Downsized Living
IF YOU LIVED HERE YOU’D BE HOME BY NOW: Why We Traded the Commuting Life for a Little House on the Prairie
BY CHRISTOPHER INGRAHAM
Harper, 288 pp., $24.99
THE DREAM OF relocating to the countryside in search of a slower-paced, more meaningful life has a proud literary tradition. Consider Thoreau’s Aldo Leopold’s or Annie Dillard’s . But if the impulse isn’t new, neither are the cautions against seeking its fulfillment. “You people there in the capital are interested in the provinces solely from a poetic viewpoint, that is to say, the picturesque,” a rural administrator tells a wealthly Muscovite in Anton Chekhov’s 1895 novella “but I assure you, my friend, there is nothing in the least poetic here—there is barbarism, vulgarity, and meanness, nothing more.” Such a warning, applied to our
