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Welcome to the continuing Rumpus Book Club Blog, where a Rumpus contributor reads the book of the month and regularly blogs about his or her reactions. It’s the first move in a conversation that we want you to join. Today, Rumpus Film editor Jeremy Hatch reacts to Part One of Citrus County, and links to another blog discussing the book. Beware: major spoilers beyond the cut!
Since just about everybody seems to have had copies in hand for a few days now, and I hope you’ve found some time over the weekend to read part if not all of the book, I thought today was a good time to talk a bit about Part One. I read it on Saturday in a bit of a hallucinatory rush — just as I had hoped would happen, and just as happened with Arkansas, I got immediately absorbed in the text and didn’t even notice the passing of two or three hours. Thankfully, I remembered the sunblock.
On the first pages we meet Toby, who, as one commenter pointed out, immediately makes an unfavorable impression — he litters, and when an obnoxious child points out the fact, Toby responds by saying “Your mom doesn’t love you as much as she used to. Have you noticed?” Okay, not so nice, but not all that bad, really — I mean, it’s not like Toby has kidnapped any small children or anything. I think if anything would make Toby unlikable, it would be kidnapping a small child and tying her up in a bunker in the forest for no apparent reason. But since he doesn’t do that until the end of the first chapter, I’ll get to that in a minute. For now he’s just your average antisocial, acting-out 15-year old, the kind we probably all were, once, to some degree, or else we wouldn’t be in this book club, right? And he stays that way, just a typical bored rebellious kid, departing from our company only when he sees Shelby’s little sister Kaley playing nearby. “Her hair was glinting like a fishing lure,” he thinks of Kaley — uh oh — followed immediately by “He did it for love.” OH NO UH OH! The love remark was apropos of some other topic, but proximity can be meaningful, so when I read that line, combined with his thoughts about the bunker, my heart sank a little. Was Toby going to turn out a child molester?
Let’s leave that one up in the air for now, why don’t we. But fortunately, I think the answer is no.
In between these scenes, we meet the teacher, Mr. Hibma, and Shelby. Now am I alone here, or does Mr. Hibma he strike you as an overgrown version of Toby? With one major difference, though — both are aware that the world around them is mostly ridiculous, and both resist its demands, but Mr. Hibma is much more covert and much more successful in having things his way. He cooperates to exactly the point he must, and subverts the thing for his own purposes the moment nobody’s looking. (As he points out to Toby, courting detention is one of the least rebellious things a boy can do.) And there’s another difference — at least in Part One, Mr. Hibma doesn’t commit any actual crimes — he daydreams about violent murder, sure, but that’s not the same as committing it. Shelby’s father pretty much has him pegged: “He’s one of those cool pessimists.”
As to Shelby, well, she’s the precocious girl who has a crush on the main character. I have to admit, I’ve never been all that into precocious kids as main characters — even when I was a precocious kid, I didn’t like them much, I’m the kid who basically agreed with everything Holden Caulfield said, and still thought he was a loser — but the main problem with Shelby, for me, is that at first, she seems a touch overburdened with discrete quirky traits — going in, she has an interest in standup comedy, and things Jewish, and reading the newspaper, and several other apparently random things. I didn’t like this aspect of her character so much; it felt like too many traits, for one, and for another, it felt like an aggregation that would have worked better on a secondary character. That stuff aside, though, I like the inside of Shelby’s head — she’s a smart kid and a great noticer, and I felt like her character really opened up after Kaley’s disappearance. All of these superficial things kind of drop away and we get a better sense of how she really is.
So then, in the second chapter of Part One, Toby kidnaps Shelby’s little sister, apparently only because Shelby is too much of a “goody-goody” and he wants to take her down a few pegs, and he stashes the kid away in a bunker he has found. I wasn’t sure what to make of this act, to tell the truth — it seemed a little extreme if all he wanted to do was upset Shelby. Actually, given that Shelby has a crush on him, in order to take her down a few pegs, all he really has to do is ignore her. Toby watches the news and joins in on a few search parties, to enjoy all the consternation and activity he has provoked, and then the fun is quickly over, and he finds himself stuck caring for a toddler in an underground bunker with her bereaved sister trying to make out with him all the time. This is a situation that just can’t turn out well — though I couldn’t resist flipping forward, and learning that it doesn’t seem to turn out too badly either. Which I guess is a relief, but I kind of like novels that end as badly as possibly for everybody concerned.
Well, there’s more to talk about than I can really cover in just a thousand words, so be sure to check out the thoughts of reader John Francisoni on Part One as well — is anybody else out there blogging this read? — and I now cede the floor to you. What are you thinking so far? What have I completely failed to mention? What are you liking and disliking? Is the book working for you? Why or why not? Let’s discuss.
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See also Blogging Citrus County #1.
10 responses
I finished the whole book in a day. Loved it. Somewhere I read recently that the most important thing a writer can do is “cast a spell, and then the little things don’t matter”
And Brandon cast one hell of a spell. I’m really interested how he did that, though, because the kidnapping … well, I agree that I didn’t get the motivation for it. It’s a central part of the book and it felt off to me, but I was also so wrapped up in it that I couldn’t put the book down. Toby’s not a happy kid. I get that. His parents are gone and he’s living with a screwed up uncle and he’s stuck in this mean place in the middle of nowhere without much of a future. But he decides he’s evil for some reason, even though the voice wouldn’t lead me to believe that he’s actually evil, just misguided, maybe. And then he kidnaps the little sister of the girl who has a crush on him and throws her in a bunker? Why? It seemed falsely mean, maybe, a little bit? But then why did I still love the book even though the central conceit bothered the hell out of me? Why did I stay up until 4AM to finish it? Could it be that this seemingly off thing was crucial to “casting the spell,” because I wanted to figure out why this “off thing” happened. I won’t go into whether I thought it worked by the end of the book (yes and no) because we’re only at part 1 here, but as a writer, I want to know how this spell worked. And I think the kidnapping is really important to explaing that, but I’m not sure, exactly, how it worked. All I’m sure of is that it made me keep reading while also making me uneasy and unsure.
Reading Part 1, I thought the motivation for the kidnapping was so that Toby could eventually bring her back and appear as a hero. But that’s not like Toby. He does have a line in Part 1 about how her disappearance gave everyone “something important to do,” or something to that effect. So maybe just to shake up Citrus County, make it less boring? It’s certainly an extreme way to go about doing that.
I think he probably did it out of a self-need to do something certifiably evil. He needs to validate his claim (to himself) that he is capable of something (when he thinks ‘These people don’t know what I’m capable of’). It is very strange how, even though I also don’t really understand the motivation behind it, I bought it, and didn’t really question the kidnapping for the entire book. I just really cared about how everything played out from it.
I admit, the kidnapping shocked the hell out of me. Even as I was reading that scene, I wasn’t quite sure what Toby was up to until he actually said he was going to take Kaley. It felt kind of incongruous to me but maybe that’s because I just wasn’t expecting it. I’ve certainly read characters who have seemed to feel stuck in their lives before, and a number of them have threatened or fantasized about violence (a la Mr. Hibma), but precious few ever actually go through with it.
Intrigued as I was by the circumstances surrounding the kidnapping, I found the rest of CC to be kind of a frustrating read. After that first burst of adrenaline I kept waiting for the rest of the characters to go off the rails but their behavior for the rest of the book is largely predictable (save Shelby’s Cracker Barrel incident, which delighted me). I wish there had been a little more deviance from the expected.
so hey, question: do you prefer that we only comment on part one at this point? I’ve read the whole book and so my comments are hard to parse out by part now.
Hey Rayme:
I would say for now, if you can hold off discussing the whole book in detail until Monday afternoon, when I expect to post about Part Three and about the text as a whole, that would be great — then we can discuss the whole book all week before the author discussion. My notes on Part Two should be up on Thursday afternoon.
I just finished part one, and so far, I’m really enjoying the book. I have to agree that Kaley’s kidnapping completely shocked me. I didn’t see it coming. I’m not sure what Toby’s motivation is. At first I thought he might be a child molester, but after reading the scene where he goes to help look for Kaley, I’m thinking he just wanted to stir things up.
I disagree with some of the comments saying that Toby is an unlikeable character from the get go. I didn’t see him as being a particularly bad person until the kidnapping. Prior to that, he just seams like an angry, confused kid.
So far, Mr Hibna is my favorite character. That guy is awesome. I love how much he hates his job and the people around him. It’s hilarious. Every Mr. Hibna scene is like a ray of sunshine. While reading it, I assumed that no school would actually have a teacher like this, but then, I described the character to my girlfriend, who grew up in rural Colorado. She said that probably everybody who went to public school had a teacher like that so I’m wondering if it might be a rural thing.
Since when do kids all talk in Cody Diablo dialogue?
All that snappy repartee and archness kind of puts me off. Did in Arkansas, too.
Re: every rural school having a Mr. Hibma:
My rural school had about a half-dozen of him, all different but all completely unfit for teaching. My Algebra I teacher spent half the school year descending into Alzheimers before she was canned because she started shoplifting around town. We then spent the rest of the year with some granma babysitting for us, no teaching done whatsoever.
It was the beginning of the end for me, math-wise. Next up: Algebra II with the greasy, obese Mr. Freckleton, who would look up girls’ skirts and have to run out of the room with a boner. No lie. Then there was the local judge’s wife who was far too old to keep teaching geometry but was kept on because….. she was the local judge’s wife. I had the misfortune of having her class directly after lunch period and she was so crippled up with arthritis that by the time she hobbled to our classroom from the cafeteria at the opposite end of the building, class was about ten minutes away from being dismissed and was in complete unsupervised chaos anyway – desks overturned, kids hanging out the window, etc.
I could go on, but what’s the point? Mr. Hibma would’ve been a vast improvement over the chuckleheads in my rural school.
Regarding Toby’s motivation for taking Kaley, it seems like this bit sums it up nicely: “He felt powerful. He’d thrown the county into a commotion, had given everyone something important to do. He’d dealt a blow to the wonderful Shelby Register, the only person in the whole county worth injuring. He’d probably made her a different girl. She wouldn’t be so sure of herself now. She’d be lost like everyone else.”
Toby is arrogant and completely self-centered, but in the pathetic, lonely way that bullies are. And he’s a sociopath. So this is the infatuated little boy who teases the girl he likes because he doesn’t know what else to do, except Toby takes it to a new, completely disturbing level.
Also, I loved Shelby’s random reference to Jim Gaffigan and hot pockets.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkUbqmS9TWI&feature=related
I just finished Part One, and like most of you, was shocked at the kidnapping, but I really think there’s more to it than just needing to take Shelby down a few pegs. There’s something not right about Toby. What was that bit about his mother’s mirror? He seems to be extremely unstable. Not that I think he will actually do anything to Kaley (I haven’t read past part one…so don’t tell me. =) ) but there’s something off about this kid.
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