Car Camping - by Mark Sundeen (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

For fans of Jack Kerouac and Nomadland, from the author of The Man Who Quit Money, this road-trip novel puts the auto in autofiction as it crisscrosses the late-nineties Southwest in search of authenticity and adventure.

At the end of the twentieth century, a young house painter in Southern California abandons his rollers to take a stab at living in the Right Now. (Mis)adventures ensue as his belated coming-of-age unfolds in fits and starts across thousands of miles of dirt road and desert highway, helped or hindered by a parade of strangers, hitchhikers, swingers, dealers, campers, loners, losers, and would-be lovers.

Review Quotes

"A stunningly wonderful writer. Sundeen's prose is sparse but the images he creates are alive and infinite. This is a book to be savored and remembered."--Hubert Selby Jr., author of Requiem for a Dream

"Exhilarating reading . . . very funny . . . the scenery he describes best in these wide-open spaces consists largely of trailer parks, junkyards, campgrounds and 'recreational areas.' Here there are no larger-than-life characters, no sinner-saints or inspired madmen--just listless, marginal dreamers, scavengers who seem to have become deluded by some long-forgotten notion of the desert, only to find themselves eking out a hardscrabble existence among the detritus of those who've been this way before."--Anthony Bourdain "New York Times"

"Housepainter Mark Sundeen, 22, tells of hopping in his ramshackle station wagon, along or with some of his more eccentric family members, and hightailing it out of his Southern California neighborhood for various godforsaken, fascinating parts of the American West. Sundeen, via his faux-naive authorial persona, makes many delightfully sly comments on the pretentious rich inhabitants of Telluride, tourists chasing Native American 'spirituality' and the true meaning of the term 'National Recreation Area.'"--Laura Miller "Salon"

"Mark Sundeen has as many great road-trip yarns as he has miles on his odometer."-- "Playboy"

"This is travel literature done DIY style, with Mark Sundeen criss-crossing the Southwest behind the wheel of his beat-up Subaru wagon in pursuit of a place where he can afford to be 'himself.' He offers up his commentary on a part of the American experience that never makes it to prime time and he has some sound, sharp explanations as to why that might be. Car Camping is funny, and Sundeen's wanderlust is infectious."-- "Bust Magazine"

"Car Camping takes readers from California to Colorado and all points in between as Sundeen searches the Desert Southwest, looking for love, home, and himself. This book, like Sundeen's Subaru, will travel you far and show you beautiful sights."--Sean Prentiss, author of Finding Abbey and Crosscut

"A coming-of-age story that never really reaches 'age' and doesn't want to. It's about someone in search of masculinity and adventure who finds instead broken dreams, ragged humanity, and the ghosts of the West. This book is somehow bone dry and a soaked sponge at once. It's full of sincerity and wryness, wonder and bite--a story allergic to pretension, grandiosity, and false epiphanies. It's kinda dirty, and not really that sorry about it--spiritually speaking, it puts the dung back in bildungsroman."--Leslie Jamison, New York Times bestselling author of Splinters and The Empathy Exams

"A riotous, beautiful, totally original road novel masquerading as a travel book. Sundeen's America, comprised of equal parts Gorgeous and Awful, absolutely shimmers with life. The prose is pure, wild, naïve, and poetic; the characters leap off the page in their dunderheadedness and sincerity. A brilliant and auspicious debut."--George Saunders

"In spare, piercing prose, Sundeen distills the itinerants of the American deserts into a series of unforgettable encounters. Car Camping is both hilarious and haunting, a road book that finds wonder in the margins."--D. Seth Horton, author of On a NASA Flight to Heaven and co-editor of Buffalo Cactus

About the Author

Mark Sundeen teaches at the University of Montana. He is the author of five other books about the American West, including, mostly recently, Delusions and Grandeur: Dreamers of the New West (UNM Press). He is a contributing editor for Outside Magazine, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic Adventure, The Believer, and Best American Essays.