This past winter, I read Sun House, by David James Duncan. It was the best book I’ve read in a really long time, yet I’ve been reluctant to recommend it. At 764 pages and telling many interwoven stories spanning six decades, it requires a big commitment. It’s not for everyone: Duncan’s style, language, and world view is intense and unusual; reviews have been mixed. A few months after finishing the book, I read it again, and decided it’s worth the risk. So I started suggesting to friends and family that they read it. I even bought extra copies to lend out. This is a book that is helping me to imagine a different way of living at this moment in America and on Earth. Seeing a different way feels like a lifeline.
Sun House starts with the stories of three unconnected people and a pair of twin brothers in Oregon, Colorado, and Washington. It follows each of them through various formative experiences, joys, tragedies, and spiritual journeys until eventually they cross paths, connect with other kindred spirits, and form a community in rural Montana.
This is not a book review. I’m not going to try to summarize the plot, or explain what characters or story lines I found most compelling. I’m not even going to explore the big themes or messages of the book. What I will say is that Sun House is an attempt to create a new mythology for our times. If, like me, you feel trapped in a civilization that seems headed for collapse once it destroys most of the living beings, natural beauty, and life support systems on Earth, and you don’t see another way, this book might be for you too.
For at least 20 years, I’ve felt that I’m part of a political and economic system that is destroying the biosphere that provides us with everything we need, love, and depend on. I’ve taken many small steps to try to do less damage, yet none of them have felt adequate. As the climate continues to destabilize, and those in power slither towards fascism and kleptocracy, this feeling has deepened into heartbreak and dread.
Yet opting out of the system, finding an alternative, has seemed impossible to imagine, futile, costly and detrimental to my well-being. It’s felt futile because me opting out didn’t seem like it would make any discernable difference, and personally costly because I’d have to give up the comforts of modern life, and live cut off from much of what brings me ease, safety, and straightforward access to necessities, pleasures, and those I love who are far away.
Sun House creates an alternative that feels meaningful and perhaps even possible. Here’s what I took from the story: As our politics, economic system, and extreme wealth and power inequality continue to destroy life and climate stability, small bands of people can start and build communities and modes making a living that will serve as lifeboats: protected reserves of living things, skills, information, cooperative systems, love of nature, integrity, and sacred knowledge. As end-stage capitalism destroys huge swaths of life on earth, these lifeboat communities might provide shelter to preserve enough life, beauty, skills, and knowledge to restore life and beauty and reinhabit earth after industrial civilization has fallen and the great cycle of destruction we’re in has run it’s course.
Duncan’s tale is an attempt to show how such a lifeboat might be born and develop in the midst of our human-shattered world. And for me, his fable succeeds.
There’s just one more thing I want to say about why I loved this book. In Duncan’s tale, there are no litmus tests for entry into the community, except to value and revere other living creatures. People there still use cars and machinery and run businesses—although with a focus on reducing consumption and waste. Some live lives that include frequent flying or driving, and some eat meat. I could write a whole separate essay on why this lack of purity testing is so important to me, but I won’t. I’ll just say that anyone who has been working for environmental progress and climate action for any amount of time knows that our different approaches have often prevented us from uniting enough to fully work together.
Sun House took me on a journey that fully enveloped me, as only the best books can do. It took several hundred pages to get into, and I found it somewhat uneven going. There were some sections of the book I didn’t even like. Yet this book allowed me to start imagining new possibilities for building lifeboats. I now see the seeds of these lifeboats in people and places I didn’t see before. I am now seeking out ways to contribute to a lifeboat in my community. Sun House did this for me. Maybe it won’t do that for you. But on the chance that it might, I suggest you give it a try.