From The Literary Desk

We've been reading The Harrows of Spring, the fourth and reportedly final novel in James Howard Kunstler's A World Made By Hand series.

It's an appropriate book for quarantine reading during this pandemic.  The series of novels is set in upstate New York after a fictional collapse of civilization, and gasoline and electricity are no longer available.  People have reverted to living more or less as their ancestors did during colonial times, surviving on locally grown produce and meat from wildlife they've hunted or livestock they've raised themselves.

I've been reading the books for almost a decade now.  Kunstler is basically an ideas guy and not the greatest word stylist or story-teller in the business.  His books are not bad, but Dostoevsky has nothing to fear.  What makes the novels interesting reads aren't his narrative style or the depth of his characters, but the concepts about what such a life might be like.

What lead to the collapse of civilization is never directly explained, but through random comments and a few bits of exposition, the reader can reconstruct the back story.  A nuclear device in a shipping container in the Port of Long Beach was apparently triggered by terrorists, and as a result, the government began searching every container in every freighter entering every port in the US.  This resulted in week- to month-long waiting times for goods to enter the country and eventually a total breakdown of international trade.  Another nuclear devise hit Washington DC, but the timing is unclear to me whether it was soon or long after the Long Beach explosion.    

Simultaneously, oil production peaked and petroleum was no longer available to fuel trains, planes and automobiles.  Then, and this is the most relevant factor today, a pandemic of something called the "Mexican flu" hit and killed millions, and that was pretty much the end of the modern era as we know it.

As opposed to some other post-apocalyptic stories, the future in the World Made By Hand books is not savage and violent, although savagery and violence do exist.  The people of the fictional Union Grove, New York are decent enough, trying to hold on to some semblance of civility in the hard times.  They're excited about establishment of a laundromat in town, not a Thunderdome.  There are those in town who find it easier to loot and prey than to engage in the hard labor of the times, just as there always are, but the books are not centered around Mad Max-style confrontations between avatars of good and of chaos.  They're more about ordinary people who remember the internet and television and microwave ovens and produce available year-round in the supermarket trying to make a living off the hard land and survive the best that they can.

Kunstler is not very good at portraying women and their lives, other than how it relates to the male protagonists, and a couple of plot lines sound like the author's own personal fantasies.  For example, the main protagonist has to regularly "service" the wife of his best friend due to his friend's erectile dysfunction and lack of Viagra in the brave new world.  Later, he takes as his common-law wife a young woman half his age, whose motivations and attraction to the older man are never fully explained.  These plot lines sound embarrassingly at times like the author's own fevered wet dreams and don't advance the plot or otherwise embellish Kunstler's ideas about post-apocalypse life.

But to Kunstler's credit, he has imagined a whole society of people in his hand-made world.  There's a town full of survivors trying to make do, and there's a gang that's taken over the landfill and extorts people for salvage rights and recycled objects. There's a religious sect that seems like some sort of cult at first, but turns out to be good-enough folks once they're met and people get to know them. There's a industrious plantation owner nearby who's on the verge of generating his own hydro-electricity, but living on his plantation comes at the cost of one's own personal liberty.  And there are stories and rumors about the rest of the country, including a government in exile, race wars in the South, and breakaway republics.  

It's a perfect, easy-read book for the pandemic -  sufficiently relevant for the times on one level, and a beach-blanket page-turner on the other.