Oil prophet: Some required reading
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It’s already clear how gas hikes affect the grocery store (food transportation costs have increased, leading to higher prices for most goods). Recently Publishers Weekly offered an interesting angle on how rising fuel prices affect the book industry -- that fewer people will be willing to drive out to a bookstore to meet authors at a reading.
If that is indeed what happens, I would still recommend venturing out if you hear that James Howard Kunstler will be at your nearby bookstore (even though I know he would probably protest against this). His ‘World Made By Hand,’ a novel published earlier this year, gave us a stirring apocalyptic alternative to Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road.’ He appeared on a panel I moderated at our Festival of Books in April, and it’s impossible not to keep thinking of his vision of the future: a world devastated by a massive jolt to the world oil supply as well as many other catastrophes.
Still, while many people are lamenting that they must use their cars less now, Kunstler answers with a picture of a car-less world that is somehow lulling, distressing though it all is. Consider:
It was about a three-mile walk home to Union Grove. In the old days, you’d drive it, of course, but now you walked. I didn’t mind. I enjoyed the peacefulness and easy pace of the walk. In a car, I remembered, you generally noticed only what was in your head or on the radio, while the landscape itself seemed dead, or at least irrelevant. Walking, it was impossible to not pay attention. On a mild luminous evening like this, the landscape came alive. The crickets had started up. In the distance a last glimmer of sun caught the top of Pumpkin Hill where men were still out mowing....
Of course, to get to this Wordsworthian vision of a simpler time, the world must go through government collapse, wars and terror, and killer flus that substantially reduce the population. The prose is lovely, and Kunstler is one of those writers who demonstrates that making socio-political commentary in fiction does not have to be tiresome. His book could certainly be called speculative fiction, but if I were a bookseller, I wouldn’t dare put it in the science fiction aisle, especially now.
Nick Owchar