After the fall

James HOWARD KUNSTLER has built a sturdy reputation as a prophet of doom. His nonfiction books, most prominently “The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century” (2005), not only heap scorn on consumerism, suburbia and our “Happy Motoring Utopia” but also predict a socioeconomic collapse in which most -- at least, those few who survive the pandemics, foreign invasions and breakdown of law and order -- will end up as serfs staggering behind horse-drawn plows.

This is the vision of “World Made by Hand,” a fictional treatment of the themes of “The Long Emergency,” set in an unspecified but not-too-distant future following atomic blasts by Jihadists on both coasts. The now-isolated town of Union Grove in upstate New York has reverted to a traditional farming community. Waves of disease have culled the population. Empty buildings are stripped for salvage. The town has unpolluted rivers teeming with fish, but no antibiotics, no mail and only occasional blasts of electricity. Everyone lives in fear of dental treatment, since Novocain is but a memory.

Robert Earle is one of the survivors, having lost his wife and daughter to illness. His teenage son, Daniel, decamped to seek his fortune or provide material for a sequel. Once a computer executive, Robert now barters his carpentry skills. At least he’s still his own master. Across town, a wealthy farmer is building a serfdom using failed men and women.

This patched-together, post-apocalyptic life is gorgeously imagined by Kunstler, from the recovering woodlands to the jury-rigged washer and dryer Robert has fashioned from an immense copper tub for his elderly neighbor. With no superfluous consumer goods and no advertisements for them, form and function fall sweetly into place. Even Robert’s lawn is now a raised-bed garden: “It was geometrical, a cruciform pattern, the beds transected on the diagonal as well, with brick paths carefully laid. With our many material privations, it was not possible to live without beauty anymore.”

There is much to admire and mourn in preindustrial America, as Kunstler reminds us by re-creating it in latter-day Union Grove. “The tranquillity was pleasing,” Robert remarks, “despite what it signified about what had happened to our society.” But Kunstler’s nostalgia sometimes tips over into vengeful glee, as if he can’t wait to rip the steering wheels out of our hands. In one scene, a bitter old man stuns a group of onlookers on horseback by driving his decrepit car down the pitted road. His destination? Death. He creeps a few more yards and turns his gun on himself.

Relishing his new Eden, Kunstler devotes a lot of attention to resolving threats to the community: violence, religious fanaticism, hopelessness. He gives just a few lines, though, to the loss of two centuries of social advances.

“All the [town] trustees were men, no women and no plain laborers. As the world changed, we reverted to social divisions that we’d thought were obsolete. The egalitarian pretenses of the high-octane decades had dissolved and nobody even debated it anymore, including the women of our town. A plain majority of the townspeople were laborers now, whatever in life they had been before. Nobody called them peasants, but in effect that’s what they’d become. That’s just the way things were.”

Women appear only as supportive wives, widows or sexual companions. Three hundred pages of meek dependence. Kunstler may be right that women’s roles would become limited in such circumstances, but he also grossly simplifies his depiction of the little town to make his point. The novel takes place a few years after the atomic blasts, yet -- just as they were before the disaster -- the town trustees, the minister, the dentist, the doctor, the lawyer, the mayor, the landowners and farmers are all men. Even the town librarian. No wonder the “egalitarian pretenses” crumpled so easily in Kunstler’s Union Grove. There were none to begin with.

Similarly, there are no people of color in Union Grove, only dangerous “others” rumored to be wreaking havoc elsewhere: “From Texas clear to Florida, there’s folks shooting each other and trouble between the races and all like that. Seems like the law is on the run everywhere.”

Kunstler’s challenge in “World Made by Hand” is to create a hopeful arc as life goes on. He focuses on recovered pleasures of the preindustrial past, and on the work to be done as townspeople shrug off their post-traumatic torpor. By novel’s end, Union Grove emerges as a model of uprightness, cooperation and honest labor, without the corrupting luxuries of hot baths or voting rights. Readers may be left uneasy -- not so much by Kunstler’s just censure of the “generation that screwed up the world” as his delight in reeducating the fallen.