Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. It’s hard to imagine that a post-apocalyptic world could be this tedious.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. After a dull adventure to free a boat crew being held hostage by a local warlord on the Hudson, Robert and company return to Union City to clean up the mess. Pockets of lawlessness are rife, both in the personal corruption of local officials and in the sadistic, unholy gang of Wayne Karp, a character who leaves one begging for civilization. Into this anarchic breach step Brother Jobe and the members of the New Faith Church, a quasi-Amish band determined to reassert the rule of law. Consequently, the locals are called upon to govern themselves. In addition, civil authority has largely broken down (no one even knows whether Washington, D.C., still exists). So few single men now exist that women (even Jane Ann, wife of the Congregational minister) are shared between friends. Premature death, in fact, has claimed a substantial part of the populace, including Robert’s daughter and his wife, who fell victim to an outbreak of encephalitis. The devastation has brought with it other effects, most notably the Mexican flu.
Kunstler’s latest novel fictionalizes some of the material covered in his nonfiction work The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (2005), which examined how a decline in oil production could have cataclysmic repercussions on modern industrial culture.Īfter a bomb exploded in Los Angeles (attributed to an “act of Jihad”), narrator Robert Earle and his family moved to Union Grove, N.Y., but the economy has since collapsed and the citizens have found themselves atavistically involved in long-lost pursuits such as subsistence farming.
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