Customer Reviews

Arkansas (McSweeney's Rectangulars)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This is a rather quirky, often compelling tale of four men--Swin, Kyle, Bright, and Froggy, and Swin's girlfriend Johnna. Swin and Kyle work for Bright, who in turn works for Froggy, although at times the exact chain of command seems a bit fuzzy. The primary activity of the group is moving illegal drugs--Swin and Kyle are sent to Florida, to Louisiana, to Texas in old cars with a stash of drugs and return with, say $50K in cash to Arkansas. We're not talking TV glamour here, no high living, no hobnobbing in glitzy Miami bars. Froggy is careful, and runs his operation almost like a communist cell: Swin and Kyle never know just who Froggy is, and it may be that Bright doesn't know either. But it pays the bills, if you don't mind living in run-down house trailers.

It's gritty storytelling, somewhere between Larry Brown, Harry Crews, and William Gay. You won't see any exciting car chases, but there is death. $50K may not seem like a lot to a Kenneth Lay or a John Gotti, but here it can be a major temptation. As you read the book you get the feeling that there is not going to be a nice happy ending: this is not the kind of life that fairy tales are made of.

Brandon does not--as of yet--have the lyrical writing of a William Gay or a Cormac McCarthy, as in Gay's Provinces of Night or McCarthy's Child of God. He does not--as of yet--have the fine sense of pace as you'll see in Crews' brilliant Feast of Snakes. But he certainly has the grit right, and that puts him in the Crews/Brown school. So this is a very good debut.

Arkansas is a great read! A fantastic combination of well-developed characters, intriguing plot and unbelievably clever, witty dialogue. The story of Kyle and Swin is an incredible saga that includes everything from sinister encounters with the South's drug underworld to comical exchanges with the many great southern characters found along the way. Brandon keeps you guessing, laughing and genuinely entertained right up to the last page.

Between 1974 and 1998 in the southern US, Kyle and Swin are drifters, who run drugs for others. The rest about the duo escapes symbolism and labels. They take jobs as rangers in a state park. On the surface, they direct visitors, maintain the park, and see to animals. Below the surface, the park is a cover for the operations of a drug kingpin and the malfeasance he plots. A look into the swamps in the park might uncover sunken bodies. When their aliases and duties as rangers foster friendship between them and give them self-respect from park visitors, they begin the shift from hoodlums to guys for whom the reader can feel interest and empathy. A nurse in a clinic, Johnna, joins them. They set up house, adopt an aura of stability, and carry out with eagerness the tasks of a ranger. The normality is broken by phone calls that tell them where to make the next run for the kingpin, a person without a name or a location. Johnna presents Swin with the possibility of fatherhood, a circumstance that might be construed as weakness in the armor that Swin like Kyle presents to others for self-defense. The climax arrives when Kyle commits a murder that Swin interprets as an extravagance instead of a necessity. When the action places Swin and Kyle in the bathhouse with thugs, the reader fears that the thugs will harm Swin, whereas the toughness in Kyle inspires fear in the thugs. The author Brandon knows how to balance horror with relief, terror and humor. He makes the down-to-earth spout philosophy and the brusque speak lines of poetry. If the reader thinks he/she can predict what characters will do or how they will reply, he/she will learn that the characters are studies in contradiction: heat and ice with regard to emotions; nobility and baseness with regard to ethics. The breathless suspense and horror in the bathhouse before the end of the novel transmutes into lyricism as the novel closes with the characters showing the strength of will to continue and the determination to face reality. Will the sequel be set in Oklahoma?

I've mostly been reading nonfiction this year; Arkansas, however, made me VERY glad to have tried something new. Between the book's immediate, taut, non-stop (and sometimes gruesome (and I mean that in a good way-- I still can't look at a coat hanger the same way)) action and its hilariously twisted characters, it very quickly roped me in. In terms of style... I don't get out as much as I'd like, so I guess the best I could come up with today is that Brandon strikes me as a southern-fried, Americanized Brookmyre. Very much looking forward to his next one.

I could not put this book down. I had read the reviews of it and knew it was a drug-runner book, which sounded interesting enough, but what the reviewers didn't mention is that the writing in this book is amazing: hilarious, startling, fast, and cutting. Completely engaging on both a narrative level and at the level of the sentence, first to last page.
BRAVO!

Arkansas is a book that is unapologetic about breaking rules. It's full of unimportant details, irrelevant backstories with dialogues that don't always move the plot, a narrator who speaks in third person, but also in second, and then finally in first. Arkansas throws you off center, destroys your sense of balance. It makes you struggle and curse at your own inability to determine who exactly the good guy is.

And yet, you tolerate it. You tolerate it because it's different, because you can tell it's doing something new, just like Robert O'Conner's 'Buffalo Soldiers.' The same old elements are being combined in ways you never thought were possible, in ways that aren't fair. You're just starting to get hopelessly disoriented, pissed off, fed up, when John Brandon switches to second person. You. `You, Ken Hovan,' he says, and suddenly you don't get to be a confused reader anymore, but rather a confused character, inside the book, and you're not just watching the action, but in fact, you're the mastermind, the Godfather, the drug dealer who is responsible for everything. It's all your doing. Your fault. Your problem.

Once that happens, it's harder to put down. You want to know what it is that you, Ken Hovan, have been up to. So what is this book about? Objectively, it's about a bunch of drug dealers, criminals, and murderers who clearly weren't meant to be drug dealers, criminals, or murderers. They're too smart or too dumb, too sensitive or too insensitive, too comical and too harmless for the brutal, twisted, and gross things that they do. They like to cook. They have families. They fantasize and exercise and waste time in front of the tube.

You expect whores, torture scenes, overdoses and big cities from drug dealer books. You don't expect hilarity, mythical characters, meta moments, or philosophizing, and Brandon gives you all of those things. And then he does more; he gives you failure, and loss, and hurt, but not in a mushy gushy, call-you-mom-and-tell-her-you-love-her way. Instead he gives them to you in a choking, empty, silent way, a way that makes you question what you're doing here, and why you're doing it. `What's the plan for you two? You know, in life?' someone asks of one of the central characters, Swin. `We try to keep the meat on the bones and keep the bones moving,' he says, as if it's all that simple.

And when you're stuck in the middle of Arkansas, when you're alone there and trying to figure out what the hell is happening to you, and to the people around you, and to the life you've constructed, you start to think that maybe it is. Maybe it is that simple. Maybe it is that sad. Characters here feel what everyone has felt some point, guilty `to have life and not know what to do with it.' Some of them have ideals, but most of them don't. They get caught up, purely by luck, in the right things (friendship, tentatively, and love, vaguely) and, also by chance, in the wrong things. Somehow or another, that's what we all do- we fall into and out of things - while we ramble around in this confusing world, trying to keep the meat on the bones and keep the bones moving.

Meanwhile Brandon keeps coming back to the main man - you - and telling you how you feel. You (as the character) are an omniscient presence in the book, the Head Honcho, God, but you (as the reader) are also under Brandon's direction, at his mercy. "You can acknowledge the injustice and the absurdity of life," he says, "while never getting weighed down by these things." You realize that it's true. You can read this book without letting it keep you awake at night, but you can't read it without feeling its effects, now and then, when you go about performing your own mundane routine, dissecting your own predictable life. I couldn't relate to the drug deals, the murders, the being-a-fugitive-in-a-park. But I could relate to that one central question, and that, for me, was enough.

arkansas is really fast moving and action packed (eyeballs being gouged out and cars being sunk into swamps), yet it doesn't feel rushed. you swiftly gain a relationship with the characters and strangely find them oddly relatable. not to mention this is the funniest book i have ever read.

There is a wonderful kind of irony in reading about characters that believe they are far more clever than they are, and feeling clever for having taken note of it. All through Arkansas, I would catch myself doing this, and it would make me feel ridiculous.

That said, I thought Arkansas was an outstanding book. It manages to strike the perfect balance of intellectual writing and readability. Everything seemed pared down to the exact point where all superfluous words were shed, leaving on ...more There is a wonderful kind of irony in reading about characters that believe they are far more clever than they are, and feeling clever for having taken note of it. All through Arkansas, I would catch myself doing this, and it would make me feel ridiculous.

That said, I thought Arkansas was an outstanding book. It manages to strike the perfect balance of intellectual writing and readability. Everything seemed pared down to the exact point where all superfluous words were shed, leaving only the exact amount of description necessary to paint a picture of exactly what the author wanted you to see.

If I haven't made it clear, I loved Arkansas. It might even be my favorite book so far this year. And taking into account how much I liked Citrus County, I may have actually found a new favorite author. I hope John Brandon writes fast, because I am really looking forward to whatever he writes next.

Kyle, a young man and a drifter, gets involved in crime early on, stealing, petty crime, and then moves on to become a drug mule for someone called Frog. Swin, another young man aimlessly moving through life, becomes Kyle's partner and the two drive drugs around the state of Arkansas. When a deal goes wrong resulting in the death of their boss, a park ranger called Bright, they hide the body and try not to let Frog know. Swin then gets involved with a young woman called Johnna and people start wondering where Bright is. Kyle and Swin realise their time is coming to an end but can they make it out of Arkansas alive?

I came across Brandon's writing in McSweeney's 26 and was thoroughly impressed. It's an exciting and interesting tale of modern day adventure taking in rural Arkansas, disturbing and fascinating characters, all told with a strong sense of storytelling. The writing is of a very high standard with the dialogue sounding genuine. The story moves along at a cracking pace and is never boring. He even writes action well, while the mysterious Frog character's true identity is a great reveal in the end.

I highly recommend this book to all fiction loving readers out there and only lament how little known such a talented and interesting writer John Brandon is when so many poor writers are so well known (you know the ones). Here's hoping he finishes a second book soon and achieves recognition.

Enjoyable reading. Differant style of writing, kept me interested most of the time.Sometimes more descriptive than necessary.