Good afternoon.
It's one of those quiet Sunday afternoons in San Diego area, with an overcast sky that pulses white against your eyes, no real shade and no rain. I finished reading The Witch of Hebron by James Howard Kunstler two days ago.
There's so much good writing in that book that I hate to be carping about a huge error made by the author. There are about three or four long complete descriptions of male masturbatory activity in that rather short novel. They are as trite and disgusting as cheap pornography. Why did Mr Kunstler bother? Why, WHY does he think that kind of stuff fits into a piece of writing meant to be read by the general public and purporting to be an elegaic vision of our emininent and mutual apocalyptic future? Is he trying to say that when the lights go out, men will still be masturbating? Duh. Who knew? More important, who asked? The best I can say of those exposes is that at least he left the women alone and stuck to what he knows about.
Some of his characters are fully wrought and interesting. The most fully wrought is the bad young man Billy Bones; you feel as if you got a pretty complete picture of him. Jasper, the runaway boy, pretty good. Brother Jobe, a well imagined and truly fascinating character--a true American type.The best are the three average guys who are, together, probably a picture of the author himself, parcelled out into thirds. So he know's what he's like (at his best.) The women--well, they're odd. The Witch herself is interesting. All of these women seem to be like something conjured up on a cold night by some lonely man. The mother/teacher types are rapidly run through and rejected into their dull roles, but the Witch is really kind of good. I think she's been prepped up for a bigger role later on in this saga. Interesting.
Both the Witch and Brother Jobe seem to possess magical powers, and to influence the outcome of the story by their dabblings. I liked that, as I like magical things in nature (where I do believe they exist) and I felt that that line of thinking added to the interest of the book.
If number of words given to a sub-topic is any hint, I think the next book by Mr Kunstler will be The Union Grove Cookbook. Never have I read so many menus and recipes and mouth-watering descriptions of meals in one somber tome as in this one. I was wondering how they come up with so many cakes, pies and cookies until I realized that (1) there are all those maple trees, (2) the honey bees may make it into the near future, and (3) most of the populace will have died of the Mexican flu and there won't be so many people around to eat too many sweets. So there will be cakes for all, I am happy to say.
Off topic, it reminds me of Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here, a novel from the 40's with a similar futuristic thrust, where all are starving but the cook keeps coming up with coconut cakes. Not honey cakes nor maple cakes, but coconut cakes...interesting. I gather that both these gentlemen do their writing on lonely nights when they need their midnight snacks.
Mr Kunstler is a good painter, but he's not a good novelist, yet. His descriptive writing is okay, some of his narrative was surprising and good. A long description of an appendectomy performed by the runaway boy, a doctor's son with good powers of observation and memory, reminded me of Thomas Costain. Anybody remember him? He was a doctor turned historical novel writer. Every novel he wrote contained at least one operation described at great length with painstaking detail. We should hang onto the book in case we have to do the same thing, a little later into The Long Emergency. YAZZYBEL
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