Arkansas

Description

Reviews

Rating: 1 / 5
Date: 2010-08-31
Summary: "No Good Guys"

I need someone to root for. Even the good guys in this novel weren't admirable. Yes, they were much sinned against. But that doesn't give them the right to waste their lives. I was happy to close this book.

Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-05-18
Summary: "We're not in (Ar)kansas anymore"

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.

Rating: 2 / 5
Date: 2008-08-20
Summary: "Not What You Might Expect (Which, If You Read McSweeney's, Is Expected)"

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.

Rating: 4 / 5
Date: 2008-07-21
Summary: "Looking for a sequel"

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?

Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2008-06-24
Summary: "Buckle up!"

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.