You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free [Paperback]

Yet we endure all this happily for the following reason. Kelman is one of very the few writers out there who combines genuine literary talent with a true appreciation of what real life is really like for the average Joe, a million miles away from that which the dons of News, TV and advertising would have us believe.

In 'You Have to Be Careful...', Kelman has evidently decided to treat us, the faithful few, to a slighly less-demanding but no-less serious a novel as 'Translated Accounts'. We get a protagonist, ex-patriate Scot Jeremiah Brown. We get a setting, an anonymous town in the backwater of the American Mid-West. We even get a love interest, ex-girlfriend Yasmin, albeit through Jeremiah's memories alone. Lucky us!

The plot, so much as there is one (Kelman's not big on once-upon-a-time), is that Jeremiah, a Glaswegian, self-proclaimed 'unassimilatit alien' living in America, is holed up in a bar for a night (when he really should be catching a plane home as he promised his mother he would), letting his thoughts slide freely between past and present, hopes, fears and regrets. In this sense, the novel is really just an extended character study, but one which takes us deep into the psyche of a character caught between two worlds, not completely at ease in either.

This is a definite return to form for Kelman, a writer who takes his art very seriously indeed. Although it may lack the punch of 'How Late it Was, How Late', or the complexity of 'A Disaffection', 'You Have to Be Careful...' stakes its worth in its creation of a character both flawed and dignified, pessimistic and witty. And by elucidating his personal history, full of the simple tragedies and triumphs that all ordinary people go through, Kelman performs that rare Frankensteinean feat of bringing his character to life.

'You Have to Be Careful...' is a wonderfully liberated account of one man's experiences on the other side of the pond, and with its subtle yet sardonic attack on the US Immigration Service, Kelman is as politically charged as ever.

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