World Made by Hand: A Novel

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“Years from now, when we hear singing at all, we will hear ourselves, and we will sing with our whole hearts.”—James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency (2005)

World Made By Hand, a fictional allegory of Kunstler’s The Long Emergency‘s dire, post-Peak Oil prognostications, is rife with reiterations that at times overshadow the tale being told; Kunstler can’t help but bang on about how brutally different our planet might be a few tumultuous decades hence. Rugged outdoorsmen, carpenters, engineers, and their ilk will fare best in an era where foodstuffs, tools, and other necessities must be hand created or otherwise cultivated because Wal-Marts will no longer exist. Everyone else—execs, hotshot computer hackers, lawyers made partner, pop stars, and so on, of the present day—work as day laborers; tilling fields, picking crops, and so on, and in turn are fed and housed on Stephen Bullock’s estate on the outskirts of town.
[Day laborer Shawn Watling] had . . . “been born in a hospital and raised on computers, and then all of a sudden the world fell out from under him. There is a bridge there over the creek, which is a tributary of the Battenkill. Shawn worked as one of several hands on the Schmidt farm up the hill, which was in fruit, oats, buckwheat, and hay, with some beef cattle, and goats for milk and meat. Shawn was probably paid decently, but his opportunities were limited.”

In World Made by Hand, the winnowing oil flow sets nations at each other’s throats, sparking an unspecified number of armed conflicts and terrorist bombings on (among other places, but for the purposes of this story) American soil. Said bombings effectively shut down the nation’s borders and end the influx stream of overpriced crude and cheap products. From there - and the narrative’s rearview-mirror glances are fleeting and incomplete enough to be maddening—Americans descend into riots, disorder, starvation, anarchy.

“The strip malll stores were vacant. Spiky mulleins and sumacs erupted through the broken pavement of the parking lot. The plate glass was gone and the aluminum sashes, and everything worth cavenging was stripped out. A fragment of the plastic Kmart sign remained bolted to the facade, the piece that said ‘art.’ The irony did not move me.”

Twin nuclear blasts in Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles set the United States into an abyss from which it never emergs; rumors of a federal apparatus situated in the Midwest circulate, but there’s no reliable means of disseminating information because electricity, the internet, television, and the armed forces no longer exist.
World Made By Hand is set in a largely depopulated upstate New York town where the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and the childbirth rate has fallen significantly. In a startling reverse of contemporary more, everybody knows everybody else because everybody symbiotically depends on everyone else; because the dollar’s lost much of its value, physicians exchange goods and services with carpenters, and bartering becomes the new economy.

This is the region where Kunstler resides; much of The Long Emergency was spent recounting his forlorn drives through all-but-withered towns where industry was on the wane and farms were selling out to developers dead-set on building McMansions the locals probably couldn’t afford. So it’s not difficult to view World Made by Hand‘s first-person narrator as the author’s surrogate. His name is Robert Earle. An even-tempered, even-handed former marketing executive for a computer security company, Earle’s stock in this brave new world would be low if he hadn’t been the kind of dude who knew his way around a Home Depot once upon a time.

Without quite meaning to, he comes to represent the forefront of one of several forces attempting to dominate the territory: namely, the befuddled, getting’-by-as-best-they-can townspeople. In apparent competition are the mysterious, uber-religious New Faith sect, who sweep into town fresh from race-wars and radiation-sickness mayhem in Pennsylvania, over-eager to assimilate into this community; opportunitistic entrepreneur Wayne Karp, who overseas a plundering subculture of bikers, outlaws, and gearheads and commands “found” building supplies and other sundries; and Bullock, an egalitarian who’s established what’s essentially a plantation-labor model on his increasingly self-sufficient estate on the outskirts of town.

The tension inherent in these factions sizing each other up and nimbly co-existing is World Made by Hand‘s greatest strength. (The rationalized, situationally-contingent adultery, not so much.) It’s analogous to international diplomacy, a delicate dance easily upset by the actions of some careless rogue or unforeseen events. It’s uncertain weather these various bands of people can peacefully co-exist and forge a brighter future that’s beneficial for all, or whether local conflicts will ensure.

It’s entirely possible that the author plans to explore this world further; I hope he does. Writing at the time of early unrest from the perspective of an urban resident would be messier and remove Kunstler from his suburban element, but it would allow him to complete the cautionary painting begun here.

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