Arkansas

by John Brandon, 2008
230pp
03/02-03/15

So, I'm one of those people who reads the books of McSweeney's "Rectangulars" line as soon as they come out, even though I haven't really loved one since The Children's Hospital. And, man, I wanted to really like this book.

Call it "deep-fried pulp fiction," if you're fond of corny reductive labels. It follows a couple of sketchy characters into a colorful but logistically dunderheaded narcotics conspiracy spanning much of the Southeast. And that's what I thought I'd like about this book: being a resident of the Southeast with frequent interactions with the criminal element, I'd hoped to recognize the familiar in this book.

To be sure, Brandon gets a lot right, particularly in the "local color" department. Not that I'm familiar with Arkansas, where much of the book obviously is set, but I've lived my whole life in Southern flyover states, even in those state's own "flyover counties," far-removed from cities or even the Interstate. To the extent that they're thought about at all, these places exist as a mystery to educated, urban Americans, and the hipsters devoted to the output of a small San Francisco publishing house. "Here there be NASCAR fans." When I make a road trip across an unfamiliar stretch of interstate, I can't help but wonder about the lives of the people living off every exit. Very often I have this vague sense--"dread" is too strong a word--that the locals are seedy; I am suspicious of the people in these parts precisely because I've never seen fit to give them much thought, even though their territory stretches across most of the map. And Brandon captures the feel of life in these unconsidered places, where people work in factories making everyday objects whose fabrication you'd never once given a moment's thought.

I read this interview with Andrew Brandon shortly after finishing this book, and was disappointed I hadn't liked Arkansas more. I really want to like the book by the guy with nice things to say about Chattanooga, of all places.

But the biggest barrier to my enjoyment had to do with the treatment of petty and professional criminals. I'm a public defender in a small Southern town; I work with the folks who sling dope and carry guns around here. I didn't recognize Brandon's world, where colorful characters operate unwieldy criminal conspiracies that seem designed to maximize potential for betrayal or interdiction. But then, it's entirely possible that Brandon was being 100% faithful to the genre conventions of crime novels, if not to bleaker reality. Never having read a single word of Elmore Leonard or any of the rest, I really wouldn't recognize it. But it's likely I ought to hate the genre, not the writer.



You can't tell, but this is a signed copy. I picked it up at Atlanta's Criminal Records, which itself could be have made an appearance in this book (a flashback, maybe).