Why Are the Mean Girls Picking on _World Made By Hand?_
Sharon May 4th, 2008
Reading apocalyptic novels is always a weird experience. They are compelling, often startlingly so. And quite often, the “I can’t look away” quality of reading them has nothing at all to do with their being thoughtful, well-written, high quality prose. That is, to put it bluntly, most of them suck, if considered as pieces of writing. Except that they make you want to keep reading.
In the last couple of years, apocalyptic novels have moved out of genre fiction, away from “science fiction” into “mainstream literary” fiction. In some senses this move isn’t really a novelty - much of what we now call “high culture literature” (which was often low culture literature when created) from Boccaccio’s _Decameron_ to Marlowe’s “Dr. Faustus” and on to Shelley’s _The Last Man_ to was permeated by awareness of the possibility of either theological or biological apocalypse, usually by plague. That, for a time, we moved our end of the world visions into a little box called “science fiction” doesn’t change the fact that this has been a preoccupation of literature as long as literature has existed.
Still, as “literary” writers like Cormac McCarthy and Philip Roth have been picking up the apocalypse as a genre and making it “high culture.” In some sense, this seems to be because the writers in question have no where else to go. McCarthy, always a lovely but never a cheery writer has a natural affinity for the apocalypse - even his other novels always seem to end in disaster. So perhaps a world where there are no shoes and babies are regularly roasted on spits and eaten is merely a step on. And for Roth, who followed up _The Plot Against America_ with a series of books who could be best summarized as “Zuckerman gets old, impotent and finally, mercifully, dies” the end of things seems to be a preoccupation.
But more than that, the idea that we have nowhere to go but towards some disaster simply makes sense - we are on course for some disaster. There is no question that Global Warming is a disaster in the truest sense of the term, and that we are entering into an unknown place. How could imaginative thinkers not try to conceive of where we are going? We want to know, we want to be frightened and horrified, and also to be engaged by the fantasy that the world could change - in ways that might make us more powerful. That is, underlying the disaster is the notion that all the things that make us feel powerless might fall away, and we might step out like the protagonist of some novel, and make things change.
That is what happens in James Kunstler’s new novel, _The World Made By Hand_, a book I’ve read, and have been trying really hard not to review. The reason is that I’m ambivalent about it, both as a piece of writing and as a piece of peak oil advocacy. For all that I often disagree with him, I think Kunstler is a wonderful writer of non-fiction - funny, smart, engaging. And he has done more than any other writer ever to bring peak oil to the mainstream - none of the rest of us make Colbert or Rolling Stone.
On the other hand, I thought _World Made By Hand_ wasn’t nearly as good as his non-fiction writing. There were things I liked about it - I enjoyed his language, and the “American Novel-ness” of it - that is, Kunstler’s vision doesn’t just involve looking back to the 19th century, linguistically it feels like an American 19th century novel, and it has the same clarity of prose. Unfortunately, it is also overblown and dull at times, also like many second-tier 19th century American novels - think _McTeague_ or something like it. But perhaps that’s not fair - in comparison to other post-apocalyptic novels, Kunstler has written _Moby Dick_ - because it is such a difficult genre, and the competition is so bad. Personally, I think both Roth and McCullers also wrote mediocre novels - and Kunstler’s can go right up there with the best of a weak (although fascinating) genre.
I wasn’t going to write about the book at all, however, but I find that I can’t resist, in part because Kunstler has gone on the defensive, telling us that the problem that some women readers have had with the novel and its gender issues is definitely their fault, not his.
The Oil Drum has a link to Kunstler’s appearance on the Colbert show (which I’m dying to see, but I have dial up and no tv reception and certainly no cable, so I’m doomed until I visit somewhere with fast internet ;-). It also has quotes Kunstler’s response to those who have criticized his book on the grounds that all the women in it are passive fuck bunnies with no brains or interest in the future in any sense. (Ok, that’s actually my analysis, but the quick skim of the amazon reviews I’ve seen has people making much the same case in slightly politer language.) Here’s Kunstler’s answer:
“Complaints have come from many quarters that in my novel the feminist revolution appears to have been discontinued, or that my female characters are not sufficiently valorized. To me, these complaints show an impressive incapacity to imagine that social arrangements might be different under very different practical circumstances. In “World Made By Hand,” the corporate milieu no longer exists. Issues of “glass ceilings” and “equal pay” tend to be irrelevant. All the people in the novel are essentially working within their competence. But the divisions of labor are not what they used to be in the age of WalMart and Time Warner. The major female characters are treated sympathetically as real people with pretty complicated lives.”
One of the best rules of literary criticism is this: never trust an author’s claim that what you are seeing is really, certainly, definitely your fault, not the author’s. Now believe it or not, I’m in sympathy with Kunstler’s claims that women’s lives will not have much to do with the kind of capitalist version of feminism seen in the essay. I’ve written on that subject quite a number of times:
http://sharonastyk.com/2007/07/17/barefoot-bearded-and-in-the-kitchen-feminism-post-peak/
http://sharonastyk.com/2006/11/06/peak-oil-is-a-womens-issue/
That is, I do think Kunstler is broadly right, that the version of feminism that succeeded within global growth capitalism is unlikely to continue, and that, without making a strong effort to retain social changes, women are likely to lose social gains and protections as they get poorer. I don’t have a problem with a depiction of a society that views women as more vulnerable to sexual assault, more subject to violence, and with less political power in some ways than we have now - all of those are real possibilities.
So this is not the part of Kunstler’s statement that I think is wrong. The problem is that the criticisms I’ve read, and the ones I’m inclined to make have nothing to do with the loss of feminist gains and equal pay - Kunstler is waving a big old straw man about here. The problem with his book is that it is completely untrue that “The major female characters are treated sympathetically as real people with pretty complicated lives.” Or rather, they are, in their fractured limitation treated quite sympathetically, they just aren’t *people* - they are literary functions who exist to a. compete to have sex with the narrator and b. suffer and c. serve meals.
Despite Kunstler’s suggestion, I don’t think it is unreasonable for readers to want some of his women to be rich and complex enough to be actually called real characters, rather than a plot function, or to suggest that in the future, the occasional woman might have an area of competence other than baking and nudity. Or that if they don’t, the reasons for that might actually be explored, or the characters might think about them, rather than simply assent to the idea that their world made by hand is the size of a pea.
There are people in novels, but those people have nuance, and subtlety, and complex motivations. They have thoughts and feelings that get explored - that’s how they get to be people in our heads, even though they exist only on paper. We get caught up with them. It is not possible to do that with any of Kunstler’s women. For example, we meet Jane Ann, one of only two female characters articulated enough to even distinguish from one another, when she arrives bringing bread and her body to the narrator. She is the wife of his best friend, who arrives weekly to have sex with him, because she is depressed and her husband is impotent.
Now there really isn’t anything wrong with the early characterization of Jane Ann, but the truth is that we never get more than this bit of surface and Robert (the narrator’s) speculation about her. He is kind and unjudgemental about her desperate expressions of grief, which conveniently take the form of bringing him food and sex - he’s also not very interested in them, and clearly, neither is the book’s author, because Jane’s non-existent interiority is never expanded upon. We get a flash of jealousy here, a bit of suffering there, and she’s gone, left to occasionally send over meals. She’s a plot function. What is almost forgiveable about this opening sequence is that the narrator, Robert, is nearly as disconnected and resigned as she is. The difference is that redemption, community and reconnection are for men, not women in Kunstler’s world.
The only other female of note is Britney, the wife of a young man who is shot and killed early on. And this, of course, begins the redemption of the otherwise apathetic Robert, as he involves himself in her life, eventually takes the 23 year old as a lover and now has “a family to look after.” And that, we are told, in echoes of Frost, “…made all the difference.” Looking after her means protecting her from sexual assault, and reassuring Britney shortly after her sexual assault of the essential goodness of humanity. One might not think that this would work, or even be a compelling bit of writing, but fortunately, Britney is always written much as other authors might write mentally disabled children.
“There’s goodness here too.
“Where is it?”
“In all the abiding virtues. Love, bravery, patience, honesty, justice, generosity, kindness. Beauty too. Mostly love.”
“I’m afraid sometimes that we drove all those things out of existence.”
“No, we carry them in our hearts. They’re always with us.”
Welcome to the post-apocalyptic Hallmark Card. Fortunately, most of the book is considerably better written than this.
The good thing (for the characters) is that the women apparently don’t *want* anything more than this - they just want to know that goodness and bravery and love are somewhere, residing in the good, brave, loving men who they cook for. And having heard that, they can go back to making pie and getting naked - because they show no interest in the events of the town, in the struggles for political power or social power.
It isn’t just that feminism has disappeared, it is that women as people have disappeared, and they are more deeply immured in their homes than the angel in the house ever was. Even under the Taliban, women had secret lives and showed signs of resistance to their complete disempowering - these women just aren’t interested enough to resist or act. They may have been raised in a reasonably equitable society, but the disaster has stripped them down literally, and all they want now is sex with the middle aged narrator, protection, sex with the middle aged narrator, to cook, and to have sex with the middle aged narrator.
The thing is, novels are novels - they are speculative, and it isn’t necessary that they perfectly represent the world. While I disagree at times with Kunstler’s vision, I respect his right to have it. And the novel is essentially a piece of genre fiction - a western overlaid neatly on an upstate New York futurism. From the riders galloping into Albany to root out corruption to the return home to root out corruption there, Kunstler has lifted a genre that historically treats its females a plot functions - there to get raped so that our heroes can go shoot the bad guys, there to serve up pie and remind us all of what we’re fightin’ for, there to get naked and remind us of the rewards of fightin’.
What’s a disappointing is that Kunstler clearly could give us more than that - but he’s clearly not interested enough in the women in his story to bother. And since he’s not interested enough, I find it interesting that he’s bothered to mount a defense of them now. Whenever authors start telling you how real and complex their characters are, they almost certainly aren’t. And it is weaker novel because of it - frankly, Kunstler, perhaps because his lack of engagement with many of his characters, fails to engage many of his readers. That these readers he misses are disproportionately female simply makes sense - it isn’t that women can’t identify with male characters, or don’t experience pleasure reading about them, but there is simply a dearth of people to identify with.
Ultimately, I think what’s perhaps most fantastic and speculative about the book may also be its weakest point. As many writers point out, and I’ve discussed here: http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2008/01/is-it-really-tough-to-be-guy-in-hard.html, historically when society collapse middle aged men have had the hardest time dealing with the complete reinvention of their world. Stories from the Depression are rife with men who left to ride the rails or simply to get away from responsibilities they could no longer live up to. Dmitry Orlov observes the same thing about Russian men during the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Kunstler turns this historical convention entirely on its ear - the only functional beings are middle aged men. The young men are bleak and angry, and without initiative, if they aren’t actually dead or missing. The women are dead from the neck up. All of the powers in the society are older men, who have expanded and consolidated their leadership positions - Brother Jobe, Stephen Bullock and the narrator. The only ones who are able to survive and go forward in the new world are the old, mature powers. This is both radical and unlikely.
It is hard not to see some of this as a wish-fulfillment fantasy. But I also see it as something else - the recognition that peak oil is going to call into question our present gender roles. I’m reminded here of a study I once saw (and can’t locate to cite) that suggested that children in homes where gender roles were not strongly differentiated were more attracted to things like Barbie dolls and GI Joe than kids who live in families with strong traditional gender roles. The reason suggested was that kids at some point need to figure out what it means to be male or female, and that in the absence of some real definition of their gender identity, they go looking for what the culture has to offer. The results of the study didn’t suggest it was better to have strong gender roles - just that it is a normal part of development to try and figure out what it means to be male or female.
And in a sense, Kunstler’s Western, I think operates mostly as a strong assertion that masculinity, post peak, like everything else, is going retro, and that maleness is going to be something important. And its need to assert this seems something like the needs of those children to find some extreme to explain what it means to be a girl or a boy. That is, when his character says that having someone to take care of has made all the difference, he is telling the truth - that this book is in part about finding a way for older men to live in the future as men, a future they are unlikely to navigate easily. It is easy to mock, to say, “Go back with me boys, the women are young, nubile and always in shape, the food is hearty, there are guns and horses and the lines of power are always clear.” And that is part of the truth.
Another part of it is this - adapting to a radically changed world is going to involve people finding a way of understanding that world . Taking away people’s maps of the world means giving them new ones. Obvious, accessible maps with large print are good, particularly for those already in reading glasses. That is, the more that we can say “the future will be like these familiar fantasies you like” the easier it is for some people to imagine going forward. It is tough, however, on those who don’t usually imagine themselves as the guy with the gun on the horse.
I think the biggest limitation to Kunstler’s imagination, which generally is a potent and powerful force, is that his answer is always that we should use old maps, perhaps perfected a little. Thus, Kunstler has a hard time envisioning a world that is a hybrid, with people simultaneously shaped by the high energy past and alive to the low energy reality. Instead, Kunstler just erases from his world not just women’s power, or the effects of feminism’s changes on the culture, but women entirely, creating a bare world of men in middle age, working through their losses without the pesky intrusions of real female characters or younger men to press against them, adapt better, push their limits.
And perhaps that’s what it would take to fully integrate the older men to the newer world.
Sharon
- books
- Comments(98)
Wow, Sharon, I have to admire your diplomacy with this piece.
I thought WMBH was really, really bad- bad to the point I’m almost embarassed to admit I read it. Subhumanization female characters/wooden dialogue/lame male fantasy plot- your average, socially awkward eighth grade boy could have written this book. Is Kunstler THAT clueless? I was disappointed, as I like his non-fiction a good bit.
Why would you expect a loudmouth like Kunstler to have any insight about women’s character?
I haven’t read the book but what you described is about what I would expect from him…Kunstler writes habitually in caricatures and hyperbole, that’s his style.
Perhaps he wisely avoided including female characters in prominent roles because he knew they wouldn’t ring true…
BTW I’m a Kunstler fan myself, the Long Emergency is really good, but you know what I mean.
I haven’t read Kunstler’s book yet, so I won’t presume to speak to any specifics about his characters. But with my own post-peak fiction, I’ve had beta readers comment on the fact that many female characters gravitate to “home and hearth” roles.
I have to point out that few of my female characters actively choose to stick close to home. Rather, without technology (and big pharma), biology once again becomes destiny. For a woman in her child-bearing years, there are a number of reasons why home-centered businesses and activities are a good idea.
None of this means, though, that my female characters are passive (most are quite handy with a gun and you don’t want to cross them). Although many things women take for granted now would not be possible in a low-tech world, but there will still be powerful matriarchs. There will be shopkeepers, midwives, horse trainers, fighters, spies, and guardians of all kinds of knowledge. There would be a slight pull back into the old notion of “separate spheres,” but it would be due to biological necessity, not because women suddenly en masse said, “Oh, to heck with it. We’re poor helpless things!”
Alas, I don’t have the platform to get my own stuff published easily and I don’t have the time to pursue it aggressively. I have some my post-peak fiction online and via Lulu, but my big exploration of the first generation to deal with a post-peak future is still waiting for me to get writer’s block so I can use my limited writing time to jump back on the query-go-round.
I’d love to hear of a published writer who has successfully written well-developed female characters. I wonder if the problem could be that most writers in this genre are male? Hm… call Sherlock Holmes!
Without reading it, I think the novel reflects the author. It reflects his hopes, dreams, and understanding of subjects other than peak oil. It seems consistent with his other writing.
Thank you, Sharon.
I found it so awful that I apologized to the library for having them order it.
Sharon explains everything beautifully- from the lack of the female mind and will to the middle-aged male fantasy of having a harem. Every chubby computer programmer envisions himself a hero.
The book even starts off in fairy tale fashion, with the mother figure (whose absence makes adventure possible) having left the protagonist safely in a house covered in the high quality paint.
It could be a realistic assumption that women might gravitate to hearth and home. But, in Kunstler’s novel it doesn’t get elevated to the level of importance that that work will be in a post peak world. All the work of the women in the novel is background noise that doesn’t address the fact that many of the characters would have had nothing to eat had it not been for the women.
bunnygirl, I would recommend you start with any of the winners of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, and would further recommend this year’s winner, Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army, to clean the taste of World Made By Hand out of one’s mouth.
For me, I’ll put my copy beside Sheri S. Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country for a balanced sample of “Wow, you really don’t see other genders as human, do you?” and carry on ignoring both.
I too have read the book “World Made By Hand” and am a regular reader of his Clusterfuck Nation though I have not read his non fiction. The book seemed shallow to me though not from the feminist viewpoint which in turn has turned me away from his non fiction.
I know that Peak Oil will change everything and that many people assume that it will shape a world in their favored image. Hard right wing survivalists see a Mad Max sort of world, some see a return to an “Earth Abides” world of hunter gathers while others envision a nation of small farmers and craftspeople clustered around small villages.
Kunstler’s book forgets what I like to call institutional memory. Governments will not just cease to function, leaving one lone bureaucrat lamenting days gone by. As oil slips away we, the voting public will look to government to solve what is essentially an unsolvable problem and government will grow in response.
In his world the only law enforcement is the good graces of the citizens, a return to feudal manors, or distance. In the real world law enforcement will grow as people worry more about near term safety rather than long term changes. As oil gets in short supply institutions with the greater political and financial power will demand more than a fair share. After the wealthy and police use what they can the military will be the ones to use up the very last drop.
Another thing that I believe has escaped Mr. Kunstler is the fact that women are currently serving in the armed forces of more than a few countries around the world, and they don’t actually operate weaponry with their genitals. I am acquainted with three women who have come back from serving in Iraq (my god-daughter was recently honorably discharged for medical reasons): his suggestion that any of these four women would meekly “get back in the kitchen” would be amusing to see put to them — from a distance.
Oh, wait, they probably all died off. If I roll my eyes any harder I’m going to sprain something.
Amelia, thanks for the recommendations! I read the Y: The Last Man series, which is on that list. Now there’s a male writer who understands that women are (duh) human!
Awlknotted up, I’m more of an “uneven collapse” person. I would expect a collapse of any large complex civilization to follow roughly the pattern of the collapse of Rome in the west. Some areas will thrive, some will revert to barbarism, most will muddle along somewhere in the middle, with different areas finding different solutions. Feudalism might occur in some places, with liberal democracy in others and firmly entrenched bureaucracies in still others.
Excellent!
I read Kunstler’s novel last week and was utterly disgusted by his presentation of female characters as mindless sexual objects.
Of course, all of his fiction writings are basically trashy novels. “World Made By Hand” is basically just another one but with a setting made to appeal to anyone interested in topics he mentions in his book “The Long Emergency,” in his film appearance in “End of Suburbia,” and his articles and blog.
His response to criticisms of his presentation of female characters is dishonest. I cannot help but suspect that his female characters are projections of his non-evolved self.
Though they are quite interested in peak oil, collapse, etc., my husband and sons refused to read — as they put it — “that trash.”
~Vegan
bunnygirl- I thought Stephen King did a great job with female characters in “The Stand.” Yeah, that was a different sort of apocolyptic novel altogether, and King could, under any circumstances, write circles around Kunstler (I know he’s not seen as a serious writer in many circles, but I think this is unfair).
Jade- you have my sympathies. I actually bought this dumb book. Generally, when I’m done with a book I’ll hand it over to my SO for his perusal- not so with this one. Too embarassing, by far- and I am no literary snob.
Can someone who was actually able to get through the thing answer a question? Were there people of color, LGBT people, people of different cultures or classes or disabled people anywhere in the book, or were all the primary characters white American middle-aged and -classed able-bodied heterosexual men?
I read _World Made by Hand_ and have to admit that I found it engaging. I actually had to take _The Long Emergence_ back to the library as I found his non-fiction writing style to be preachy and to lack references. Despite agreeing with 99% of his arguments in _The Long Emergency_, I couldn’t stomach his “the sky is falling” tone.
I am a strange broad who likes reading and watching Westerns and SciFi. I think Sharon’s identification of Kunstler’s book as a Western set in Upstate New York is dead-on. I, of course, noticed the lack of female character development and agree that such an omission is more egregious on Mr. Kunstler’s part than his assumption that women will revert to a place primarily in the domestic sphere. However, I took it as a limitation of his being a baby boomer male. We write what we know. To do otherwise is to be disingenuous. I think that his book can provide a perspective on post-peak oil that can lead to thoughtful consideration and discussion, while recognizing that the author’s imagination is limited (as always) by his own biases.
I wish Sharon, that you had the time to write a post-peak oil novel. Your writing style is both thoughtful and engaging. One of my favorite of your posts was your thoughts on what life will be like in a couple of years. I found it riveting and thought provoking.
Cheers,
Tina
It’s funny because his female characters put Kunstler squarely in with golden age sci fi
I just want to point people toward Kim Stanley Robinson’s “40 Signs of Rain” and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.
Butler’s Parable books are an amazingly believable American apocalypse story (she doesn’t give a reason at all, it just happens), and Robinson manages to show how incredibly sudden, awful change can coexist with everyday life with people adapting really quickly.
I liked World Made by Hand and found it a plausible extrapolation and a good story. Kunstler set out to do something difficult: frame “The Long Emergency” in terms that are accessible and follow the rules of genre fiction. I thought he did quite a decent job.
Sharon, thank you for the literary analysis. It’s nice to see a trained critic in action. My training is in engineering, and I seldom read fiction, so perhaps my standards aren’t high enough, but I thought the storytelling was better than most genre fiction. We can cut the guy some slack for not writing Great Liturature, he wanted something that people would actually read.
Kunstler thought a lot about where we go from here if things get really unstuck, about the role of the informal economy in restructuring life and how our material culture would transform. He has four social structures: the late feudal system, the gang, the cult and the self-organizing pioneer small town. All are just lifted from real life, past and present, so it’s specious to claim that they are unrealistic.
I was struck by the parallel between China’s history and Kunstler’s world. China spent millenia going through cycles of collapse, chaos, warlordism, reorganization and restoration of empire, all on just solar powered energy. The continuity of culture during periods of collapse and chaos was maintained by the existence of China’s trained civil servant class. They weren’t too different in function from Kunstler’s college educated middle-aged guys. Kunstler caught his small town just at the moment when reorganization is starting on the local level and shared it with us.
I noticed that many people just freaked out about the book. It’s only implausible if you believe that we could never, ever, lose oil, electricity, central government, postal service, women’s sufferage, law and order, industrial agriculture, our ability to respond to plague, etc. Just ask the Chinese; it sure can happen. Whether it will is an entirely different conversation.
I’m reading The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler right now — I’m really liking it. Real people in a suburban cul-de-sac turned into a walled community, trying to have some semblance of normalcy in a world where people kill each other for their shoes. Excellent characterization so far.
I had wondered about World Made By Hand … thanks for the review.
We can cut the guy some slack for not writing Great Liturature [sic], he wanted something that people would actually read.
In my opinion, part of the difficulty with getting people to read it is that 5/6ths of the potential audience either does not see themselves or sees an offensive stereotype, thinks “White straight privileged guy imagines a world where the people like him don’t have to give a rat’s arse about the people like me — gosh, how is this different from the world I live in now?” and goes off to do something else.
While I’m at it, the notion of a white man generously bringing Chinese history to the attention of American society somehow reminds me of Oyceter’s “What These People Need Is A Honky” presentation at Wiscon.
Okay, I’ll admit to finding the book a page-turner, too. I’m only 1/2 way through but am happy to finish it quickly. And I am *kind of* a literary snob (English major, blah blah blah) who often can’t finish a book because it’s too formulaic, etc.
I see this book as a “man’s book”, one man’s fantasy about an undertain future. It’s based on the archetypal hero’s story, really, of which Joseph Campbell writes. He even has the Odyssean journey, to Albany, with strange meetings like the one with the woman who served rocks for dinner and kept her husband’s corpse in the bedroom. (I’m at this point, currently, though true to form for me I’ve already read the ending!)
Yes, women are pretty much an afterthought in the book, but hey, it was written by a man. I’m not looking for any political correctness in a fiction novel, though. As I said, it’s a man’s fantasy and it’s not too bad a one at that.
Just my 2-cents! Lisa in MN
Well now, I realize that a bunch of folks are up in arms about what one reviewer called “all the women reverting to Little House on the Prairie mode” in World Made by Hand. After I read the novel, I read “See You in a Hundred Years”, which is not fiction, not at all. I found it because Logan Ward, the author, and I both went to Vanderbilt and there was an excerpt in the alumni newsletter.
Logan Ward and his wife Heather were inspired by the PBS series “1900 House” to sell their apartment in Brooklyn, buy a farm in rural Virginia, rip out all the 20th century doodads and spend a year with their toddler living with 1900 technology.
Escape from New York and a high stress, two profession life worked for them. What I found interesting was the emotional process that they went through, first transitioning to 1900 and then figuring out their marriage and their identities. They didn’t play dress up or try to take on 1900 persona. They went in to their year with their 2000 mindsets, skills and values. We learn how they sorted out their values and goals afterward only from the alumni newsletter, where we find out that they sold the farm three years later and moved to Staunton, Virginia. Heather is back at a day job.
Back on the farm, they reverted to mostly traditional sex roles immediately. Logan got all the heavy lifting and the outside jobs. Heather went right into that Little House on the Prairie mode, a function of the enormous amount of work that it took to keep the household operating. Logan could cook on the wood stove and he was better able to mind the baby and do Heather’s jobs than she was to split wood and deal with the draft horse. Perhaps in 1900 he would have left all the canning to Heather while he tried to get in a cash crop.
It’s told from a guy perspective, and Logan shares with the reader how they piled up the handmade quilts on the living room floor and made love.
I really can’t see why Kunstler should be given a pass for writing shitty fiction with zero insight into women just because he’s a man. Come the fuck on. I know we’re all hungry for apocalyptic stories, but I don’t see why we need to stoop to this guy’s level. There’s a lot of decent, PERCEPTIVE end of the world fiction out there- why should we need to accept Kunstler’s stuff (in desperation)?
But Kunstler is a white male from upstate New York. Octavia Butler is an African American women who write from her perspective in _Parable of the Sower_ (and her other books) about issues of gender, race, and sexuality. Those come from her experiences and backgrounds. What many of you are really seem looking for are more post-apocalyptic novels from authors of various backgrounds and more specifically from backgrounds that are similar to yours. Write them!
Tina
In a world made by hand, post-energy, lots of traditionally female skills are going to be crucial to the survival of the species. How about root medicine lore? Herbs, roots and other kinds of traditional healing (including energy healing and body work/massage) will become the only medicine around. Midwives will be valuable members of the community. Womens’ abilities to gather, forage and cultivate crops will be crucial. Hey, what about basket weaving. This is all “home and hearth” stuff and yet from where we stand we don’t understand how absolutely crucial all these skills will be to the functioning of every day life, and therefore to the economy such as it will be.
Anybody who has lived in a traditional village knows how important women’s skills and lives are, even when patriarchy seems to hold terrible sway over those lives.
I’m thinking about Starhawk and her band of permaculture activists. Even if the Cormac McCarthy vision of fascist shock troops comes to pass, the women who know how to keep crops going and make functioning systems for living will have power.
Kunstler just has a weak imagination and not a very good grasp of what it’s like to live “off the grid.” Not that I do, either, but sheesh.
That’s a fair point, Tina. But then - what we’re talking about here is a novel where the world as we know it ends, and a new one begins. That takes a lot of imagination - so is the request for more filled-out characters that big a strain on the imagination?
I’m grateful to Sharon for this review. I’d already realised the novel would have a “19th century American” tone, but I enjoy that. I knew about the laid-out changes to the role of women, but that seemed plausible to me. I didn’t know the women were so hollow and passive, though. Now I can save myself the fifty bucks.
And perhaps it is too great a strain on the imagination for Kunstler to imagine real women, or blacks, or whoever isn’t him. I’ve got the hobby of roleplaying games, like Dungeons & Dragons and such, and I often find male geeks blathering about how female characters should have less physical strength than male characters. “It’s realistic”, they say. In the game worlds we have dragons and elves and magic fireballs and faster than light spacecraft and antigravity and tentacled aliens - and none of that gives them any problem at all, but the thought of a girl beating them in an arm wrestle does. They find dragons and antigravity more believable than a strong woman.
And perhaps that’s Kunstler’s problem, too. But rather than unbelievable, he finds a strong woman actually unimaginable. And we cannot write about what we cannot imagine.
I don’t think you have to be from group X to write believable and fully-fleshed-out characters from group X. But I do think you need to make a deliberate effort of imagination. Which shouldn’t be too scary to you if you’re writing a novel, which is wholly a deliberate effort of imagination.
About a year ago, tired of the white male protagonists of postapocalyptic stories usually running around blowing people away, I set out to write a story with a different lead in it, a different kind of postapocalyptic story. I found it pretty difficult, and I don’t think it really succeeds as a piece of fiction, it’s a bit too contrived. Nonetheless it was a useful exercise, to try to develop my imagination a bit more. Maybe Kunstler needs to do something like that.
Well, I’m a white girl from the Midwest, not a Black woman living in California like the heroine of Parable of the Sower. But it’s written well, which makes the characters easy to empathize with.
And, hell - Stephen King can write strong female characters. How are his demographics different than Kunstlers? Ralph Borsodi, writing nonfiction, showed great respect for his wife and her talents and abilities, and was white, male, Eastern, AND of an older generation.
There are a lot of writers who don’t write strong women characters. Some of them are worth reading anyway, either because of mitigating factors or your own personal taste or even just because of the connections they open up for you (Total Loss Farm led me to Home Comfort which, tangentially, led me to Marge Piercy’s book Vida, and I would say TLF has the New Left problem of only including women you happen to be sleeping with.)
It’s great if you enjoyed World Made By Hand. But it doesn’t mean the rest of us are just putting some outside political test on books we don’t like because of sexism - just like if some old man talks down to us in real life, and we decide not to listen to what he has to say because he rubs us wrong. It makes it less enjoyable for us.
Kiashu, I too play D&D and have run into the conflicting desire of gamers for reality in their fantasy games. I think it goes beyond gender issues though as many want “realistic” weapons stats while fighting orcs.
I want to make sure it is clear that I am not saying that Kunstler is a great author. He is not. I found his book engaging, but he is still writing pulp. Most of Kunstler’s characters are unidimensional. In fact, the only character in the book that seems well fleshed out at all is the character that most resembles Kunstler himself, thus making him a mediocre fiction writer rather than a chauvinist fiction writer.
I thought Sharon wrote a very nuanced and thoughtful critique. I largely agree with it. It was the overwhelming number of responses that seemed to be knee-jerk feminism that provoked my responses. (It’s not feminism that bothers me. It is the “knee-jerk” part that bothers me as it makes the feminist cause easier to dismiss).
Well now, interesting viewpoint. Yes, some
of the chracters were a little flat. But I
liked the book. Kuntsler explored so many
issues and ideas and tried them to bring
them together. (I particularly liked his
musings on medicine, dentistry, farming,
wheat blight and transportation.)
Hubby thought that the narrator’s lack
of gun ownership was unrealistic.
I got the feeling that apathy, from both
males and females was as rampant as
hunger. It was a disease in its own right.
And yes some women, LOVE to shoot,
ride a horse, have copious relations,
bake and serve pie, and don’t give a crap
about politics.
~Michelle
“Knee-jerk feminism”, oh, for pity’s sake!
We are agreed that we are facing a crisis, yes? We need to get the people who, for whatever reason, are not peak-oil aware thinking about what may be coming down the pike. Kunstler’s book, for good or ill, is the flavor of the moment: it is being presented as representative of the vision of the movement.
When women — many of whom have their own money, their own vote, their own degrees and jobs and control over reproduction and quite literal war wounds and who overwhelmingly make the purchasing decisions for their households, and have a tremendous and largely untapped potential to influence public and personal policy — are offered a vision of the future in which all the diversity and achievement of women’s experience is reduced to vaginas with legs, when it is not simply erased?
Many of them will turn away, and every reference thereafter will be tainted by that association. They will stop listening, no matter who else might speak.
I literally cannot think of another way in which to explain my objections, and so I am going to go watch Scrapheap Challenge and won’t be back until tomorrow.
Hey Tina, I’m the boy commenting here, I’m meant to be the one whinging about “knee-jerk feminism”, not some girl! :p
I don’t think it’s a knee-jerk response. A knee-jerk response would be, “he depicted women as dropping socially, he didn’t write an egalitarian utopia, therefore his book is crap.” This looks to me more like a complaint about simple bad writing, characters being blank cardboard cutouts. It doesn’t sound like Kunstler isn’t being feminist enough, but that he isn’t being interesting enough.
That Kunstler should turn out to be sexist and unable to imagine women as full human beings doesn’t surprise me, we already know he’s racist and can’t imagine Arabs and Moslems as full human beings.
It seems to me that people are letting their objections to Kunstler’s inability to write strong characters (female and otherwise) blind them to what I view as the worst failing of the novel — his use of unexplained mystical happenings to resolve issues and add “weirdness” to his vision of the future.
I refer to the issue of the impossibly-inflicted, impossibly-identical wounds and the ability of the cult leader (who is implied to have caused those wounds) to disappear while the narrator’s head is turned.
In addition, there is the morbidly obese woman who can read minds (?), predict the future (?) and around whom the cult is constructing some kind of hive structure, presumably for their female members. She is introduced, presumably for the purpose of some subplot which Kunstler (or his editor) decided to leave out entirely.
I found the introduction of such fantastical fol-de-rol to pretty much negate the “common sense”, rational tone which he had spent most of the book establishing.
Hi Kiashu and Amelia: My point is that many people only noticed that that the female characters were “blank card-board cutouts”. I think the majority of Kunstler’s characters are simply place holders (e.g. the stereotypical liberal minister versus the right wing cult leading minister, the manager of the garbage dump, the drunk mayor…). He appears to have been more interested in painting a landscape of what the world will look like than he was in writing a book that has complex characters and a meaningful plot. I would agree with Alan’s objection to the inexplicable addition of mysticism to the book. It seemed not only weird, but contrived.
I am going to check out of the conversation. I will keep reading responses. However, I think in using the word phrase “knee jerk”, I have kept the conversation from being a constructive one. I prefer how Sharon, Shira, Lisa, Leila, and Michelle expressed their affirmation of women and perspective on the book. All five appeared to see limitations with the book, but also recognized what it had to offer. That is what I had originally hoped to express and they have done so much more eloquently.
Ok, I’ve got to start a book club, don’t I. The post-apocalyptic reading group ;-).
Oh lord, I’m becoming Oprah…actually, I’m becoming Crunchy - first challenges, now book clubs…I just need the poll and eco hotties! Well, I can’t imagine better role models.
Well, maybe after the book is finished. Any interest?
Sharon
Absolutely - a book club would be great. I’m reading every apocalyptic novel I can find - I’ve read a dozen or more in the past few months. I’ll put together a list when I have more time.
Excellent review, Sharon.
What troubled me most about WMBH (other that the fact that the cult plot seemed to be suggesting we are about to turn into some sort of social hive insect, which IMO, has zip to be with PO and the aftermath) was that assumption by both the main character and the author that women woud just chose to bow out the political relm (even that women having the vote, etc. was some sort of unnatural result of the gult of cheap oil) with out any sort of questioning or protest.
It not the idea that women will end up (by whatever process) dealing more with the issues of hearth and home that bothers me. (Though I’m not sure that will happen as much as people think it will — yes biology puts certain limitations own women as a class (if enough women have unprotected sex a number of them will end up preganant; and assuming they don’t all abort, spontaniously or other wise) some will give birth. And assuming that they don’t all abandon their infants, some will having to manage the needs of a nursing infant) however, I PO is not going to instantly erase women who have non-reproductive sex,or no sex etc. And even those with infants in tow can vote (assuming that PO doens’t instantly erase universal sufferage — as a side note I find it interesting that on one ever seems to worry that black men will lose the vote by magic in a PO world — or if they do, I’ve never come across it. I can image poll taxes, etc. being reinstated in places — but it will be by human agency).
I think of lot of heavy lifting will still be done by women — and not just over the laundry tubs.
If the novel is intended largely as a “thinkpeice” is the lack of detailed nuanced engaging character exploration really such a problem? I haven’t read it yet, but the point is to emphasize the setting, not the characters, right? Not every novel needs to be about character exploration.
I sorta figured that Kunstler would write a thinkpeice with just enough sex, and violence, and plot, and characterization and such to play with the very male end of the scifi/fantasy/military demographic. I mean instead of thinking about other peak oil authors, or Roth, compare him to other testosterone fantasy/scifi authors. Say David Drake or Eric Flint or S. M. Stirling. I’m guessing that Kunstler is trying to compete with folk like that. Now he’d miss the goal of riffing on 19th century style without detailed characters, fair enough. And perhaps he has would like to be compared to Roth or McCullen, more than to Ringo or Baen. But I’m guessing that World Made by Hand is a far more thoughtful meditation on the near future, than many of “trashy” genre novels that he is competing with. And nuanced characters, male or female, just can’t have been one of his major goals; so pointing out its lack is kinda like criticizing a summer blockbuster movie for not being thoughtful enough, or goth music for being too depressing.
If you like your novels with lots of character exploration you are going to be disappointed, fair enough, but that isn’t the end all and be all of a novel. Of course, if his vision characterizes women as so shallow that it undermines his setting that is a much worse problem, because setting exploration probably was one of his major goals. But if someone else could fill in the character nuance of his characters in his settings, then the setting isn’t in trouble, the characters are just sketchy rather than actually shallow. It is one thing to write a novel where the characters can have no depth, it is another to write where the depths of the characters are simply not explored because you have other fish to fry. Consider the Wizard of Oz. No character is explored much at all and they are all pretty iconic rather than complex. The Wizard of Oz is about setting exploration, and light fantasy, and learning to see one’s own home with new eyes. Yet after the movie version was so successful, others have played with the setting and the story again, brought out nuances left unexplored in the original. McGuire wrote a re-examination of the Wicked Witch of the West’s life, focusing on exploration of her character, which is puddle-shallow in the original portrayal, and he quite intentionally leaves Dorothy almost unexplored. That means that the SETTING wasn’t at fault for the characterization, rather Frank Baum just didn’t want to do a lot of character exploration in his fairy tales, because he wanted to keep them intentionally light-hearted in contrast to Grimm or Andersen. So are the munchkins and the scarecrow “people”? Well, Baum ISN’T trying to portray them as any less that people, he just also isn’t trying to explore the full complexity of being a person, much less a munchkin-person. Let’s create the terminology that a sketchy character is one where the author simply isn’t exploring in much detail, but a shallow character is one where the author is intentionally trying to portray the character as lacking in further depths. Many of Atwood’s women in Handmaid’s Tale are shallow not just sketchy, because the point is that they haven’t been allowed to develop much depth by the society around them. Does Kunstler portray the major female characters “sympathetically as real people with pretty complicated lives?” Maybe so, and in just the same way as Baum, even if he isn’t trying to explore the full complexity of what being a female person is like in his setting. He may be trying for sketchy not shallow characters. So called non-genre fiction, like Roth, tends to focus on characterization, and often specifically on exploring the complexities of being a person, and this can confuse us when we look at works that aren’t aiming at the same target. A sketchily explored character might look like an assertion of non-complexity, rather than just a refusal to explore a complexity. So is Kunstler trying to say that all there is to being a woman in the setting of his world made by hand, is baking and fucking and supporting a man? Well if so, then he deserves the complaints, and us peakniks can say the future won’t be like that. But it is also possible that Kunstler is simply not trying to explore what being a woman is like in his setting, and that characters (other than the main one) are intended to be sketchy rather than shallow.
Anyway I can’t really criticize a book I haven’t read, but I DO want to defend the policy of writing a novel with intentionally underdeveloped characters, when characterization isn’t your main goal, even though I know lots of people think that characterization is an all-genre standard for written fiction. Huh, that went on a bit more than intended, well back to grading …
-Brian M
Brian, I intentionally didn’t mention Stirling or Flint et al because I don’t think Kunstler is either quite doing what they are doing, and frankly, while neither Flint nor Sterling have deep subtle analyses, both of them do far better characterization that Kunstler does. I’ve read one Drake novel but don’t remember it well enough to comment, but frankly, I think both Stirling and Flint do more nuance and character than you credit them with. For example, I can’t recall the title, but the long short story/novella that Flint did set in Prague was a marvel of subtle characterization (this is somewhat off topic, but frankly, Flint suffers from most of his co-authors - he’s a better writer than any of them), and there are levels of fairly remarkable complexity to his characters (he can handle Cromwell passably, and that’s saying something.
Stirling is, IMHO, the platonic example of the “I can’t look away” novel - he’s not a very good writer, or that great a thinker, but there’s something about them that makes you want to keep reading. But even Stirling does a better job of nuance with most of his characters - they are types, and obvious ones at that, but at least he recognizes it - for example, he makes fun of the over “evilness” of his bad guys at the same time that he articulates it.
And the truth is that Kunstler does more characterization with several of his major characters. The thing about the Wizard of Oz is that all the characters are archetypes -that’s not true of WMBH. Kunstler wants to assert that his characters are complex and subtle - he says it outright. They are in many ways, the fodder of 19th century American novels, with their complexities articulated in action, but they aren’t just archetypes - and even his women aren’t archetypes, unless you consider “woman” to be an archetype.
Sharon
Kiashu, I think your analysis is absolutely brilliant.
“And perhaps it is too great a strain on the imagination for Kunstler to imagine real women, or blacks, or whoever isn’t him. I’ve got the hobby of roleplaying games, like Dungeons & Dragons and such, and I often find male geeks blathering about how female characters should have less physical strength than male characters. ‘It’s realistic,’ they say. In the game worlds we have dragons and elves and magic fireballs and faster than light spacecraft and antigravity and tentacled aliens - and none of that gives them any problem at all, but the thought of a girl beating them in an arm wrestle does. They find dragons and antigravity more believable than a strong woman. And perhaps that’s Kunstler’s problem, too. But rather than unbelievable, he finds a strong woman actually unimaginable. And we cannot write about what we cannot imagine.”
It’s not just Kunstler. It’s in our culture. I think it’s playing out in the current presidential race, this inability of the largely middle-aged white establishment to *imagine* a black man or a woman as a viable President. (Just this morning on HuffPo, for example, James Carville cuts down both Democratic candidates in metaphorically crude sexual terms: “If Hillary gave Obama one of her c*****s, they’d both have two.”) There is fear, insecurity, and a resulting deep and stubborn failure of imagination in the elite classes, in order to maintain their status quo. Fortunately, despite all the media handwringing, I believe that voters *are* ready for a brilliant, multi-dimensional black man or woman as president, whose strength and qualifications can’t be reduced to mere c*****s.
Back to WMBH, am about to read a library copy for our local book club gathering. From Sharon’s great post, and some comments it reminds me of “Stepford Wives,” in which affluent, aging, insecure men protect their fragile egos by replacing their brilliant, multi-dimensional wives with artificial replicas which do no more than smile, look pretty, make small talk, and supply their husbands with food and sex.
Sharon, I can’t join a book club of apocalyptic novels - I have made a personal decision to only read cheerful material until at *least* the end of the Bush administration - but I have had several periods in my life where that was close to all I read (if you add utopic/dystopic fiction and back-to-the-land treatises it covers years of my fun reading) so I could probably participate if you’re reading books that aren’t brand new.
I’m so glad that people have been writing about this. I had quite a bit of mixed reactions to the story of WMBH myself, not the least of which was that I dream of writing a post-peak novel that might be called “Fifth Sacred Thing East Coast.”
It might not be fair to compare WMBH with Starhawk’s book, because I’m clearly biased more toward her novel. I also find the comparisons to Octavia Butler illuminating, and a little eerie. I was reading “Parable of the Sower”, literally as 9-11 was unfolding around me, on the #M2 Bus going downtown toward the WTC. It’s probably my favorite “post-apoc” novel out there.
Unlike the other poster who saw the mystical element at the end as a weakness, for me that was a saving grace. Mystical things happen around us all the time, but for the most part we refuse to be open to them. We categorize them as “schizophrenic events” and lock our shamans in mental wards or kil them. Scientific fundamentalism offers as little substance as religious fundamentalism, imho. They’re both junk food, but one is of the spirit/mind and the other is of the mind/soul.
I agree that the female element is undernourished, and I also had a problem that there were no black people in the book. I live in Albany which has a rich variegated history as any reading of William Kennedy’s books will tell you. The city has had an African-American presence that extends way way back, actually. He casually dismisses the non-white races in a couple of unbelievable sentences. I found the Albany section ludicrous to be honest. The comparison to second-tier 19th century literature is telling. I burst out laughing at the mention of McTeague. T-hee! (Perhaps Kevin Costner can play Robert in the film. /snark)
Re: S.M. Stirling. I hope that he is able to complete his latest series before things go totally kerblooey. That would be a shame if we didn’t get the final installments of his latest series where the Nantucket story and the post-Event story come together. I agree that the characters in his books are more richly defined, and dare I say loved. My favorite characters are the evil Tiphaine D’Ath and Sandra Arminger, much as I also love Juniper McKenzie. His “machoness” extends to women fighters though, and that stirs my Celtic passions. (The Morrigan, indeed!)
Still, for all its faults, I must say that Kunstler does at least spark the “novel in me” that encompasses strong women, gay people, pagans, African-American people and 12-step recovery. All of the types of people that would inhabit the world I’d like to make by hand, as it were.
Shira: “He has four social structures: the late feudal system, the gang, the cult and the self-organizing pioneer small town. All are just lifted from real life, past and present, so it’s specious to claim that they are unrealistic.”
I don’t know about gangs or cults, but in the feudal system and pioneering small towns women were more than cooks or entertainment. Women were crafters and inventory managers at pretty much all status levels (managing stores for a year at a time, plus thought to the long-term is no simple-minded feat).
There are many recorded instances of women actively defending castles and towns in the event of a siege in Medieval times. Going back to Roman empire times, there are still stories of this sort of thing, at least from the area now known as the UK.
Some women were leaders in battle (strategy and tactics mostly from what I’ve been able to find so far, as opposed to foot soldiers). People like Kunstler forget women like Eleanore of Acquitaine or Maude (Stephen vs. Maude on behalf of her son, England), at their peril. And as Sharon said, there are many stories from the Great Depression of middle-aged men not being able to adapt, whereas I suspect many of those who did succeed were younger folks, male and female.
Discussing some of this last night, my husband mentioned seeing any number of Westerns when he was young that had a woman standing by her home, rifle at the ready, as strangers approached. Oh, and anyone here ever watch the t.v. show Big Valley, years ago?
My husband is a baby boomer himself, and prefers women to be fully-developed human beings. I think people with Kuntsler’s apparent limitation in regards to women (and younger males too in his specific case), can exist in any generation.
***
Now, I suppose I could read the book for its information on possible post-collapse scenarios, but I can read about those elsewhere, and without the irritation of skewed population statistics thrown in. Also, Awlknottedup’s remarks on Kuntsler’s take on government (or lack thereof) were enlightening. It’s possible that a total collapse of administrative organization could happen in some areas, but I don’t see it happening all at once across the entire country.
As regards post-collapse scenarios (how people cope, or not), some of S.M. Stirling’s books might be of interest to folks. For the different types of organizational structures that develop and how these interact, that is, since the collapse of current civilization is caused in the series by some unknown event. He perhaps gets a little over-involved in describing how some things work for some people’s tastes, depends on if you like that sort of thing. In particular I’m thinking of his trio: Dies the Fire, The Protector’s War, and Meeting at Corvallis.
Oops, guess I should have finished reading all the comments first! Didn’t mean to jump on the S.M. Stirling bandwagon, so to speak! And will be checking out some of the other books when I have time.
As regards character development in the context of exploring possible scenarios for a lower-tech world however, I do think there should be enough there for readers to see what sorts of people the author thinks will survive, and what things they might be doing to aid in that survival.
Intelligence, wisdom, commonsense, determination, both everyday and certain specialized skills, life experience of all sorts, an ability to work with others, adaptability, these are all generally the sorts of things any author writing about these types of scenarios should be considering.
It sounds like Kunstler, like many of the golden age science fiction writers, just hasn’t the foggiest idea what a well-rounded character depiction of a woman would be. (Consider _Foundation_ by Issac Asimov.)
I’m not a mean girl (or old woman), just someone who has read SF/alternate history/fantasy since she was 4, and JHK’s book just wasn’t very good. Lots of loose ends, (what the hell was the Hive Queen and the disappearing Brother J, as well as the mystical wounds thing?) and just not a good story arc. I’ve read worse, though. Maybe he will get better after a few novels more.
You want a really good post-apocalytic novel, try Sheri S. Tepper, The Gate Into Women’s Country. Very believable and you’ve even got your crazy FDLS nuts in there in the hinterland to boot. Love to talk to folks about this sleeper. Or be part of this type of book club. I’m at bolete_picr@hotmail.com.
Can I throw in a “yes, please” for the Post Apocalyptic book club? I’m already writing down suggestions for my next library trip from these comments.
I just got WMBH from the library Saturday and read 5 pages before setting it down for something else (The Book of Dahlia, really good so far). The dialogue was so contrived and the narrator was already all up on my nerves. So, yeah, no Kunstler for me.
Richard of Albany said:
“… I must say that Kunstler does at least spark the ‘novel in me’ that encompasses strong women, gay people, pagans, African-American people and 12-step recovery.”
Please do include Hispanics or Latinos as well. Nowadays, they do comprise a large percentage of US population, not to mention the continent of Latinos to the south.
Some of us are well informed and are aware of which parts of the US and the world would be the most survivable in a collapse situation.
As a Cuban-American who has lived most of my 57 years in South Florida, my family and I will be moving to Vermont to live off the land. Vermont’s 520 certified organic farms, 16 food coops and vibrant relocalization movement is calling us.
Yes, we’re taking diversity to New England and any realistic post-apocalyptic scenario must reflect the varied colors seen and the varied sounds spoken in this land called the United States.
~Vegan
Kiashu writes:
“That Kunstler should turn out to be sexist and unable to imagine women as full human beings doesn’t surprise me, we already know he’s racist and can’t imagine Arabs and Moslems as full human beings.”
Yep, and that is why I will never read WMBH. When the first book I see by a given author contains a series of hateful, bloodthirsty, and moreover IRRELEVANT rants against religious and ethnic groups whose existence the author perceives to be inconvenient to his interests, I am never going to give that a****** another bite of my wallet.
As for Stirling, both the series mentioned are great postapocalyptic fiction with strong female characters. One of the main protagonists in the Vancouver series is a black lesbian Coast Guard officer and excellent swordswoman (with, sadly, some biases of her own), and there are lots of strong women in the four post-Change novels to date. The thing about the latter series, which is much better, is that the survivors are instantly deprived of all modern technology by some unexplained “magical” or alien intervention, so it’s not exactly science fiction. It shows people adapting not to a decline over time, but to a situation where everything is lost at once, and people revert to medievalism within a single generation. That’s not very plausible in real life — but Kunstler is pushing an almost equally extreme vision of collapse, and instead of acknowledging that he can’t provide a detailed explanation of causality, he asks us to assume that the shutdown of gas stations will cause women to stop wanting to vote. Anyway, Stirling is a much better writer.
Thanks for the analysis Sharon. I didn’t even see the roles that way. I guess I was reading somehow with my eyes closed. Thanks for opening them.
>As a Cuban-American who has lived most of my 57 years in South Florida, my family and I will be moving to Vermont to live off the land. Vermont’s 520 certified organic farms, 16 food coops and vibrant relocalization movement is calling us.
Actualmente, la dramatista que esta mi favorita de los Estados Unidos es Maria Irene Fornes, una lesbiana dramatista que nacio en Habana desde 1935.
I love creating Hispanic characters! I have a short play about a gay Mexican boy who has a white boyfriend who’s giving him “los vapores,” and he goes to his mamacita to come and beat him up! It’s an homage to a play called “the dreamer examines his pillow” by John Patrick Shanley, but I’ve Coloradified it. I’m originally from Denver, una ciudad muy hispanica si que preguntame.
(Sorry I don’t think I can type con acentos in this program.)
Hi Sharon,
I found your blog through Carolyn Baker’s daily post…thank you for your lifestyle choice and for your willingness to talk about it.
I devoured Kuntsler’s novel, hungry for something, anything to give me something to hold on to as I looked out in the abyss. Your critique confirmed my own thoughts and feelings…many of which I doubted as I read his novel, casting it off as my own critical nature, but reading your words confirmed a piece of the world I intend to create and bring to pass…my world looks very differently from Kuntsler’s.
It seems that he, like many white men in the US have forgotten or are afraid to lose their privilege and power, as the needs of this unprecedented times call for women to reclaim the power that has rested in the hands of men for thousands of years…we are just at the beginning of this transition, yet the path of the feminine is clear and present.
I’m wondering how will we walk together into this transition in community…
In gratitude,
Tarrie
Ok. Unfortunately I’m running behind this morning so I don’t have all the time in the world to read this entire post. Suffice it to say I get the drift that JHK really did a botch job on creating realistic women in his new novel and you wish that his take on their/our lot in life was as more than housekeepers and sex objects.
Have you read SM Stirling’s “Dies the Fire” series yet???? The first book is good, if a bit more gorey than I’d like. But he’s got some strong “main character” women in that set. If you’re looking for a post-apocolyptic series that shows the true potential for women (as well as acknowledging the fact that there will always be men wishing to relegate us to either bedroom or kitchen), I strongly suggest this series. I don’t think it’ll hold up next to “classic lit”, but for post-apocolyptic fiction, it’s a good read.
I actually also like Pat Frank’s “Alas Babylon”, though it is somewhat less interested in the female world post-apocolyptically. Given that it was written in the 70’s (I think), it’s rather campy and somewhat chauvenistic, but also the few primary woman characters are treated fairly and given the capacity to think and work and hold up under pressure and outside the kitchen or bedroom. Also gives some almost-point-blank talk of the kinds of things we need to keep in mind when making preparations for non-electrically-driven society (lots of salt & canning equipment for preserving, needles & thread for clothing making & repair, etc).
Just wanted to throw those two suggestions out there before I head out for work. Blessings.
Personally, I was neither surprised nor upset when Kunstler’s new novel turned out to reveal the author’s “trouble” with women. I read his previous fiction attempt, “Maggie Darling,” and was appalled by the depiction of the central female character as a weak, dumb, hysterical sort of person with whom it was impossible to be sympathetic.
After I read “The Long Emergency” and Jim’s other excellent non-fiction books, I was delighted with him as an author –elegant cultural sensibility, yet bold, irreverent, iconoclastic, exceptionally brilliant, beautiful prose style, something I especially appreciate. I eagerly read all the (substantial at that time) autobiographical writing on his website. (I love his beautiful paintings too.) What I learned from Kunstler’s life story -to my regret –is that he is one of those men who had a really terrible mother. There was divorce in his prealdolescense such that his real father became almost completely estranged. The only slightly sympatico presence in his young life was the new husband of his cold, distant, harpieish mother. The unfortunate young man had to practically raise himself all alone through the hardest parts of growing up and finding a place in the world, which he did quite a good job of, considering the outcome –a productive adulthood making really valuable contributions.
I felt much compassion for the lonely row he hoed as a young person, realizing also that he was probably one of those men who were pretty much ruined for healthy male-female relations. I’ve known other men like that. It’s just really unlikely that a man ever gets over early bad impressions of women. It’s a shame, but there it is. They usually get no corrective experience because like all of us, they tend to choose women they expect and are familiar with, reliving past experience. It’s a weakness and a blind spot and it’s tragic for the man. One expects quality people to get over their early conditioning, but I’ve found that most never do. It’s kind of like how, after childhood, it’s almost impossible to learn to speak a foreign language like a native.
Not to excuse the insulting prejudices of an important author, but simply to explain them. Perhaps Kunstler should stick to non-fiction.
Glad to see this being discussed. I read WMBH- and promptly sold it! Have to say that I wasn’t too impressed- and the role of women bit was over the top …… I don’t know if Kunstler really thinks this way- or if it makes him happy to think this way(a sort of revenge driven attack on women perhaps??) but the notion that all of the advances women have made will be washed away and that they will retreat to the kitchens and the bedroom while the men run the world bit is not a vision of the future I’d want to entertain.
As for other “post-apocolyptic ” novels- well as has been mentioned here previously, from Stirling’s “Dies the Fire” series- which while definitely testosterone riden and violent, I have really enjoyed AND he has developed strong women characters, to Starhawk’s “Fifth Sacred Thing”, to “The Parable of the Sower”-all have strong women as central figures.
While I can see how it is true that if manual labor is paramount- then it is obvious that perhaps the wood splitting be done by the big 6 foot muscular guy while his petite wife does the canning let’s say- but that has more to do with purely physical strength. Who runs a community, has political power or whatever is NOT a function of physical strength. To imply that who has the muscles(or a penis) is once again going to determine who is in charge does seem like going backwards to a point in time in which half of our society was not able to have a voice or use their talents. We can’t afford to do that in this world-we NEED all of our voices and talents.
Sharon- it would be interesting to discuss books- or movies as applicable. I rented the Frontier House DVD’s- found them fascinating in terms of the relationships between the family members between the other families, the changes in the kids etc. Am finally watcing the Jericho series on DVD-I don’t have a TV so am rather out-of-the loop in that respect. I find it fascinating to see how these sorts of things are depicted, whether in WMBH or Jericho, Stirling’s books, or even “The Stand”, or “The Postman”- hmmm- if we were to list all the post-apocolyptic novels we’ve all read………
Kati - would you believe we read Alas Babylon for 8th grade language arts in my middle school? Looking back, that is so twisted - we couldn’t read an unexpurgated Tom Sawyer because of bad language but crazy postnuclear stuff was A OK.
Ani, I would totally want to talk about Frontier House. Crunchy was going to run a discussion on that (maybe she did and I missed it?).
and another postapocalypic book - Pat Murphy’s “The City, Not Long After” is one of my favorites, it’s plain beautiful and very short. And Delany’s Dhalgren, though it’s not so much post-apocalyptic as during the downfall. Or something. Gorgeous, though.
Does anybody else find that their taste in literature makes other people take them less seriously when talking about environmental issues? My mom still pats me on the head and says “I remember the summer you read The Stand, honey. You just worry too much.”
Rosa-
I asked Crunchy about Frontier House recently- she is still planning to do it(a discussion).
Now that I’ve finished the book, I think I can conclude that Kunstler is just not a very good writer. Or that his editor was a little too gung-ho with the editing pen. It’s not just women that he doesn’t “flesh out”–it’s a lot of things.
I love a mystic element or two, but in this book those couple of elements went nowhere. Almost like they were just to add words. Or, the editor cut out too much if they did go anywhere in Kunstler’s original manuscript.
Nobody criticized Margaret Atwood for envisioning an apocolyptic future in which women were severely limited, and even worse, in their roles. Instead women everywhere take that as a warning of what could happen. Scared the hell out of me! Kunstler’s book doesn’t scare the hell out of me, but I think he did paint a picture in which women’s roles are fairly limited. Whether that’s his fictional vision of an apocolyptic future or whether he just “forgot” that women could do more, we can’t know. I think he would be better off responding to criticisms of his females with a statement that this is how his imagination envisioned the future, rather than getting defensive that “well, the women in my book actually have pretty complicated lives”. Maybe in the background they do, but they never make it out of the background.
Still, this was the story of the main character Robert. That Kunstler didn’t flesh out his other characters much is entirely the author’s prerogative. Of course, we can complain about it because that’s our prerogative!
Ideas for the book club…In addition to all the classic apocalyptic novels like Earth Abides, Alas Babylon, Swan Song, On the Beach, A Canticle for Liebowitz and The Stand, here are some of my favorites with small blurbs:
Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
An apocalyptic novel that covers geographical upheavals, famine, cannibalism, human power struggles, lack of medical care, lack of power and fuel. A comet that nearly destroys the earth gives forewarning; some people prepare and some do not. Written in the 70s, it is still one of the best books I’ve read. It starts slow, however, stick with it while it introduces all the characters.
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
This has been mentioned before. It’s excellent. Global warming, pollution, racial and ethnic strife, gangs of drugged-out crazies and other unnamed problems have caused civilization to crash. The main character is a young black woman who flees when her semi-safe compound in Los Angeles is flooded by murderous hordes and her family is killed. A road trip ensues, as she collects comrades and fights bad guys along the way. Her journal entries tell the story. Strong females.
Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler
Sequel to Parable of the Sower; it takes up where Sower left off – a piece of land where the heroine and her friends try to build a better life. Both books deal with a political climate of religious extremism and a new spiritual philosophy that the protagonist has developed. This sequel is written through the eyes of the daughter, who was kidnapped at an early age.
Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer
Don’t be put off by the fact that this book was written for young adults. It is written through the eyes of a teenage girl who grows up swiftly and painfully when an asteroid hits the moon. This causes earthquakes, tidal waves, eruption of volcanoes, and drastic, rapid climate change. The government falls apart in a rerun of Katrina writ large. This takes place in smalltown, USA and centers on one family as conditions worsens and hope diminishes along with fuel and food. There is a focus on the stress and psychological effects of in-your-face hunger, disease, cold and hardship. I won’t spoil this by hinting at the ending, but I still think about this book. It will haunt you long after you finish it.
Into The Forest by Jean Hegland
Another book about teenage girls – these two lose their parents in the midst of an unexplained decline in civilization. They live in a northern California forest, 30 miles from any town, while society slouches toward total collapse. First the power goes, phones fail, fuel disappears, their parents die and they are left alone in the woods to survive. Although the book lacks any explanation of the cause of the collapse, and it is not very realistic, that is not the point of the story. I’m sure we can all imagine a scenario. The strong points are the relationship between the sisters and between them and Mother Nature.
Last Light by Alex Scarrow
And last, but certainly not least - the first real peak oil novel. Although this story differs from the imagined scenario in that the entire crash takes place in one week – due to “terrorist” strikes at major refining and transportation hubs – it allows the ramifications to come about in a terrifyingly short time frame. It takes place in England and is primarily about the members of one family, who are all separated when the SHTF. Unfortunately, this book isn’t being sold in the US yet, but you can still get copies like I did – through the Amazon used book marketplace.
If anyone has other suggestions, I’d love to hear them.
Sorry I’m late getting back –
My own suggestions for the book club:
Daughters of the North (UK title: The Carhullan Army) by Sarah Hall, winner of this year’s Tiptree Award. Set in a near-future UK wrecked by resource depletion in which contraception is forced on all women of childbearing age and reproduction is controlled by government lottery; it explores the social factors that could drive someone to become a terrorist, anger and violence as expressed by women, and the concept that power is available to anyone, regardless of gender, willing to do whatever it takes to obtain it.
Night of Power, by Spider Robinson. Chronicles a multiracial Canadian family’s efforts to survive race riots in a future domed and racially segregated New York; Robinson is working through a lot of white liberal guilt in this book, written early in his career, and it bogs down in places. But most of the primary characters are people of color — not overly common in this genre — and there’s some effort to examine how race influences POV and experience and interpretation of events.
Always Coming Home, by Ursula K. Le Guin. Set well after the Apocalypse in a Northern California valley still dealing with the effects of pollution (the conception and full-term healthy birth rates among humans and higher mammals are very low, and there are words in the language Le Guin invents for neurological disorders caused by long-term genetic damage), the society is modeled on Pacific Northwest Native gift culture, in which one’s wealth is measured by what one can afford to give away.
It examines gender issues — same-sex married couples and trans people appear throughout — disability, the cultural challenges experienced by mixed-race children, the effects of militarism on society, what medicine can and can’t do in a low-tech society . . . it’s certainly one of my Desert Island books, and I once spent a ridiculous amount of money to get a copy of the boxed set edition which contained a cassette of some of the songs.
And my son has just reminded me of M.K. Wren’s A Gift Upon the Shore: two women on a subsistence farm on the Oregon Coast, in the aftermath of nuclear war, working to preserve what they can of Western culture by creating a book repository.
Comes complete with conflict with the obligatory dominionist Christian survivalist cult — and if someone could suggest some books that deal positively with any sort of religion postCrash, particularly Christianity, I would thank you most sincerely.
While there are physical issues that would push women into a domestic role in his world you have to question a level of passivity which is unheard of in any of the founding western cultures. This attitude might develop a couple of generations down the road but since the mature population are still children of the modern age there is no way short of physical abuse and cultist like programming you could have pacified women so quickly. Even in the most oppressive societies men might appear in charge publicly but still draw the line at home for domestic bliss. I think Kunstler’s jump to old language forms and old social stereotypes was both a botched attempt at showing devolution of civilization and a vast lack of understanding of relationships, now and in the past.
The passivity however is not exclusive to the women as the sad state of the town shows, the mayor and constable were disinterested or dysfunctional, there was no sense the council met on a regular basis, there was no public works, no attempt to lay claim to the riches of the dump, there was no mention of schooling that I recall, etc.
Jane’s personal depression could have passed as a representation of an overall malaise in society but when you only show women only as weak passive fuck monkeys (Jane, Brit and the young girl the preacher tempts the main character with) it must go beyond plot and represent a real belief of the writer.
While women did get the worst of the literary treatment I did not find any of the characters adequately developed, he’s no fiction writer
There is certainly a personal bias built into the book some of which is directly taken from his predictions in the Long Emergency and his Blog. He apparently feels its ok to judge peoples worth by minor life choices, agrarian folk music lovers, good, rock music loving ex car culture people, bad, and he even puts them in a trailer park despite there being a half empty town.
He feels that a community cannot thrive without aggressive religiosity that the new preacher brings and apparently places limited value on women. The whole bit with the religious seer in the bee hive was just bizarre, I don’t know if he was trying to redeem the value of women or it was just more overt religiosity showing that god would directly interact with us.
He has an obvious belief that a mixed race society cannot survive, hell even the main Character was a Jew passing himself off as Christian
An aside
In Kunstler’s world where birth rates have dropped dangerously I would think that the power of fertility would increase women’s value and that a matriarchal system with open marriages to ensure children would be the end result.
Avoid the movie which is a joke, but David Brins the Postman is a good post crash book showing the power of a symbol to reunite and stimulate a fallen society. It has an interesting twist as a group of women decide that it’s women’s responsibility to cull their mistakes and strike down those men who should have been allowed to grow up and become monsters. It’s only a side line to the story but certainly a image of powerful women.
GAB, some of us who read The Postman adopted the unofficial subtitle “Why Oral Hygiene Is Important”.
i named kunstler, “the curmudgeon of armageddon”.
a prophet of doom who is in it for the profit.
JHK sez the only thing that will save uhmerika is the railroad. then he promptly jets around the country rents a car and settles into a big city hotel. he mocks folks who conserve,”anything you do will be useless”. at his website CFN, i read the same thugs posting there over and over. it’s like an old boyz club. um… i post there a lot also.
so dont sweat it. JHK is a grumpy old man making a buck. i figger he will be the first to go when the collapse he predicts comes about. no doubt one of his blog posters will visit him clunk him on the head and steal all his food. or, maybe when the collapse
comes he will have a heart attack and no recourse to high tech medical assistance. HOO-RAY!
well i read his book. and i thought it sucked.
compared to the long emergency and geography of nowhere it definitely suckethed.
i have lived with farmers. dairy farmers in upstate new york over by herkimer. they are so busy keeping things going that they dont have the time nor the energy to fornicate. both sexes.
in a return to no tractors and combines and harvestors there will be twenty four hour work days for everyone.
thank god for that. people get too much time on their hands and they become candidates for the laughing academy.
Hey! He’s a guy! Male fantasy elements. It’s all made up. Only one version of the way things might turn out. Things are going to change. Will they go retro or not? It depends on how bad it is.. really and whether or not women have choice about reproduction or not. Think about life without choice.
All of my great grandmothers were pioneer women on the Great Plains. They had nine, ten, eleven, twelve children. They lost babies too. They lived in shacks and soddies . A homestead is a partnership.They worked in the house and the barn and the dairy and the church. Without electricity or gas and without driving anywhere they cooked and did laundry and put up food from the garden and made quilts and raised all those kids. They are the strongest role models I can think of. Most of them lived into ripe old age.
An unrelated comment is: Will feminism survive peak oil? Can we possibly survive if we don’t team up?
Thanks for reminding me of Always Coming Home, Amelia. That’s just the book for me to reread right now.
I don’t have time to read all the comments up thread but as a male who likes survivalist fiction, I found the male characters to be a bunch of brain dead losers so it isn’t just the female characters.
It’s simply a rotten book.
Todd
Thank you for the excellent, albeit reluctant, review, Sharon. WMBH seems to be just the latest expression of Kunstler’s, um, gender issues. Here is a recap for those unfamiliar…
One of his favorite gripes about architecture is that buildings have lost all “feminine” qualities, whatever the hell that means. Oh, wait. Here it is, in _The Geography of Nowhere_, _The Long Emergency_, many of his blog posts and, most recently, in his latest Eyesore of the Month (http://www.kunstler.com/eyesore.html). It’s a lack of “curves” and “ornaments” that bothers him.
In his infamous Y2K screed (http://www.kunstler.com/mags_y2k.html) Kunstler wrote, “Y2K is a bitch-slap upside the head of American culture.” I am not aware of anyone calling him on it at the time (the oppressive language directed at women, that is; plenty of people have since raked him over the coals for his Y2K predictions).
It turned up again in 2005 when he used the phrase in the title of one his posts (http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2005/04/a_bitchslap_ups.html) in which he tells the story of using the phrase “bitch slap” at one of his talks and another anecdote about buildings’ lack of curves and ornaments. His responses to the “wrathful female[s]” who dared question his language indicate his utter ignorance about gender as a system of power and *why* such statements are harmful.
I can understand the desire for a meme to describe what I, too, would like to see happen — a mass awakening of the populace from our “sleepwalking into the future.” I’ve been trying to think of one for some time now. The closest I have come is something along the line of a splash of cold water in the face. But, I digress.
Stan Goff and De Clarke wrote an excellent response to one of his posts last year about Hillary Clinton (http://www.insurgentamerican.net/2007/01/31/kunstler-latoc-and-misogyny/), dutifully echoed and riffed upon at Life After the Oil Crash, connecting (rightly so) these attitudes and gendered language to the conquest of nature and women, which is entangled with the popular concept of masculinity.
Kunstler has a special place in my consciousness as the person out of whose mouth I first heard the words “Peak oil.” Too bad it’s been mostly downhill since. I think we are well past Peak Kunstler.
I’ll be reading “Always Coming Home.” Le Guin’s interest in philosophical Taoism is very appealing. I love her translation of the Tao Te Ching.
Today I finally got the courage to get through the first 70 pages of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” Beautiful and sooooo sad …
~Vegan
I wonder how many of the harshest critics here have ever tried living a much more basic life. I have. Having planted myself, from our pampered twisted mishmash upbringing of the wannabe liberated - but really still stuck in the role playing, boomer society, into an experimental life of building and digging and lifting and hauling and wrenching and fixing… well you get it. Guess what happens to the gender role models. Those that built forts and go-carts and fixed cars and went hunting and fishing were able to build things and cut wood and dig holes and haul heavy things. Those that couldn’t did the rest, much of which they had luckily been taught to do despite the sometimes distracting battles being fought to right the worst of the injustices.
Let’s let go of the fantasies that we are all so damned liberated and just work together using whatever skills we have to contribute to the greater good. If Kunstler has anything right it is that we are still too trivial to survive if we think that any real emergency will allow us the luxury of endlessly debating how life should be instead of quickly learning how to live it during really different circumstances. Spending much time at all on something as trivial as critiquing one vision of a possible outcome when things fall apart rapidly at a given moment in time should only happen after one knows everything there is to know about how to cook and sew and grow food and cut wood and build buildings and kill and slaughter and defend yourself. Do you think you have time for more?
Let’s get real and quit living the phony life of the pampered. That and more will indeed go away unless we get very serious very soon.
^MikeL- While I’ve lived adult life in a decidedly conventional manner, I grew up off-grid. It was there, off the grid, that I learned unconventional gender role models. Granted, my father was a disabled vet whose mangled hand rendered him more capable of changing diapers than, say, chopping wood (although he did both, and frankly, I’m amazed to see so many fathers who are clueless to change plastic diapers when I witnessed my father change cloth diapers- with pins!- one-handed). Still, I think you’re making some presumptions here. You’re also giving a lot more credit to Kunstler’s silly novel than it’s due.
Let’s not play the old Internet OneUpMan game, Mike L. Whatever you’ve experienced or done, someone’s had it harder or nastier. Forget that bollocks.
As I read it, people’s complaint about this book are not the roles Kunstler gives women, but rather that they’re empty blanks. It’s not that his writing is offensive, but that because the characters are so empty, it’s boring.
A writer can commit no greater sin than to bore their readers. I can be bored without spending a couple of days reading, and paying A$54.95 for the hardback.
Both good comments. Plenty of people, men and women, have lived rich lives and contributed much. The book was a silly novel. It didn’t claim to be more.
What pushed my button, and tapped frustrations left over from coming of age in the 70’s, was the notion that this “silly little book” should have covered in depth many things that perhaps it couldn’t. If Kunstler had tried to develop complex female characters he would have been just as likely to have been jumped all over for being so arrogant to think that he actually knew what it was like to be female in this world run by men. Or whatever slogan you wish to insert.
After growing up with women struggling to identify themselves as radically different than their mothers and getting beat up for decades for simply being male no matter how hard we tried to be supportive I have tried since to understand why most of those women ended up just like their mothers, or worse.
He is a man, writing f