You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free

A brilliant extended piece of stream of consciousness writing and a scathing indictment of GWB's Hobbesian american dystopia. Unlike Kelman's earlier works this novel is not set in Glasgow, but is instead set inside the head of a working class Scottish immigrant who becomes stranded in the snowy wasteland of Dakota while trying to work his way home to Glasgow. As do all of Kelman's novels, this one operates on numerous levels, being both a celebration of the rich working class dialect of his native city as well as a commentary on the inadequacies of human communication. Like a more sympathetic (and more hopeful) S. Beckett, Kelman notes our miserable failure as a species to live up to our potential, yet holds out hope that one day we might do better in communicating/loving/caring for one another. Kelman's work falls in the great Marxist/Existentialist tradition of those writers who believe that we may indeed be all alone, but that that aloneness is a shared condition which allows for the possibility of us mitigating our suffering (and in turn creating meaning) by caring for one another.

Jeremiah Brown, another of Booker Prize-winner James Kelman's down-and-out protagonists, thinks of himself as a writer and keeps a notebook into which he jots down his observations about his life, recording them in the vernacular--phonetic spellings ("Skallin" for Scotland, "Uhmerkin" for American, for example); pervasive profanity; and run-on sentences and paragraphs. No chapters interrupt or divide the stream-of-consciousness narrative, told by Jeremiah, as he drinks his way through a series of bars in Rapid City, South Dakota, the night before he is supposed to begin his roundabout trip home to Glasgow, by way of Seattle, Montreal, Newfoundland, Iceland, Amsterdam, and Edinburgh.As he reminisces about his life, especially his life with his "ex-wife" Yasmin, whom he never married, and their daughter, now four years old, he shows himself to be aimless, "a non-assimilatit alien...Aryan Caucasian atheist, born loser...big debts, nay brains." A compulsive gambler, pool player, and heavy drinker, Jerry has held a series of dead end jobs, the only kinds of jobs, he tells us, that are open to immigrants with Class III Red Cards--primarily bar-tending and nighttime airport security work.The novel follows no logical time frame, spooling out from Jerry's memories in more or less random fashion. We observe his relationship with Yasmin, his "ex-wife," and meet his acquaintances, including Suzanne and Miss Perpetua, two other security guards from the Alien and Alien Extraction Section who also patrol the periphery of the airport car park where he works; two down-and-out war vets, Homer and Jethro, who sleep wherever they can find warmth and space; and "the being," a grocery cart pusher who frequently disappears into thin air and about whose gender bets have been made.Obviously, plot is not the focus here. In choosing to recreate Jerry's aimless inner life in such a realistic way, however, the author has created a character who does not change or gain the self-awareness that makes his life relevant to most readers. As a character, Jerry does not really engage the reader, and that seems to be part of the author's point: Jerry is and always will be an outsider. Humor, most of it dark, permeates the novel, and an episode with "the being" in the airport VIP lounge is hilarious, but the ending is startling in its abruptness and may surprise readers. Kelman the iconoclast has, once again, produced an unusual and iconoclastic novel in which he experiments with form and structure, bringing to life a character who remains forever on the periphery, even for the reader. Mary Whipple