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lieslindi 's review for:
World Made by Hand
by James Howard Kunstler
Wow. Robin McKinley freely admits that The Blue Sword is her teenaged self's wish-fulfillment novel, and so it is, from horses to hair. World Made by Hand is wish fulfillment too, of a much less appealing sort.
Kunstler's protagonist revels in traditional sex roles. There's conflict straight out of the mythology of the Wild West. Regular folks know who Savonarola was. No women contribute to the leadership of the society but they're all fine cooks, even the ones with small breasts. At least one conflict with a female character is left hanging because neither Robert, the protagonist, nor Kunstler, the author, could figure out the decent thing to do. The one female character anyone reveres is one Robert is frightened by. I found her frightening too, because she's a meaningless insert without followup, just a bogey for Kunstler's ilk to be spooked by. A fertility figure? a Delphic one? mere sloppy plotting?
Robert witnesses the physical abuse and injury of a companion, stoically, because that's manly, except the stoicism is rather more a pathological lack of affect, considering he is next up for similar torment. Except the torturer spares him injury, inflicting instead only humiliation. This mercy is out of character for the torturer but he does incongruously spare the protagonist -- which is, no doubt, all we should be concerned with.
I thought Kunstler's McDonaldization of Society had a few good points but was overwrought, and this fiction of the same premises is overwrought with fewer good points. I admit to selecting it in pleasurable anticipation of a hate-read, which colored my reading. Robert's presence leads at least two characters* to suicide. I sympathize.
* Kunstler made his point with the first suicide, but since that was only a female character he needed a male character to do essentially the same thing so the reader could be sure it was important and not just hysteria. In Kunstler's world, "girls" are discrete from the set of humanity called "kids": "[A character] ended up in [prison] himself at age nineteen for stabbing to death another teenage boy one summer night at the quarry outside town where kids gathered to drink and hook up with girls" (~39).
Kunstler's protagonist revels in traditional sex roles. There's conflict straight out of the mythology of the Wild West. Regular folks know who Savonarola was. No women contribute to the leadership of the society but they're all fine cooks, even the ones with small breasts. At least one conflict with a female character is left hanging because neither Robert, the protagonist, nor Kunstler, the author, could figure out the decent thing to do. The one female character anyone reveres is one Robert is frightened by. I found her frightening too, because she's a meaningless insert without followup, just a bogey for Kunstler's ilk to be spooked by. A fertility figure? a Delphic one? mere sloppy plotting?
Robert witnesses the physical abuse and injury of a companion, stoically, because that's manly, except the stoicism is rather more a pathological lack of affect, considering he is next up for similar torment. Except the torturer spares him injury, inflicting instead only humiliation. This mercy is out of character for the torturer but he does incongruously spare the protagonist -- which is, no doubt, all we should be concerned with.
I thought Kunstler's McDonaldization of Society had a few good points but was overwrought, and this fiction of the same premises is overwrought with fewer good points. I admit to selecting it in pleasurable anticipation of a hate-read, which colored my reading. Robert's presence leads at least two characters* to suicide. I sympathize.
* Kunstler made his point with the first suicide, but since that was only a female character he needed a male character to do essentially the same thing so the reader could be sure it was important and not just hysteria. In Kunstler's world, "girls" are discrete from the set of humanity called "kids": "[A character] ended up in [prison] himself at age nineteen for stabbing to death another teenage boy one summer night at the quarry outside town where kids gathered to drink and hook up with girls" (~39).