The Book Shelf

Ah, summer, time to lie out in the sun and read those fluffy beach novels-or maybe not.   Jim and Laura Armstrong take a look at three novelists who have envisioned the collapse of civilization due to environmental castastrophe and have asked what it might take for humanity to go forward: novels discussed include Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and Year of the Flood,  and James Howard Kunstler's A World Made By Hand.  Each of these books seem to say that survival depends on more than guns and survival skills: what is more important is a sense of community.  Whereas the usual post-apocalypse narrative has the lone survivor pitted against the world (a cliché that McCarthy exploits and questions explicitly, for example), these novels point out that we'll have to face the future together.   Atwood and Kunstler-though not themselves particularly religious-posit that religious communities might have a better chance of going forward, because they resist the individualism that brought on the catastrophes in the first place and because they help organize the agricultural work that will be required to keep human communities viable.  Even McCarthy thinks that humans will need to find a source of faith in each other, in the face of a dark and challenging future. Jim Armstrong has a Ph.D. from Boston University and has taught creative writing at Northwestern University, in the MFA program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chautauqua Institution, and at Winona State University, where he is currently a Full Professor of English.  Armstrong is the author of two volumes of poetry, Monument in a Summer Hat, published in 1999 and Blue Lash, published in 2006 by Milkweed Editions. From 2007 to 2009 Armstrong was Poet Laureate of the City of Winona, Minnesota, where he lives with his wife and two daughters.   Laura Armstrong has been teaching English for thirteen years and currently teaches at Winona Senior High.  She earned a B.A. in writing from Sarah Lawrence College and a Master's degree in English and Education from Boston University.  Reading is her favorite sport.