson and the Miracles or, yes, Nirvana.

 

Overall, though, in World Made By Hand, Kunstler delivers a fine story, with examination of spirituality, vocation, locomotion, food, politics, terrorism, the flow of information, localism vs. globalism, humor, quietude, and slow pace. And he delivers a story with a number of compelling characters, despite the complaint above about some of them being under-developed. In fact, it is testimony to Kunstler’s skill that the reader would care at all about a character as apparently vile as Wayne Karp - yet, because of Kunstler’s meticulous craft, it is evident that he is a human being - deeply flawed, but with some redeeming characteristics, just like a real person.

 

A deeper examination of Robert Earle reveals that Kunstler may have styled him allegorically as a Christ figure. Earle starts out as an unlikely and unwitting hero, but one who earns redemption by adapting to his mission, to save his people, to be revealed as a sort of anointed one. His appearance was foreseen by the supernatural "Queen Bee" of the New Faith congregation, who notes that Earle was born a Jew. A Jewish carpenter.

 

Scholar Joseph Campbell pointed out that the Christ archetype throughout historical storytelling always goes on a heroic journey. Earle, whose hand wound was miraculously healed, was on a journey at the time to rescue several lost individuals. Coincidentally, some researchers argue that Robin Hood, another Christ figure in literature and lore, was a real person, named Robert, Earl of Huntington.

 

The end of World is a climax which is at once conclusive and a staging, from which the rest of everyone’s lives springs into a new day. There is ambiguity as to whether Union Grove’s factions will be able to remain in harmony. The reader is left hoping that the residents of Union Grove, and perhaps the rest of the world, have learned to work together in a sort of rebirth.

 

*Peak oil theory holds that, once the world’s petroleum supply passes its "peak" (that is, when half of whatever the total global petroleum reserves have been used, and when the production rate is on a downward trend), it of course becomes less plentiful. Oil production plots as a bell curve. At its peak, half of the world’s oil endowment has been used. Production figures indicate that the peak was in 2005. Since a bell curve is symmetrical, the production in 2020 would be equivalent to that in 1990. However, since the population will be much higher in 2020 than in 1990, and since global economic activity has ramped up inexorably, the demand for oil has grown dramatically. As a consequence, the price of oil has exploded, and it will continue to do so, absent an economic meltdown. At the same time, the oil available to produce is more difficult to produce (the easier to access oil was produced first), and in areas which are unstable and unfriendly to U.S. military and economic hegemony.

The world will never "run out" of petroleum, because the price to produce it will become so great that demand will finally fall off. More effort will go into replacing petroleum, but since there is no energy source available with all of the fantastic attributes of oil (it is portable and very high in energy for starters), the replacements will leave the world in an energy deficit.

 

Reviews

[Writer CW Kirkland]

This seems to be a good "review" of the book, but I admit that I have not read the book myself. Your writing seems easy to read. There are a couple of things that stood out to me as opportunities for improvement:
1) Your comma usage seems correct but overused...the second sentence in the third paragraph is a good example. It should be cut up into two or three sentences.
2) Is this writing a "review" or "book notes"? These two terms are different things, but you referred to both terms in the introduction. This seems to be too long to be considered a review, but you did a good job balancing the constructive criticism that should be in a review.

By the way, I really like your website as well. I think your site has a great message.

Thanks for sharing your writing on the Cafe. I look forward to reading more in the future.