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's Book World/washingtonpost.com
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.


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


Book Description
In the superbly crafted and critically acclaimed You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free, James Kelman has created an unforgettable character and a darkly comic portrait of a post-9/11 America.

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--by way of Seattle, Canada, Iceland, and England--to visit his mother. On his last night in the States, Jeremiah finds himself in a town south of Rapid City, moving from bar to bar, attracting and repelling strangers, losing count of the beers he has drunk. All the while he is haunted by memories and by an acute sense of foreboding.



About the Author
Born in Glasgow, JAMES KELMAN is the author of a number of novels and collections of short stories, including Translated Accounts, A Disaffection, and How late it was, how late, which won the Booker Prize. He lives in Glasgow.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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

FROM THE CRITICS

Dwight Garner - The New York Times

The good news is that this novel happens to be very, very fine -- [Kelman's] 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 (loserdom being the song Kelman was born to sing). 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.

Michael Dirda - The Washington Post

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.

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. 4-city author tour. (May) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Scottish immigrant Jeremiah Brown has gambled his way around America for over a decade, winning and losing the woman he loves in the process. Now, he has planned his first trip home to Glasgow in eight years. The novel begins hours from departure in freezing Colorado as he leaves his hotel in search of a bar. As he passes the time, we witness his astute observations and verbal self-flagellation in a stream of consciousness peppered with profanity, humor, and Scottish vernacular. We remain inside Jeremiah's head for the duration of the novel, learning of his singular philosophy, his delusions, and his stints as a bartender and security guard in New York. It is within the account of this security job that we learn that Jeremiah is living in a nightmare of color-coded identity cards, alienation, and paranoia, complete with spectral transients who haunt airports and guarded camps where new immigrants await processing. Our hero doesn't seem surprised, but readers should be jolted and challenged. Using a unique blend of stark realism and Orwellian fantasy, Booker Prize-winning author Kelman (How Late It Was, How Late) presents a darkly comic picture of post-9/11 America, in which the fate of airline flights is furiously bet upon and schoolchildren fear the ominous helicopters ever overhead. This brilliant novel is highly recommended for all literary fiction collections.-Jennifer B. Stidham, Harris Cty. P.L., Houston Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews