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IT'S A HAND-ME-DOWN WORLD

April 6, 2008 12:15 am

FOR THE FEW hours I was engrossed in James Howard Kunstler's "World Made By Hand," I was less than an exemplary father. What harm could come from the 4-year-old pouring his own milk? And it stood to reason that if he knew what drawer the scissors were in, then his mother had let him cut things before. I was fairly confident, though, that his 4-month-old sister's few strands of hair were not one of the things he had cut previously.

With gas prices nearing record levels, the dystopian world envisioned in Kunstler's new novel becomes less fiction than forecast. Kunstler plumbed the depths of a world out of oil in his best-selling book, "The Long Emergency," and he has now taken the premise and cast it into a not-too-distant future free of the restraints of nonfiction. The result is an amazing story, bathed in stark sadness, and one that required an aspiring 4-year old barber to make me put it down.

The particulars of how America arrived at the state where the book begins, devoid of electricity and reverting to a pastoral and agricultural past, are nebulous, which allows the story a freedom not beholden to a prolonged and suffocating back story. The tale is told through the eyes of Robert Earle who lives in the small town of Union Grove in upstate New York. Earle's family, like most of those in Union Grove and the rest of the country, has been devastated by illness. This former corporate executive who used to fly across the country multiple times a month now fills his solitary days with fishing, gardening and picking up odd jobs around the town in exchange for goods that he cannot provide for himself.

The residents of Union Grove are merely going through the motions of life, steeped in despair with only the occasional apocalyptic word from the outside world. But the communal lethargy and daily quest for sustenance are interrupted by the arrival of The New Faith order, a seemingly devout religious group, which has fled both Virginia and then Pennsylvania in search of a region where they can live without the constant fear of attack or illness.

"World Made By Hand" was certainly written as the direst of warnings about our world and its dependence upon oil. But the story and characters are so compelling that one forgets that this is a future that Kunstler believes may come to be. There is the faintest glimmer of optimism in his tale, and it is far easier to champion that hope when it is couched in fiction.

Drew Gallagher is a freelance reviewer living in Spotsylvania.