The Funhouse of America
Review of Barrett Swanson’s Lost in Summerland (USA: Counterpoint, 2021)
by Audrey Teong
I am drawn to the cover of Lost in Summerland. The crystalline blue sky and cotton-white clouds remind me of a cartoon afternoon, like the pictures I might have painted as a child. As a reader I wonder where, and what, “Summerland” is and how we have become lost in it. Upon a closer look at the cover, however, I discover cracks in this innocent image. “Summerland” is the state of an eternal summer, evoking nostalgia and idyll, an image that Barrett Swanson is on a quest to break in this debut collection of essays. Swanson’s essays, which have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Believer, and The New York Times Magazine, investigate such topics as masculinity, mental illness, and faith in the United States. Gathering these essays and supplementing them with new material, Lost in Summerland leads its readers on an intentional meditation on American personhood and society at this moment in history.
In his essays, Swanson holds up a funhouse mirror to Americana and “that eerie twilight hour of history” he is at once a part of and observing. The ‘I’ (eye) in these essays is in a constant state of tension. Swanson finds it hard to sit still, and instead pursues, insatiably, what lies just beyond those surrealist American Dream clouds of the book’s cover. A spiritualist concept, ‘Summerland’ is the paradise between life and death, one that Swanson refers to almost sardonically, weighing epistemologies for their workability. In the eponymous essay, Swanson, who is a religious skeptic, recounts how he was brought close to the beliefs of Spiritualism when he accompanied his brother, Andy, on a trip to Lily Dale, a hamlet home to registered psychics and mediums. Their reason for travelling there was because Swanson’s brother claimed to have acquired after an accident the paranormal talents to hear spirits and sense the feelings of others. For testimony Andy’s friends told stories of how Andy summoned their dead relatives. Swanson also recounted the tale of how Andy got out of a traffic violation by summoning the ghost of the officer’s mother. As a poststructuralist, Swanson is trained to be suspicious of such claims, and when he met with the various inhabitants of Lily Dale, his self-described “journalistic moxie” caused him to view Lily Dale as a place for blind faith:
Hailing from beleaguered rural towns across New England and the Midwest […] suffering from all manner of emotional or financial disaster [… they] were desperate for a more hopeful story–that their lives were being guided by cadres of benevolent spirits.
Yet this skepticism was difficult to bring to bear on his brother. Swanson writes how doubt set in when Andy passed the psychic’s tests, and everything came to a head when Andy revealed that he had called Swanson because he had a premonition that Swanson wanted to kill himself. Swanson’s suspicion is disarmed by his brother’s intuition. In these moments in the essay, Swanson breaks from the tone of humor and skepticism he has adopted. He is reacquainted with his brother’s face, “full of a terrible understanding. Always, even across time and distance, his face has been full of this terrible understanding.” Although Swanson has investigated many disturbing American social and political realities, “this terrible understanding” has the most profound impact on him. In his pursuit of truth, Swanson knows where poetry is the answer and silence our solace. For it is not just America that is being looked at, but Swanson too.
Assumptions of journalistic objectivity and critical distance are regularly examined and overturned in these essays. From water parks to political campaigns, Swanson writes of the disillusionment and the loneliness of the forever-observer left to himself, trying to discern his own relationship to what he analyzes. In “Flood Myths,” Swanson takes the opportunity of going on vacation to ruminate on the existence of waterparks. He begins a paragraph by repeating the “standard critical reading” of a waterpark, that “they embody the quintessential American yearning for unattainable “Reality”.” This anthropological mode reveals a degree of amusement on Swanson’s part, but his writing is also autoethnographic, using personal experience to analyze wider cultural meanings. This approach allows Swanson to punctuate the essay with wrenching urgency as he ruminates on the casual use of water amidst the growing climate emergency. In doing so, he faces the present moment only to uncover all the ways the collective ‘we’ have not learnt nor changed from the past. And it is this dreadful in-between that Swanson is particularly adept at capturing – the point where pleasure covers up a deeper horror. Drawn out of a musing about the impending climate crisis, he finds himself about to go on a ride called “The Point of No Return”:
I could see its large, dark throat gape menacingly at me as it swallowed another parkgoer. One after another, the people fell, until soon I found myself trudging towards its entrance. […] It was the point of no return, a waterpark in 2019.
At a time of instability in American politics, Swanson’s utter exhaustion, ennui, and depression are palpably felt. As a result, we are left with a dreadful understanding, behemoth in sensation and syntactically finite all the same.
Swanson has been compared to Joan Didion, and rightly so. Swanson’s language generally avoids elaborate, multi-clausal sentences, and instead names things for what they are. America, as described by Swanson, is sunny but brutal. The waterpark, where families go to summer, strikes Swanson as “a dress rehearsal for our coming disaster, a nightmarish burlesque of a live-action drill.” In the essay “Calling Audibles,” the American game of football is observed to bear the language of violence, exalting brutality and “extol[ing] its players in militaristic terms.” Yet the endings to his essays are often surprising and deeply personal. At the end of “Calling Audibles,” for example, the narrative voice turns inwards from explaining on-going reforms in football to observing Swanson’s relationship to his aging father. Overcome by a swirl of nostalgia and grief, Swanson returns to his younger days as a high-school athlete and realizes how football became a proxy for genuine communication between his father and him. He then closes by narrating a scene on Christmas morning in 2013, when he and his father “trade a wordless glance” and begin to play catch:
Soon, we’re back in that drab Wisconsin yard, the one with uneven footing and the rampant patches of dandelions and crabgrass, the lawn of my boyhood, and Dad is going long. He’s nearing the edge of our property, a distance that requires a degree of strength I’m not sure my young arm can summon. But I hear him calling out to me across the partial dark. It is a voice that the distance between us has rendered deserted-sounding, somewhat desperate, bereaved, seemingly, and fearful that I might lose him, I raise the ball to my shoulder and try one more time to lead him out into the open.
Having begun his essay with an analysis of metaphors, Swanson closes by creating his own, using football as a metaphor for fraught but necessary communication: “I hear him calling out to me across the partial dark.” The effect of this narration is expansive. With a sympathetic imagination, Swanson reckons with his father’s mortality, reflects on the plight of being father and son, and interweaves it with his childhood self. The subject of his essays is consistently agitation (towards varying issues and in various forms), but his style ultimately reveals the stark humanity of it all.
The fourteen essays of Lost in Summerland distill long stretches of narrative down to their sharpest points, offering readers a feeling of immediacy. Time stands still, fresh with injury, and the smallest moments hold great significance. Mining the times of his life: his boyhood, the morning of Christmas 2013, and the moment of his writing, to name a few, Swanson creates exquisite temporal texture, combining past and present, drawing insight out of initially unconnected events. Within the fractured geographies and cultures of America, Swanson is the archaeologist we follow; the Brechtian director we rely upon; the tireless cataloguer of realities that have been willfully omitted. The themes of cynicism, doubt, fear, and mental health are individual to him in terms of the relentless tension between being a believer and a non-believer that he feels and depicts.
At the heart of Lost in Summerland are crises of faith. In the act of writing, Swanson runs right up against the impossibility of language, working with its “fickle, crumbly” nature. He attempts the great and terrifying act of seeing things for what they are, and in doing so, he seems to be seeking something more spiritual: the soul behind this simulacrum. But perhaps this disillusionment can evolve into something else, as Swanson writes in “Church Not Made with Hands.” An essay on faith, and the last in the collection, he narrates the scene at the altar of his friends’ wedding, just as they lean in to kiss, “How easily we forget that it’s only when they both close their eyes that they choose to connect.” With the help of a little bit of stillness, Swanson bridges the critical distance between the subjective, perceiving, and roving ‘I’ (eye). Even an easily-missed moment reveals itself as divine.
Audrey Teong is a writer and actor. Her reading interests include plays, contemporary novels, and travel literature. She recently graduated from Nanyang Technological University with first-class honors in English Literature and Art History.
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