I first learned of James Howard Kunstler back in the 1990s when a friend sent me a galley copy of Home From Nowhere. That nonfiction book was a revelation, explaining why suburban sprawl is depressing and more traditional architecture and urban development is not (in other words, why I had chosen to live in Old Town Key West instead of Weston). I feel a little reactionary about it and I’m not against everything modern but in the Jane Jacobs / Le Corbusier divide, I’m on Jane’s side all the way. I noted that Kunstler was, at that point, primarily a novelist but was grateful that he had chosen to write, and write well, about urban planning, a subject in which I have always taken a small but persistent geeky interest. *
Since then, I have followed Kunstler’s career as a polemicist about the coming post-oil world — which he thinks is coming a lot sooner than the rest of us are prepared for — and occasionally looked in on his blog (which has the endearing name of Clusterf**k Nation). But I had never read any of his fiction. Until recently, when dystopia became a topic of interest. Not just because of earthquakes, volcanoes and oil spills although that certainly all seems to make one think post-apocalyptically. And my sister mentioned she had been reading Kunstler’s novel World Made By Hand. So I ordered it up via interlibrary loan (thanks again, Alachua County!).
The story is set in an unspecified but obviously near future, when America has essentially fallen apart and reverted to a pre-industrial society after oil wars, nuclear bombs and a lethal flu epidemic. The setting is Union Grove, New York, an upstate small town that has survived better than most but is starting to fall apart. Continue reading