In Lost in Summerland, Barrett Swanson's eloquent and insightful collection of 14 essays, nothing is simple, and everything has a dark side. A contributing editor at Harper's, Swanson is adept at drawing incisive and sometimes disturbing connections between the searing, often harrowing, experiences that determine an individual's fate within the greater cultural forces and narratives at play. In "Consciousness Razing," he finds himself at Evryman, an all-male retreat where attendees are encouraged to express their emotions (primarily anger) but not necessarily to question the source of toxic masculinity or its tragic consequences: "Several of these men struggled with addiction and depression... but the more common complaint was something vaguer--a quiet desperation that... seemed to stem from a gnawing sense of purposelessness." In "Calling Audibles," Swanson, who was a quarterback in high school, highlights the troubling comparison between football and war, especially since the game provided a necessary conduit for Swanson and his father to communicate and connect without words.
While much of this collection is reported with a certain sense of journalistic distance, Swanson is also transparent about his personal struggles with depression and various unhealthy trauma responses. With clever, elegiac prose that is as thoughtful as it is amusing, Swanson, a Pushcart Prize-winner whose impressive litany of publications includes the New Yorker and the Paris Review, proves that his is an essential voice in the critique of a simultaneously surreal and vulgar modern age. --Angela Lutz, freelance reviewer