REVIEW: Lost in Summerland by Barrett Swanson

Nonfiction. 304 pgs. Counterpoint. May 2021. ISBN: 978-1-640094-18-5.

“Consciousness Razing,” the impeccably titled second entry in Barrett Swanson’s newly released essay collection, Lost In Summerland, centers on Evryman, a men’s retreat at a hunting lodge in Ohio. Swanson describes the retreat as being full of “manhood-confirming adventures” through which middle-aged men “weep with shame and contrition.” The retreat serves as a source of emotional catharsis for its participants, who grunt, scream and cry their way to a supposed new level of empathy. The task of Everyman is, essentially, to allow men who have grown disillusioned with their jobs, families, and personal lives to blow off some steam. This, the retreat would likely argue, is all these men need to do to heal, even though what exactly they need to heal from seems to be a source of exactly zero interest among its participants.

Swanson’s account of the retreat, although not without its sympathetic moments, is predictably cringe-worthy. As these men attempt to release years of pent-up emotions over a single weekend, their prescribed candor often takes on a tone of desperation; the retreat’s impending conclusion means their opportunities for catharsis are dwindling. This, in itself, would have made for a worthy read: Swanson’s account could have tread predictable ground by detailing, or perhaps satirizing, the way that men who embody toxic masculinity in so many ways think that their weekend of forest crying somehow means coming terms with it. These kinds of interventions would have been entertaining. They would have also been far from groundbreaking. And so, as he did throughout the essay collection, Swanson zigged when it seemed he would zag. Lost in Summerland deals with the current mental health crisis in America, and how it is as much a result of shared, communal trauma as it is a product of neurochemical abnormalities. Put simply: what if instead of letting men scream in the woods once a year to blow off some steam before returning back to the real world, we dealt with the cause of the problem instead of doling out makeshift—and conspicuously capitalistic—solutions like Everyman? What if there was a broader effort to have a larger conversation? Swanson makes the case that a lot of the issues plaguing the country today stem from a total breakdown in communication, which has left people adrift and alone. Resultantly, it is impossible for anyone to see how their personal traumas might be a byproduct of shared, external forces.

There is a “depoliticized and dehistoricized” worldview that “persists under a kind of end-of-history insouciance,” Swanson says. It’s an underlying belief that because the “system cannot be changed,” all one can hope to do is “blow off some steam.” Swanson is outlining a pervasive form of spiritual alienation that undergirds contemporary society. And in the book’s titular essay, Swanson finds perhaps the best place to unravel the country’s metaphorical spiritual crisis, by journeying to Lily Dale in New York state, a safe haven for people who, quite literally, believe themselves to be in contact with the spiritual world.

Swanson’s pilgrimage to Lily Dale begins with his brother’s self-proclaimed supernatural powers following a nearly fatal brain injury. He visits the community in order to appease his sibling, but he nonetheless holds plenty of reservations. This essay does detail Swanson’s personal journey of slowly eroding skepticism through his time at Lily Dale, but what emerges as even more captivating than the community’s purported communication with the afterlife is its members’ familiar feelings of existential aimlessness. “Sometimes I wish I went to college and actually did something with my life,” one Lily Dale visitor told Swanson. “The problem was,” she continued, “I never knew what I wanted to do. So I never ended up doing anything.” This, a quote from a blonde woman in her 30s at a spiritualist convention in upstate New York, sounds eerily similar to the sentiments expressed by the middle-aged men at Evryman. The central difference being that, while Everyman looks for release through forced-emotional catharsis, Lily Dale searches for answers in contact with the afterlife. The approaches to a solution are starkly different, but they seem to be stemming from the same problem, whereby people are overwhelmed by an increasingly globalized, complex, and disconnected world.

It would be slightly misleading to say that Swanson offers up any sort of definitive solutions to this issue himself. But, to be fair, part of his argument lies in the fact that all proposed solutions are band-aid fixes anyway. We are dealing with structural, top-down issues, in which a veteran can’t comprehend how his “grief has been caused by his armed service,” and how his “inability to connect with his wife stems from foreign policy decisions that we civilians have tacitly endorsed.” One cannot feign interest in fixing the mass feelings of alienation felt under neoliberal capitalism while at the same time ignoring his or her complicity in the grander narrative. “It is an insidious habit of our time to assume that personal deprivations don’t have social or political dimensions,” Swanson offers. What good is a weekend of shared, emotional catharsis if each participant is returning home to his own “private grief”?

Swanson’s work is full of this kind of less-than optimistic questioning, but I also think it’s important to mention the glimmers of hope that shine through in the collection. One such example is in his most surprising essay: “Calling Audibles.” Drawing on his own experience as a high school quarterback, this piece initially looks to be another entry in the anti-football cannon. In some ways, it is, but Swanson also finds beauty in a “more tenuous transaction” that takes place between players: “not brutality, but communication.”

“How do I minimize the window of the self and see the world from someone else’s eyes?” Swanson wonders while considering the work of philosopher Martin Buber. “How can I escape my inborn subjectivity?” The violence of a football field seems a funny place to turn to contemplate such lofty inquisitions, but Swanson argues that certain aspects of the game “ascend to a spiritual register” because it asks one to “aim for communication.” The wording here is notable when considered in connection with his essay on Lily Dale. The ascension to a “spiritual” realm by way of “communication” could apply to mediums as much as it does to quarterbacks. I’m not sure if the parallelism here is intentional, but the implications are nonetheless meaningful: in an age of social uncoupling, an opportunity to transcend oneself and enter into any sort of collectivism can feel like a religious experience, or dare I say a spiritual awakening.

The subject of religion—or a lack thereof—serves as Swanson’s inevitable endpoint. His final essay—“Church Not Made With Hands”—is a sort of literary critique on what the author has termed the “post-religious quest.” Often found in contemporary literature’s auto-fiction movement (Swanson invokes the work of writers like Sheila Heti, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Tao Lin), post-religious literature reckons with a lack of “grand unifying narratives” in the wake of prominent thinkers like Friedrich Nietzche sounding the “death knell for religion.” Swanson denounces certain practitioners like Knausgaard, as the Norwegian author says in his own work that he writes primarily for his “own sake.” But Swanson is far more favorable towards writers like Heti, and specifically her 2010 novel, How Should a Person Be?, which Swanson asserts transcends the “concave fixations of autobiography” and enters the “outward realm of representation.”

Inspired by Swanson’s essay, I recently read Heti’s novel. Swanson himself speaks about the novel’s final passage in his essay on the book, but I find it to be thematically entangled with a different entry in his collection: the aforementioned “Calling Audibles.”

How Should a Person Be? ends with a game of racquetball between two of the narrator’s friends. It is clear that the participants have no idea what they are doing, and Sheila herself (the narrator is also named Sheila) is uneducated on the sport as well. “I don’t think they know the rules,” one onlooker notices, “they’re just slamming the ball around.” I won’t spoil Heti’s outstanding final words, but her account of the match speaks of laughter, and cursing, and moans, and groans, and head nods after impressive shots, and enthusiastic acts of physicality. In a certain sense, nobody knew what was happening. But from another perspective, the game provided the group of friends with a collective form of entertainment that, if nothing else, allowed them to do something. Good or bad, happy or sad, the value of the activity was in the interplay between participants and the banter between observers. The value, if such a thing does exist in a post-religious world, was in the communication.