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Book Review: World Made By Hand
Some books are primarily plot-driven books, which we devour to see what happens, as we are delighted by the twists and turns that can surprise, yet satisfy. Some books are primarily character-driven books, in which we feel like we are watching real people and exploring their inner workings and interactions in a way that we don't have access to in real life. Still other books are primarily idea-driven books, which cause us to reconsider what we know or see our world and its possibilities in a different light. The best books succeed in all three ways, at least to one extent or another.
James Howard Kunstler's World Made By Hand, unfortunately, only really works as an idea book. The characters are rather wooden and the action awfully straightforward (when it's not just strange, as it is at a couple points). Still, a book can succeed in this way (Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn, is the best example I can think of: it barely has a plot or characters, but it's incredibly successful on the strength of its ideas), and the success that Kunstler's book has comes from its imagining of a possible future for our world.
Kunstler himself has said that he is not really in the predicting game with this novel; he doesn't want to be judged on whether or not he gets anything right (though given how much this is based on his non-fiction work The Long Emergency, he does have at least some stake in this game).
The setting of his novel is a sort of post-apocalyptic near-future upstate New York. Through a converging series of disasters, from the energy shortage associated with Peak Oil to the various flavors of environmental degradation that the 21st-century seems likely to be prey to, with a couple nuclear terrorist attacks thrown in, the United States has lost its effective power to govern its territory, such that the country has devolved into a regional patchwork with very limited power for anyone to exercise any control over anything. The world is no longer flat with interconnectivity; instead, life is intensely local.
Now, whether one believes that such an state of affairs is likely or even possible, the novel is ultimately an interesting study of how people react (and by extension how they should and shouldn't react) when normal life breaks down. To that extent, even without strong characterization, it is a study in humanity.
Overall, it was an interesting though not wholly compelling read. As post-apocalyptic visions go, it's not exactly Mad Max and it's not exactly an anarchic paradise, but it is a fairly believable vision. If such things catch your interest--as they do mine--then I would certainly recommend it, even if I can't do so unreservedly.