Lovely Little Shelf

The Book: The World Made By Hand, by James Howard Kunstler

The Story: This book takes place in the not-so-distant future, maybe 30 years or so.  There have been wars and a couple flu pandemics and things have fallen apart. Electricity is gone and there’s no cars or trucks.  Communication has fizzled to nothing. Pretty much, our society has been tossed back about 100 years but with the knowledge of how things could be. There is never a clear cut reason for why everything ended up like that.  The narrator hints at global warning and oil dependency, although he never comes out and says it.

The story here revolves around Robert Earle and his small community in Upstate New York.  His wife died from the flu and several years ago his son took off to see what else was out there and never returned.  Robert assumes him dead but doesn’t want to admit it.  He is just kind of struggling to get by.  He has a good hand at carpentry and makes things to barter.  He has a small garden but gets most of his food from his neighbors.

As the story goes on, several different “sides” are introduced.  There is a group of people that live near the old junk yard.  They are kind of rough around the edges and take advantage of the townspeople by charging them insane prices for things that they’ve stolen from around town anyway.  A creepy-religious group show up in the town and make themselves at home in the old high school.  Their leader is charismatic and forceful and they are trying to revive the town.  There is also a group that lives outside of town on a large farm run by a rich man.  They are doing better than most of the people in town although he works everyone that lives there like slaves.  Then there are the little group of people who still live in town and try to retain some idea of “normal.”

So I’m sure you can guess what happens here.  A series of violent and criminal events take place that that turn these sects against one another and the rest of the story is kind of this primitive culture trying to figure out how to sort things out without the law, in a place where everything has changed.

What I Thought: There is very little I love more than a dystopian/utopian/post-appocolyptic book.  I was really excited to read this one because it’s something I think about quite a bit: If all this technology that we depend so heavily on was taken from us, where would we go from there?  Interesting concept and a great thing to write a book on.

Even now, several days after reading this book, I am not really sure where I stand.  Again, I liked the idea and the first 100 or so pages where the author is setting up the premise was totally fascinating for me.

The follow-through? Not so much.  I feel like there was such potential here to make a point. Any point. Either about what got these people here or about human nature or…. just anything.  It seemed like he got so caught up in new kinds of violence that he got distracted from the point of the story. Once he hit on the idea of justice being carried out without a justice system, he was totally off on a bunny trail and he didn’t ever quite make it back.

To be fair, there were great scenes here and great ideas presented, it just lacked “umph.”  There was no heart behind it.  It seemed like someone approached the author at a party and said “Oh, I have this idea for a book…” and so the author took it and ran with it without thinking it through to the end or really caring about the premise.  The writing was engaging and the characters were pretty believable.  Of course after everything goes bad, there are these people who start to take advantage of the situation, of course there are religious nut-bags, of course some people are as lost and confused as Robert.  The people and situations did ring true, it was only with the story and resolution (or lack thereof) that there were real problems.

Or maybe I’m wrong and all this is leading up to a sequel? That would be the only way that the book as a whole makes any sense…

*Just wanted to edit to add that I just did some Googling and found out that the sequel for this book is called The Witch of Hebron and should be released during the fall of this year. Hm. Who knew?

Conclusion: A read that will make you think for the first 100 pages and make you shake your head for the rest. For fans of this genre, I’d say it’s worth a read if only for a different kind of take on things.  Also, if you are a film director/producer/anything, make this into a movie, because I have a feeling that it’d be pretty awesome.