LOST IN SUMMERLAND
Essays
By Barrett Swanson
When we first meet Barrett Swanson in the opening essay of his new book, he is trapped in a malaise — “feeling rudderless and unmoored.” He long believed that “the point of life was to chase down a succession of exotic experiences” and that “no true consequences stemmed from my ideological decisions,” but he has since awakened to the realization that his nihilist indulgence marks a broken worldview that he is unsure how to fix.
That quandary is a launching point for “Lost in Summerland,” Swanson’s impressive debut essay collection. Swanson, a contributing editor at Harper’s and a winner of a 2015 Pushcart Prize for his short fiction, serves as a candid and empathetic narrator, guiding us with restrained cynicism and enticing prose as he interrogates the stories we tell ourselves to paper over truths we’d rather not face.
Stitched together, the essays — which were previously published online and blend memoir, immersion reporting and cultural criticism — chronicle Swanson’s search for enlightenment amid the ruins of old paradigms. In “The Soldier and the Soil,” a powerful portrait of a traumatized Iraq war veteran who is running a struggling farm, Swanson depicts a former soldier’s discomfort with the reverence he encounters in public. In “Consciousness Razing,” Swanson attends a retreat hosted by Evryman, a men’s group that aims to foster “masculine emotional intelligence,” and condemns the group’s exercises for endorsing “a belief that because the system cannot be changed, the best that one can hope for is the chance to blow off some steam.” In “Midwestern Gothic,” Swanson explores whether his childhood friend’s mysterious death might be tied to a ring of serial killers, and observes that “the impulse to find a villain” can stem from the suspicion “that someone, somewhere, is responsible for our misfortunes.”
The main characters across the essays are all white and mostly men, and Swanson approaches his subjects inquisitively. The rise of Donald Trump is a recurring allusion throughout the book, and Swanson admits that he himself is among those “boggled and lost” in a struggle to comprehend the “plot twists of the last few years.” Still, his observations are shrewd, so much so that the occasions when he doesn’t probe deep enough stand out as disappointing exceptions.
Throughout “Lost in Summerland,” Swanson addresses the racism simmering in the cultural fault lines he explores, but he doesn’t directly grapple with the idea of white male predominance and its erosion. In that vacuum sits a handful of missed opportunities. In one essay, Swanson recounts a visit to a model utopian collective designed by a famous urban planner, but he doesn’t connect the dots to redlining policies intended to segregate American cities. In an essay about mass shootings, he notes that authorities missed red flags in the criminal histories of the Columbine shooters and chalked them up to “ordinary kids engaging in run-of-the-mill high jinks” — the sort of leniency authorities tend not to extend to Black people, an unmentioned fact that could have seeded further insights about how mass shootings pierce the bubble of comfort inhabited by those who feel most protected by the country’s institutions.
Swanson finds more questions than answers in his quest, but he reaches a meaningful starting point for treating the ills of our age: elevating the virtue of love above the idea of conquest.
His essays reveal a thinker willing to wrestle with the realization that there is more beyond his sight. In one essay, Swanson marvels at the transformation of his older brother, Andy, after a sucker punch knocks him into a coma. When Andy tells Swanson that his brain injury seems to have given him mystical powers of perception, our narrator is skeptical, but then Swanson witnesses Andy somehow intuit the numbers and words on a series of index cards while blindfolded. Suddenly aware of this new reality, Swanson can endeavor to understand it.
