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BOOK REVIEW FOR ...
Big Slide
by James Howard Kunstler
As Big Slide opens, America's president is dead (of causes unknown, though assassination is suspected). Stores have been looted of food and supplies; fuel is scarce and running out; people are fighting in the streets of major cities. The government is no longer in control, and various militia groups are vying for regional dominance and authority. Los Angeles has been wrecked by major bomb blasts. The nation's electric grid is off more than it's on.
In response to the chaos, three generations of the Freeman family have gathered at their rustic country estate (called Big Slide) to weather the storm. The cast is cut partly from the era of
the feckless "Bertie Wooster" leisure class and partly from the era of modern workaday urbanites.
The main question on most of the characters' minds is when normality will be restored. The more intelligent among them suspect it will be quite a while, and wonder how long this bunch of rather privileged, largely unskilled city folk will be able to hole up in their enclave without starving, freezing to death, being overrun by brigands, or just plain driving each other crazy.
As with all literary works that are also trying to make a point, the dialog of the characters in Big Slide occasionally feels a bit pedantic. But overall the interaction between the characters here feels genuine, with discussions of "the situation" interspersed with more normal conversation and familial jabbing.
As a story, everything proceeds along quite well in Big Slide, with the characters scrounging food and preparing creative meals, warming themselves by the fireplace, drinking and talking, and trying to get some outside news on the radio. But the plot lurches into a ravine in the last few pages when local "law enforcement" shows up, making unreasonable demands. That's not a surprising or problematic plot twist, given the level of trouble that's going on in the story's outside world. Our complaint is that the response of one of the Freeman siblings is so inconsistent with Kunstler's earlier framing of that character's personality, it makes the overall ending "feel wrong." The author is clearly making a point with the character's action, but the groundwork he previously laid does not make it believable.
Kunstler certainly managed tension, resolution, and character believability well his excellent novel World Made By Hand, so we know he's a capable author. But in Big Slide, by bending the character rules to ensure he could check off more boxes on the "we're so screwed" list, he screws his own play.
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To be clear, it's not that we were looking for a happy ending to Big Slide—a certain level of bad outcome was baked into the plot. Perhaps the novella-length format was insufficient for Kunstler to be able to make the mechanics of the ending scenes work plausibly and still end up with the same plot result.
Is Big Slide still worth reading? Yes. It deals with many important "collapse concepts," and fictional treatments such as this help bring new clarity to the realities we may face in the future.
See sidebar for info in how to purchase Big Slide e-book or download MP3s for free.
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HOW TO GET BIG SLIDE
Big Slide was written by James Howard Kunstler to be performed as a play. A live reading of the manuscript is available for free download at KunstlerCast. As we at GP started listening to that reading, however, we felt the performances missed a lot of the nuance in the dialog, detracting from the innate quality of the writing. So we ended up abandoning the MP3s and paid the $5 for the e-book. That was better, and it's a pretty quick read.
Free MP3s at
KunstlerCast
Kindle version at
Amazon.com
PDF at
Kunstler.com
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