Things in Union Grove always seem to get worse before they improve, and society never returns to the heyday of yesterday. The stakes rise ever higher when Earle's Union Grove friends elect him mayor, placing him in a world of pain. He then takes a dangerous trip on horseback to search for some men who've gone missing in Albany, which Earle describes as having reverted to a frontier town. Earle soon finds himself a witness to a murder that the Union Grove inhabitants are almost wholly incapable of dealing with. Of course, things don't remain tranquil for long. The tranquility was pleasing, he tells us at the outset of his story, despite what it signified about what had happened to our society.

And he ekes out a comfortable living as a fisherman and a handyman. He's got a mistress, too, in the wife of the local minister. He even manages to enjoy a world without electricity and gasoline, given the fact that Union Grove has running water drawn by gravity from the nearby Hudson River. But Robert Earle, protagonist of the book, doesn't feel it does any good to look back at all that's been lost.Įarle is a software executive turned carpenter, and he's somehow come to terms with the loss of his family to the disaster that America has become. Terrorist bombs have destroyed a number of big cities, and the oil supply has run out.

In his latest work, 'World Made By Hand,' Kunstler returns to fiction.ĪLAN CHEUSE: We begin in Union Grove, New York, and a few decades along into the new century. James Howard Kunstler began writing fiction decades ago, but then turned to social criticism, writing about energy crises and urban collapse.

The world made by hand series