CARELESS

A debut novel features a feckless young man who encounters an unexpected love.

As Swifte’s tale opens, it’s 1976, and college graduate Nathaniel, possessed of a fresh (and useless) degree in English, is living alone in his parents’ house as they take their RV on a Bicentennial jaunt for the summer. Nathaniel has a girlfriend named Maggie and not many cares in the world when he’s at a party and meets a young woman called Sarah. The two hit it off immediately, to the point that even when Nathaniel is in bed with Maggie, he’s thinking about Sarah. “It was a perfect moment, just Sarah and me talking and arguing and creating little inside jokes,” he recalls. “I realized that I didn’t want it to end. I liked arguing with her—an experience I’d never had with a woman.” In short order, Nathaniel and Sarah are on the road with her mother, Fran, helping her move into her home in the San Diego suburbs. After the adventure, Nathaniel is back home on his own, pining for Sarah and wondering about his own future. “I needed to find a job,” he thinks, “but in the post-Nixon, post-Vietnam era of stagflation, opportunities for English majors were hard to come by.” Swifte writes all this with infectious, rhetorical humor and a genuine sense of heart, mixing plenty of ’70s references and trivia with evocative, broader focus color about life in Southern California: “It was a blindingly bright day, the light scattered by smog and dust overwhelming my cheap sunglasses.” The major plot revelation the author has in store for Nathaniel is shocking. And the decision to forestall it long enough so that readers will feel deeply invested in both Nathaniel and Sarah works very well in a smoothly orchestrated final act.

A readable, involving, and shocking tale of a tangled relationship in the ’70s.