You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free [Hardcover]

James Kelman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 17, 2004

Jeremiah Brown, a Scottish immigrant in his early thirties, has lived in the United States for twelve years. He has moved as many times, from the east coast to the west coast and back again, all in the hope his luck would change. To add to his restlessness and indecision, he now has a nonrefundable ticket to Glasgow to visit his mother for the first time in seven years. The question is, will the visit help him get over the pain of separation from a woman he met and loved in New York and with whom he had a little girl, or will it make it worse? In this rich, funny, superbly crafted novel, Kelman has once again created a memorable character-compulsive, obsessive, self-doubting, beer-loving, and utterly engaging-and a singular portrait of an immigrant's America

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Booker Prize-winning Kelman (How Late It Was, How Late) returns with another exuberant novel steeped in Scottish dialect. Jeremiah Brown, the 32-year-old Scottish narrator, has lived in the United States for more than 12 years, acquiring an ex-girlfriend, a daughter ("the wean" he calls her) and a string of dead-end jobs. The novel is a chatty record of his last night in the country, before he returns to Glasgow (in the country of "Skallin," as he calls it) to see his ailing mother. As Jeremiah bar-hops in an unnamed Midwestern town, drinking beer after beer, he reflects on his life as an immigrant ("I read someplace the emigrants werenay the best people, the best people steyed at hame"), his relationship with Yasmin and their daughter, and just about anything else that pops into his head: "I had naybody to talk to, it was just my ayn fantastic inner dramatics." The effect is like being captive audience to a drunk, sad, funny, bitter, paranoid but hopeful man who has thus far in his life "messed things up." The novel can feel claustrophobic at times, since the reader is trapped in Jeremiah's rambling mind. But Kelman pulls off this literary feat, aided by the undeniable charm and appeal of Jeremiah. The reader becomes easily acclimated to his Scottish vernacular ("I didnay even want to go hame"), which lends the work authenticity and immediacy-his voice resonates as he veers from story to story, only interrupting himself to order another beer and take in his surroundings. Kelman's latest will please and reward readers patient enough to pull up a chair and listen.
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From Booklist

Jeremiah Brown, Kelman's narrator, is a Scottish immigrant living in an America subtly different from our own, where the homeless haunt the nation's airports, betting on frequent airline disasters, and immigrant workers are strictly classified depending on their politics. Brown speaks to us, as Kelman's characters do, with a thick "Skarrisch" accent. He speaks to us relentlessly, jumping from the present to the past, circling around the subjects that obsess and bedevil him. These include his reluctance to return to Scotland and the shambles he has made of his life with his ex-girlfriend and their daughter. He is both an optimist and a fatalist. He knows that he is doomed to continue making dumb choices, but he is endlessly hopeful that everything will somehow turn out all right. Kelman's prose has a wonderful rhythm as his character rails repeatedly against the inequities of class systems, the vagaries of love, and himself. Despite his gambling, his drinking, and his bouts of self-loathing, Brown is a compelling character and well worth your time. Patrick Wall
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 424 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (May 17, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151010420
• ISBN-13: 978-0151010424
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,031,182 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Everybody vanishes, that is what life is, unresolved.", July 5, 2004

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free (Hardcover)

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

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a dark view of contemporary america, September 21, 2005

By 

Jay F. Bolick "living fossil" (Rose Hill, NC USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free (Hardcover)

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.

2 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Garbage - Kelman has written )better, February 10, 2006

By 

J. Pemberton "JRP" (Calgary, Alberta Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free (Paperback)

Poor James Kelman - seems the Booker Prize has finally gone to his head. He's actually starting to think that what he does is important. After writing some excellent novels live How Late It Was, How Late and Translated Accounts he spits out this garbage. Good for nothing, alcoholic, paranoid, Scottish loser comes to America looking for opportunity - when it is not handed to him on a silver platter he decideds its due to American racism (and George Bush). Of course we all remember those sad post-911 days when Scottish immigrants were the target of so much American hatred. And who can forget the terrible invasion of Scotland (that damn war for oil!). Kelman has totally lost his mind if he thinks the reader will be able to feel for poor Jeremiah Brown. Brown sits in a bar drinking his face off, complaining about American immigration policies (ever consider putting some of that energy into cleaning yourself up and looking for a job?).

The use of Scottish phoentic writing in How Late was an interesting idea and Kelman can be forgiven for trying this gimmick in one or two more novels, but I think its time he gave it up for good and tried something different (Translated Accounts was a good first step).