Barrett Swanson - Lost in Summerland: Essays

Contents

PRAISE FOR LOST IN SUMMERLAND

As the narrative of American exceptionalism collapses swiftly and spectacularly all around us, Im grateful for Barrett Swansons brilliance and clarity, his affectionate skepticism of our most violent games and lies, his earnest and anxious interrogations of twenty-first-century masculinity. Lost in Summerland is an essay collection of the very highest order: a book that poses more questions than it seeks to answer, a book that has wrestled my empathy for the fucked-up citizens of our tragicomic era and country into new, uncomfortable, gorgeously fruitful places.

LAUREN GROFF , author of Florida

More than most writers, Barrett Swanson is a first-rate cultural anthropologist. Perceptive, amusing, searching, he scans and gazes past the variety of scrims the world has set out to cloud our vision. His brilliant essays bring so much back into focus, while also noting the American surrealism of the American dream. There is not a weak link in this collection. Every piece is a gem.

LORRIE MOORE

Lost in Summerland collects a singular sensibility: fourteen essays of searing intelligence throbbing with uncommon sensitivity and executed with incomparable style. Barrett Swanson is his generations Joan Didion, running down the centrifugal flingings where the center once held, exorcising the pain and folly of living in a nation fervently in denial of and devoted to its own decline. An absolutely essential read.

CLAIRE VAYE WATKINS , author of Gold Fame Citrus

Casting a net of electric prose, these essaysmiraculouslycatch midair the hot shrapnel of an exploding moment. In Swansons humane and gifted hands, the glowing fragments light a path through our national dream life, illuminating Americas new paradoxes and precarities.

WELLS TOWER , author of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

Barrett Swanson achieves a sublime density of intellect and soul in Lost in Summerland, a vivid, immersive, fiercely openhearted survey of the American landscape and spirit. In handsome lyrical prose, with the sensitivity of a cultural seismologist, Swanson finds humor and insight erupting everywhere. His unstinting honesty is that of the best memoirists, who remind us that it is reasonable and perverse and exalted just to be a person, awake, alive, listening for the quiet essence in things. Reality is so palpable in these essays that I found myself nostalgic for moments I had never lived.

GREG JACKSON , author of Prodigals

With potent lucidity and fierce intelligence, Barrett Swanson pierces the superficial arguments that make so much of our moment strange and alienating. The range of these essays is astonishing, but more electrifying still is the agility with which Swanson probes the deep mysteries of masculinity, ecological threat, capitalism, and race to reveal thrilling, if terrifying, connections. Swanson is a tremendous writer, and this collection provides one of the truest, most haunting portraits of our time Ive ever read.

BRANDON TAYLOR , author of Real Life, finalist for the Booker Prize

Barrett Swanson is our eloquent guide on this tour through the toxic masculinityindustrial complex, disaster capitalism, and other exhibits of a lonely, lost America. In essays that are moving and candid, personal and sweeping, Lost in Summerland seeks alternatives to national myths and tries to name the unnamable turbulence were living through, to rescue the ineffable from invisibility.

ELISA GABBERT , author of The Unreality of Memory

LOST IN SUMMERLAND

Essays

BARRETT SWANSON

COUNTERPOINT
Berkeley, California

For Luke

Contents

LOST IN SUMMERLAND

I t was a belated wedding present. Early last January my wife and I were offered the chance to spend three months in Fort Lauderdale, a touristic city on Floridas southeastern edge, one that in the 1950s served as the nativity scene for the American Spring Break. Around that time, her grandfather bought an apartment four blocks from the ocean, and her family has been vacationing there ever since. The building is a squat midcentury complex with a stucco-white exterior, and in the shared courtyard out back, there is a kidney-shaped pool cordoned off from onlookers with a hem of clacking palm trees. Most of the amenities inside the apartment havent been updated since the Kennedy administration. There are turquoise couches and sun-faded curtains, terrazzo floors and senile kitchen appliances.

My wifes grandfather would let us stay there in balmy reprieve from the bleak winter months of Wisconsin, where wed been living for the past five years. Since both of us were teaching online that semester and thus had no fixed geographical commitments, we decided the trip might have a salutary effect and embarked on the cross-country trek at dawn on New Years Day. I suppose the date carried some symbolic importance, a version of that old chestnut: a new year, a new you. Perhaps the tropical climate would render us porous to sunny influences and slacken our sense of self. Over the next forty-eight hours, we watched the tundra of the Midwest gradually defrost into the profligate greenery of Kentucky, noting the steady accretion of drawl among gas station attendants anytime we stopped to fuel up. Doing our best to scrimp, we spent our nights in budget motels with glowing marquees that whirred electrically near the roadside, advertising their amenities with an oddly poetic phrase:

KING BEDS OPEN

VACANT HBO

After two days, we finally crossed the Florida state line, entering a corridor of sugarcane and everglades where we were made to endure an endless parade of weather-battered billboards, signs that spoke of surf shops and alligator wrestling, but the promises seemed dubious with their bubbled fluorescent fonts. Somewhere south of Gainesville, we came across a billboard that offered a mortal riddle. TEXTING WHILE DRIVING KILLS , it said. FOR MORE DRIVING TIPS, TEXT SAFETY TO 79171 .

We reached the ocean by nightfall. The sky was rinsed with sherbet colors, the edges of distant clouds rimmed with a vulgar pink. I suppose I thought Id feel relieved, that confronting the edge of the country might offer a bolt of fresh enlightenment, some timely mitigation of mood. But I was worried because we had just crossed the entire continent and I didnt feel a thing. We parked along the boardwalk and piled out of the car, with chip wrappers and empty soda cans spilling from the open doors, to which we pretended to give chase. The shoreline was dimpled and forlorn, and as we watched the silver mulch of crashing waves, the moment soon acquired the breathy impressionism of a Terrence Malick film. For a few minutes, I gazed distractedly at the horizon and felt my wife turn to me, her expression bright with anticipation. How do you feel? she said. Good, I said. She raised an eyebrow, unconvinced. Really good.

We needed a break from the Midwest. That was our public reason. Whenever friends or family members asked about our abrupt change of plans, we responded with stock answers, a litany of complaintsWisconsin was too cold; we felt too isolated in our insular college town; plus, we hadnt taken a vacation in years. You have to understand that this kind of preemptive apology is necessary in the Midwest, where the dominant aesthetic is utilitarian, where suffering often takes on a grim inevitability. There, even the slightest indulgence will be interrogated if its left unexplained.