Book Review:  World Made By Hand by James Howard Kunstler, fiction, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008.

Okay, first I have to say that I love, love, love the title of this book.  I love the feel of it as it rolls around in my mind, I love the way it falls out of my mouth, I love the sense of somethingorother (would that be je ne sais quoi? *snark*) that it evokes.  A good start, no doubt.

For those who are unfamiliar, Kunstler is one of the grand high muckity-mucks of the Peak Oil movement.  He wrote the nonfiction book "The Long Emergency", the title of which is now the moniker second only to "peak oil" as most-used to describe our situation.  I must say, this guy's got a way with titles.

As for the rest of the book?  I'm still wrapping my brain around it.  This is an odd book, and no doubt about it.  Thin on plot, looooong on setting.  That's the point, though, for Kunstler, and I think he does use it to good effect.  Kunstler is very much trying to give us a glimpse of a possible future, or maybe a better way to put it would be a possible future-past.  The date is unclear, but I'd take a stab that it's somewhere around 2030-2040.  In his setting, we're well out of oil, or at least, no one in America seems to have access to oil any longer, at any cost.  The story is very obviously one of a small society ravaged by the changes wrought by a world without oil.  It's fairly lyrical.  It is well written.  And even though it doesn't have much of a plot to speak of, it doesn't want for plot, and is a compelling read.  The characters aren't particularly well developed, but they're sympathetic, and even a bit interesting in their mystery. 

The most compelling force of this book is how very easy it is to see this version of our future unfolding before your eyes.  His descriptions of burned-out old strip malls & K-Marts, empty houses, provincialism, even tribalism, are disturbing in their potential accuracy.  Biking around town, it's now like I have a film-strip running just behind my eyes, superimposing Kunstler's future over what my real eyes are taking in.  It's very disconcerting. 

I disagree in many particulars with Kunstler's vision of the future.  I think his timeline is too fast, for one thing, if I've got the estimated dates right.  Most analysts agree that there will still be oil available for decades into the future, just vastly out of range for most everyone.  There's also no compelling reason that the electrical system will fall apart so quickly (around 5 minutes of electricity per month), although certainly the regular service we've come to expect will be a distant memory.  And why we apparently no longer have antibiotics is anyone's guess, unless we've forgotten how to grow mold on bread in the prehistoric future.  Now, we won't have *good* antibiotics; they won't be carefully crafted and purity-controlled.  But someone with a petri dish, a microscope and a "My First Chemistry Set" can probably kludge together something that, while not great, is better than death.

I also disagree with Kunstler's portrayal of the people in this setting, I think largely because I disagree with his timeline.  In Kunstler's world, people went from "oil" to "no oil" very quickly apparently (I suppose on the Cuba model), with little run down.  They ruminate almost continuously about things past, things gone, things changed, no tin foil or stereos or whathaveyou.  These people are still firmly in the "suicides are common" phase of the unraveling & collapse.  But I suspect the rundown will be much slower indeed, and people living in a genuinely "no oil at any price" world will have become far more well-adjusted (or, probably, far more hanging-from-the-beams-by-a-rope).  None of this is to say that I think the upcoming two decades will be fun, or easy--far from it.  But I think Kunstler's characterization is off.  However, he could be correct if the remaining oil-producing countries in the world just decide to give us the finger and cut off our supply.  We hain't got much oil left in our corner of the world, no matter how many oil fields they open for exploration.  And there's every reason to expect that, while the mideast may not cut us off entirely, they will begin some serious stockpiling of what they have left, just as we did in the runup to the 1970's oil peak in our own country.

The book is also weirdly sexist, although in an almost purely descriptive rather than prescriptive fashion.  That is, he's not saying "and this is what the place of women should be," but something more like "Huh.  Look at what the place of women is in this world."  There's even a brief reflection on the situation by one character, although again, without either decrying or endorsing it.  I'm not sure if this descriptive mode is better or worse than a prescriptive mode--I could see a fair case being made either way.  But again, it also seems very plausible indeed.

Overall, and maybe surprisingly, I liked it.  Even though I disagree with much about it, the world he describes really is bizarrely compelling.  I found it well-written, and I find myself wanting to find out more about what happens to the people in this little New England town.  Since finishing this book, I've been wandering around in a bit of a haze--sometimes a funk, sometimes a more surreal state, as I see my town melting away before my eyes and replaced by a Kunstlerian future world.  It's odd, not really bad, but also not good.  Just, is.