You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free
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James Kelman has failed to deny that this unrelenting and boundaryless narrative unleashes one more unwelcome alien subversive unto the world.
For twelve years the immigrant Jeremiah Brown has wandered the United States living a new life in the old ways. Now caught in mid South Dakota on the eve of a chaotic money-saving return deal “home” to Scotland. He wanders out for a last beer. It leads to another, and another, amid strange encounters with a bunch of weirdly normal regulars, figments of a deluded AI self image, premised on the need to confront an imposed reality of community displacement, intellectual stagnation, and an imagination stunted by a system that bonds insiders and outsiders in a scary shitswamp birthed by the firewall thud of pre-Enlightenment appeals to an uncaring Providence.
Praise
“Will delight Kelman loyalists and should win him many converts among Americans. This brave and provocative novel deserves to be widely read.”
—Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting
“Kelman is simply incomparable.”
—Independent
“Very, very fine—his best since How Late It Was, and in some ways his most angrily profound book, period. It's not just a first-rate drinking novel and a first-rate elegiac failure novel and a first-rate Fred Exley-ish novel about loserdom. It may also be the best—it's certainly the most paranoid—book we've had thus far about the political and social reverberations of 9/11 in this country. Deft and moving. Very funny.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“James Kelman—winner of the Booker Prize for How Late It Was, How Late—possesses an astonishing voice … Read a page of Kelman and you can’t help but laud his sheer virtuosity.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“Kelman is a politically minded artist of the first order. His plays, stories and essays all have a critical edge that deepens the work … and somehow it’s even laugh-out-loud funny … You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free is a beautiful embodiment of moral, social, and political outrage portrayed on the most human level.”
—Rain Taxi
“[Kelman’s] technical ability, his sheer artistry is such that displacement and subversiveness are foregrounded, not merely as political issues, but in an effusion of linguistic and formal inventiveness.”
—Financial Times
“Kelman's latest will please and reward readers patient enough to pull up a chair and listen.”
—Publishers Weekly
About the Contributors
James Kelman was born in Glasgow, June 1946, and left school in 1961. He began work in the printing trade then moved around, working in various jobs in various places. He was living in England when he started writing: ramblings, musings, sundry phantasmagoria. He committed to it and kept at it. In 1969 he met and married Marie Connors from South Wales. They settled in Glasgow and still live in the dump, not far from their kids and grandkids. He still plugs away at the ramblings, musings, politicking and so on, supported by the same lady.
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