Heralding The End Times

Leaving aside the half-baked geopolitco-cranko-economic analysis that “informs” Mr. Kunstler’s vision of a Peak Oil Ragnarok, it’s hard not to occasionally feel something like that same distaste for our dense, messy way of life. Say it happens when you’re stuck in traffic, surrounded by honking imbeciles, or when you see a sea of unsightly bodies at a too-crowded beach littered in cigarette butts and candy wrappers. But eventually you appeal to your better self and take a deep breath, and think: It could be worse. The moment passes. But not if you are James Howard Kunstler:
In that case, you take what are essentially aesthetic judgments — ungenerous ones at that — and allow them to collect and fester into a unified theory explaining why a near-apocalyptic thinning of the human herd might be just what the doctor ordered! Which leads me to Mr. Kunstler’s superb new novel, “World Made by Hand” (Atlantic Monthly Press, 336 pages, $24). Mr. Kunstler may be a self-righteous, bileful economic ignoramus, but he’s nevertheless managed to write an extraordinary, suspenseful, deeply affecting yarn that very successfully weaves together elements of science fiction, the Western, and even magical realism. Any lover of genre fiction will find much to like, despite the fact that the novel is ultimately veiled propaganda for the cause of abandoning and perhaps incinerating America’s postwar suburbs. The world in question is our own, in a near future where — you guessed it! — the oil runs out. Now, Mr. Kunstler the pulp novelist could have had a pair of gorgeous Brazilian supermodels rescue America by bringing sexy back to the importation of sugarcane-based ethanol but, being Mr. Kunstler the wild-eyed polemicist, he instead posits rather less plausibly that an infelicitous combination of catastrophes — Peak Oil, a war in the Holy Land, a couple of global pandemics, a couple of catastrophic terrorist attacks, and runaway climate change — finally does America in.

New York Sun