Ish is the personification of that quote about “god grant me the confidence of a mediocre white guy,” except that he is even more assured of his specialness than usual, because he survived the plague that wiped out most of the rest of humanity. When he finally ventures out of his mountain cabin, civilization is dead and survivors are sparse. He adopts a dog and takes a road trip, looking for other people who are worthy of his company. Finding no one (California to New York) he’s willing to hang out with, he heads back to his childhood home in California and slowly builds up his own small commune of people (and a wife) who are dumber than him.
Usually post-apocalyptic stories are full of excitement and danger, but this book posits that boring people are still gonna be boring, even after everybody else is dead. They still want the status of fancy lamps and expensive furniture, even when there’s no more electricity. Nobody wants to learn how to farm or do important survival skills, because there are canned goods everywhere and the water still works. Ish keeps trying to tell his group (especially the ever-growing number of children) that this can’t last, and they need to learn to read and stuff or future generations will be screwed, but nobody cares. He worries a lot, but then he looks at his courageous, strong, but appealingly dumber-than-him apocalypse wife, and he is content.
And that’s it! For decades! They hang out, they eat canned goods, they travel by dogsled (dogwagon?), they occasionally let Ish philosophize at them and try to teach them to read. Definitely a different take on the post-plague genre (and written in 1949, so not too triggering about covid stuff), but I wish I had cared more if these survivors kept on surviving.
“He felt all the great forces of the world at work against him, against the only man still alive who could think and plan for the future.”
