You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free (Hardcover)

by James Kelman (Author) "I HAD BEEN LIVING ABROAD FOR TWELVE YEARS AND I was gaun hame, maybe forever, maybe a month..." (more)
Key Phrases: wasnay gauny, nay cunt, scabby prick, Red Card, Miss Perpetua, Patriot Holding Center (more...)

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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
P. G. Wodehouse once remarked that sometimes a writer decides he's such a hotshot stylist that he can just dispense with plot or action. Not so. Yet this is the basic problem with You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free.

James Kelman -- winner of the Booker Prize for How Late It Was, How Late -- possesses an astonishing voice on the page, mixing interior monologue, colloquial speech, run-on sentences, the occasional Scots word (e.g., wean for child), fancy nouns to spark up a phrase (spleneticism) and every possible variant, employed at every possible moment, of the most common English vulgarism for sexual intercourse. Read a page of Kelman and you can't help but laud his sheer virtuosity, the ease with which he can shift tonal registers. Here is his protagonist, Jeremiah Brown, age 34, about to return to Glasgow after 12 years in America, stopping in a bar the night before he's due to climb on a plane. He admires a pretty waitress:

"I wasnay gauny talk to Sally about failed . . . relationships, given her hips swung when she set off walking from my table. Obviously it was unintentional. I know some guys, they would have thought she was doing it for their benefit but that was a lie sir, an uttah fabrication sir, you shame ma family sir, yasm."

Over the course of the long evening encompassed by the novel, Sally brings Jeremiah seven or eight beers and a glass of whiskey, which he spills. He sits there at his table, occasionally glares at the bar's manager, converses for a while with an elderly couple, eventually wanders out into the snowy night. But for the most part he just drinks, not to forget but to remember. He recalls his life in America: gambling at cards, bartending, working as a security agent at an airport. Most of all, he returns, again and again, to his love for his "ex" and their child (a girl who is never named). Yasmin has left him because he's proven such a failure at everything. And so he rambles on about the past dozen years, those low-paying, dead-end jobs, Yasmin's gigs as a jazz vocalist (Nina Simone is her model), his daughter, his periodic confrontations with authority, how he never had much and finally lost that. It is an old story. Jeremiah Brown could be any no-hoper morosely hunched there in a smoky corner, sipping one for his baby and ordering one more for the road.

Kelman makes Jeremiah's love for Yasmin the heart of his American experience, and their unofficial marriage is wrecked largely because he can never make enough money to rent a proper apartment, buy a decent car, truly support his family. Interestingly, Kelman avoids identifying Yasmin's race, and only near the novel's end do we know for sure that she is "dark brown" (and Jeremiah "pink"). The two simply love each other. The jazz singer's band members don't particularly take to the skinny Scot, this foreigner, and that might hint at racial prejudice. But that's about it. Such color-blindness is refreshing (if at least slightly unrealistic).

At more than 400 pages of largely relentless stream of consciousness, You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free simply goes on too long. Like real drunks in real bars, Jeremiah can't tell a straight story and he doesn't know when to stop. Still he can be funny along the way. A friend of his sports a ludicrous mustache: "Like maist of us he had a tremendous regard for Pancho Villa but so what, it doesnay mean ye stop shaving." After losing at pool to a Mexican kid who makes, with ease, a miraculous, almost impossible shot, Jeremiah says, "For some reason I examined my cue. I kept my heid lowered. In the physical presence of spiritual beings ye have to." Sometimes the humor builds on the Scot's penchant for slapstick oratory, as when he explains why he always carries his papers with him:

"If I was tramping the mean streets in search of work and chanced into a bar or café and met somebody hiring help then whoosh, Here are ma papers sir. You need someone to pour a proper glass of stout sir? carry bricks and mortar sir, wear a kilt and wait table sir, wield a claymore sir, push a pen, pick a pocket, deal the cards, construct a database, settle a bet, perform minor heart surgery, sell ma body, write a screenplay, scramble up the rone pipe and enter that toty wee window and rob the Inkliz crown jewels?"

But mostly Jeremiah goes in for sorrowful and shrewd observations: "One relaxes into sentimentality, especially with women" or "She was one of these women men have difficulty walking beside. Except for loose-fitting trousers where would we be?" During his time with Yasmin he tries to write a private-eye novel but keeps forgetting his notebook, and then he blows his savings by attempting to win big at poker. Though he works hard, he never gets ahead. "How could people earn so little for so much? These are the questions that floor a body."

Jeremiah isn't uneducated. He's a left-wing radical, speaks fondly of second-hand bookshops, refers to Pat Hobby (from Scott Fitzgerald's late stories) and can even make jokes using classical music references. When a couple of straight-arrow security guys start to hassle him, he imagines that they might be Freemasons: "Maybe they would relax if I whistled the second movement of Mozart's clarinet concerto, the section used as a code by particular lodges in stressful situations." At times Kelman's revved-up prose sounds like that of Hunter Thompson or the dizzying English writer Iain Sinclair, albeit with a Glaswegian accent. But style alone just won't carry a long novel, and though we feel sorry for Jeremiah, Yasmin and the wean, and laugh or weep at the often absurdist comedy of their lives, we finally weary of the relentless soliloquizing. Should the book have been shorter? Probably. Or perhaps admirers of Kelman's past work, not to mention those wanting to give him a try, should just plan on savoring only a few pages at a time.

"What can a man do," asks Jeremiah, "except return life to its aching parts?" You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free touches movingly on many of those aching parts, but those parts, alas, don't quite make a whole.
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 424 pages
• Publisher: 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: 3.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,647,546 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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)

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)

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.

2.0 out of 5 stars Headache, April 4, 2009

By	Shmee "Chris" (Detroit, MI) - See all my reviews

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

I forced myself through "how late it was", which was not worthy of 5 stars, although it was better than this book. Both books have no chapters. They are both rambling drunken accounts of a mans life that you the reader most likely could experience for real, for about the same cost of this book...at a bar.