In ‘The Unsettlers,’ Mark Sundeen looks for lives well lived | Books … – Missoula Independent

Mark Sundeen, as his books attest, is a seeker. His novel Car Camping chased enlightenment through travel and came up with comedy. The Making of Toro was a meta (and also pretty comic) quest, identified right there in the subtitle, for the authorial "acclaim he deserves." The Man Who Quit Money projected his seeking onto another seeker, Daniel Suelo, a man refusing the shackles of currency in an attempt to create a better way to live in the world.

With The Unsettlers, he's zoomed out from the micro of Suelo's search and into the encompassing big-picture: What might it mean, and how might it work, to live well?

It's a timeless question, and it's also a zeitgeisty one. Why do Trump supporters want to make America great again? Because they don't think America is very great right now. Why are progressives always complaining about everything? Because progressivism is built on the belief that the-way-things-are can always be improved on. Either way, whichever ideology gives the search shape, it's self-improvement that we're ultimately after, and America, from Gatsby to Oprah, has never been short of self-improvement strategies.

And maybe that's because Americans are so often disappointed. Baked into the idea that the good life requires a search is the premise that the life we're already livingright here and right nowisn't it. (Also baked into any quest to "live well" is the privilege implied by the phrase's second worda privilege Sundeen does well to acknowledge and navigate).

Sundeen blessedly skips the rhetorical bother of building a case or even identifying a cause for the nagging imperfectness of the world, but he convincingly sketches the shadows thrown on human satisfaction by the numbing bombardments of what we're probably safe in oversimplifying as late-stage capitalism: disconnection from community, dependence on institutional injustice and the commodification of fulfillment.

Ostensibly incited by the compromises and opportunities of a new marriage, and armed with a skeptic's suspicion that he might harbor room for some self-improvement of his own, Sundeen hits the road in search of anyone who looks like they might have figured it all out.

His thematic roadmap, as his title suggests, is Wendell Berry's 1978 classic The Unsettling of America. That book made Berry's agriculture-centric case that the growing cultural distance in America between livelihood and land accompanies and probably causes a whole host of ills (like disconnection from community, dependence on institutional injustice and the commodification of fulfillment). Racism, sexism, addiction, appetite for destructionall, in Berry's scheme, are part and parcel of the country's tilt away from Jeffersonian farmdom and toward rootless cosmopolitanism.

That map steers Sundeen toward the landed. First in Missouri, where an idealistic young car-foregoing couple scrapes together enough cash to start the latest in a long American line of intentional communities in flyover country, where water is plentiful, land is cheap, and building codes are lax. Then in Detroit, where an urban farming movement has established itself in the ruins of a gutted industrial powerhouse. And finally in Montana, where Sundeen, a former Missoula resident, turns away from such upstarts to see if anyone has managed to make a good lifewith all its deprivations and difficult choiceslast. He finds that sustained integrity inspoiler alertVictor, where Steve Elliot and Luci Brieger have spent the last 30-plus years building their good life at Lifeline Farm.

If Sundeen's subjects' attempts to live in harmony with land connects them, so does the fact that they are, or become, couples. The good life in Sundeen's sights is clearly built for, if not by, two. This choice of paired characters has the happy effect of making each of Sundeen's vignettes also a love story of sorts, which provides him a nice prism through which to view his own coming to terms with marriage, after what he presents as a thoroughly bachelorized life beforehand.

It's probably not giving too much away to note that Sundeen eventually decides that the life of ethical denial and honest toil that drives his characters isn't really for him, as much as he's intellectually attracted to the idea. Sundeen's searching ultimately leads him not back to the land, but to a reaffirmation of his own "practice," which is research and writingthe acts of creation that brought us this book. There's even a nice little love story of his own tucked away in the realization. And good thing he recognizes it, too. This fallen world has quite enough wannabe farmers, and long may they thrive. But it's frankly hard to imagine the bunch of carrots, however lovingly husbanded, that would be more nourishing than the body of work Sundeen is building.

Mark Sundeen reads from The Unsettlers at Shakespeare & Co. Mon., Feb. 27, at 7 PM.

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In 'The Unsettlers,' Mark Sundeen looks for lives well lived | Books ... - Missoula Independent