Join The Rumpus Book Club today to receive our second selection, Doug Dorst’s The Surf Guru.
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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 Two of Citrus County.
First of all, I want to thank everybody who contributed to the discussion of Part One earlier this week. A lot of our discussion centered around the most dramatic event, Toby’s kidnapping of Kaley, and whether it seemed motivated or not — and if it did seem motivated, then why did he do it? A lot of people were surprised or half-surprised by it, including myself, but many people found it motivated. John Francisconi commented that he thinks Toby “probably did it out of a self-need to do something certifiably evil,” and Andréa Ford commented:
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.
I have to admit that I didn’t think of this last aspect, that Toby is actually infatuated with Shelby from the beginning and doesn’t want to acknowledge the fact even to himself, at least at the point when he kidnaps Kaley. But now that Andréa points it out, I think there’s definitely evidence for that motivation. And it seems pretty clear that by the end of Part Two, after Shelby gives him a handjob in the back of the bus, Toby is either starting to fall for her or beginning to acknowledge that he has feelings for her, depending on your point of view regarding the foregoing. As a matter of fact, I think that is the primary story arc in this section, Toby beginning to fall in love with Shelby.
Which leads me to a further reflection. I flipped forward into Part Three a little to get a sense of how strong Toby’s feelings get, and I think this kidnapping is ultimately going to be tragic — not because anything worse happens to Kaley, but because the kidnapping itself, the fact that Toby carried it out, will make it impossible for there to be any kind of love between the two.
Another part of our discussion was about Mr. Hibma, and how great he is, and for me Mr. Hibma is really the highlight of of Part Two. I’m beginning to suspect that Mr. Hibma is actually meant to be the reader’s stand-in, the closest thing that Brandon has to an objective point of view in this novel made up of very close third-person perspectives. He’s not from the place and he won’t be staying much longer, he’s intelligent and very perceptive, it seems pretty unlikely that he will end up doing anything especially bad (or heroic, either), and he basically has a clear view of all the characters he has contact with. And his weaknesses are very easy to relate to.
Sarah’s remark about the dialogue — “Since when do kids all talk in Cody Diablo dialogue? All that snappy repartee and archness kind of puts me off” — I think gets at the heart of what I was saying earlier, about my personal dislike of precocious kid characters in novels and films. Maybe what I most dislike about these characters is not their smarts, but the ironic lines that get put in their mouths, which, in all fairness to Cody Diablo, goes back way further in film than Juno (I’m looking at least as far as you, Max Fischer). On the other hand, archness per se doesn’t bother me much. I love Wes Anderson, and the other night I watched la Pointe Courte for the first time, which I really enjoyed — the dialogue in that film is arch and artificial to a very exaggerated degree. So I’m still not sure about this. Is anybody else annoyed by this kind of thing?
To be honest, the only thing that really annoyed me in Part Two was the thread about Iceland, for reasons that are completely extra-textual. If you’re not aware of this already, you now know that McSweeney’s has a thing for Iceland — the quarterly was printed in Iceland for years, Issue 15 was dedicated to Iceland, and it just keeps coming up. Don’t get me wrong: I’m sure that Iceland is a truly magical place, with its gray skies and elves and everything, and I love McSweeney’s a lot — I’ve admired the house from the beginning and I own most of their catalog and I volunteer there today — but Iceland, cropping up here as a theme, felt a bit calculated to appeal to notional “McSweeney’s readers,” and every mention of the place pulled me straight out of the text.
Apart from that detail, I’m liking the book at the conclusion of Part Two much more than I did earlier. Part of it is the relationship between Shelby and her father — she is really supporting him the best she can, I think, and for me the two scenes where she reaches out to him, despite the conflicts she’s feeling, were really moving. Overall, it’s the richness of the character development that is making this book work for me. As I’ve said, an abundance of action and event is not particularly important to me as a reader, and I enjoy what’s going on here in Part Two, where the only dramatic event in the novel so far, Kaley’s kidnapping, is casting a shadow over everything that happens, and it’s a shadow that darkens and grows longer as the book goes on.
So what do you think?
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Quick links: Reader John Francisconi’s thoughts on Part Two, and Blogging Citrus County #2.
23 responses
Hey! I just finished the book and it’s a lot of fun to read Jeremy’s notes and the commentary.
I enjoyed the same things and had the same questions as everyone seems to have.
For me, the strength of the book is its comic and satiric sensibility, the arch and ironic dialogue and actions. Mr. Hibner is my favorite character in this regard — he’s hilarious. I thought the book was a great satire of the many ways people don’t connect. They say and do the wrong things in every situation. Everyone is lost, whether they know it or not. They can barely figure themselves out, let alone muster the love and empathy it would take to meaningfully connect to another person. To me, that was what the novel was about, and it was at its best in those moments when it was shining a light on that universal human quality, or failing.
It reminded me of that Fox television show King of the Hill. Does anyone remember that show? The name “Mr. Hibner” comes right out of that world, his character seems like a different version of the father in that show, and Toby a meaner more inscrutable and withdrawn version of the son.
For me, all of this made the novel a winning coming-of-age satire. The problem is that dropped into the middle of it all we have a very dramatic and serious event — the kidnapping of a little girl.
What to make of this?
For me, the ending of the book was Brandon’s attempt to reconcile the two modes in which he’d written his novel, and the two parts of the novel that didn’t really wear well together. His character are hilarious, and sardonic, and their inner lives and actions are a dead-on parody of swampy small towns, junior high, the pettiness of people and how they can never connect, and yet it’s all wrapped around this genuinely disturbing incident that seems to demand a realist and dramatic narrative.
Or maybe another way to say it is, if you’re going to write a satire of junior high and life in a Florida swamp town, and have it involve the kidnapping of a little girl, I wonder if you have to take the (huge) risk of also giving that hot-button subject as much satirical treatment as you’re giving everything else. Write the scenes in the bunker with the same sense of satire that the rest of the novel has. Maybe Kaley should be complaining that, as a kidnapper, Toby is as much as a failure as he is a pole-vaulter. Well, it’s just an idea, and maybe it’s a terrible idea. Certainly it would be a huge risk to give a satirical treatment to such a dark and taboo subject, but I wonder if that’s what this novel needed.
As to Toby’s motivation, that also nagged me throughout. John gives a good textual explanation of what his motive might be, but the problem for me is that I don’t see those qualities of Toby’s elsewhere in the narrative. He struck me as more withdrawn than arrogant and self-centered.
I wondered if his motivation didn’t fit with one of the themes running through the book — the failure of people to understand and truly love each other. Toby’s behavior is the most extreme example of this in the book. He’s intrigued by a girl at school, who seems to like him, so what does he do but kidnap her little sister. It’s sort of the extreme and grotesque version of Mr. Hibner making his players wear make-up, or Shelby acting out by hanging an offensive banner on the church. Everything is just slightly (or more than slightly off).
Thank you, Rumpus! Interested to see what others think.
Max Fischer’s whole persona was based upon his idiosyncratic intelligence and square-peg-in-round-holeness. He was unique. (unique: there’s only one of them.)When all the main characters display idiosyncratic intelligence via ultra-snappy and ultra-self-conscious dialogue it’s no longer unique and starts the reader wondering who the hell ARE these people? Why is the the author making them this way?
I haven’t figured that out yet.
My main take-away from two John Brandon novels now is shallow people doing horrible things and getting away with it.
I will think on this and perhaps comment more when I have more time.
Or not.
Well, I guess I feel a little like I’m hurling my comments into the void but I would like to point out that what Toby did to Kaley is worse than waterboarding that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times, so if you understand that as torture, surely you must understand that Toby tortured Kaley directly, and tortured Shelby and her father indirectly.
I found it curious that Kaley’s time in the bunker was kept from us; it had to be a decision made by John Brandon not to describe her underground hell when he chose to describe so many other things.
Imagine being four years old, recently having lost your mother – not that you can understand that loss, only feel the terrible effect it has on you and on your father and sister – and being brutally thrust into a dark hole devoid of warmth, light, the passing of time; with no knowledge of or contact with what’s left of your family, just a horrid, masked caretaker who takes less than good care of you.
You’re left alone for hours on end. You have no idea if it’s day or night. There are smells and noises you can’t possibly know and threats to your safety you can’t possibly understand.
Every detail of your already ruptured life is brutally destroyed. You begin to hallucinate. Your immature brain cannot possibly process this horrible stimulus-deprived prison you’re in, or comprehend the ongoing threats to your being.
You are left for longer and longer periods of time, but you have no way of counting the hours or days.
Even when you’re reunited with your family, you’re a shell of who you were. Your childhood, your very person has been violated. You may never recover. You will never forget this inhuman treatment. It will shape who you are for the rest of your life.
There’s your Toby, guys.
He’s a sicko. A sociopath. No matter how glib his speech patterns, no matter what the extenuating circumstances of his life, he didn’t just kidnap Kaley: he tortured her.
The bunker isn’t a womb from which a new birth can bring a do-over life. It’s a torture chamber.
I’m just not someone who countenances that – from a character, or from an author.
Oh, and Mr Hibma? What’s so great about him? Holden Caulfield didn’t even imagine the phonyness of Mr Hibma.
Isn’t it rather devastatingly ironic that the one kind act in the whole book (as far as I can see) is Ms Conner’s kindness toward her loser-murderer?
You’re not throwing comments into a void! Promise.
Thanks Sean! You’re raising a lot of things I never thought of, and now you mention it, I do wonder whether satire necessarily conflicts with actions that are flat-out indefensible. Or whether Citrus County is indeed a satire. I’ll have to contemplate your ideas over the weekend; check back on Monday afternoon for my next post, about Part Three and the book as a whole.
Sarah: for the record, you’re not commenting into a void. Everybody’s response is valid.
I do have to disagree with you with regard to Rushmore and dialogue — yes, Max Fischer is perhaps a more compelling character than Shelby, but in my memory at least, all the dialogue in that film (and in Wes Anderson films generally) is arch and snappy and ironic to a similar degree as it is in Citrus County, regardless of what characters are speaking. That’s not really a problem for me, I’ve concluded — I enjoy the artificiality about that, in much the way I enjoy exaggeratedly noirish dialogue. I do think my only misgiving was a fatigue with precocious kid characters. But these are matters of mere taste.
As to the rest, what I think you’re getting at overall is that you find the novel insensitive to certain of its moral implications. Which is a perfectly valid point. And you also raise a very good artistic question in connection with that — why was Kaley’s perspective omitted? These are reasonable objections to raise and I’ll certainly bring them up in my next post.
Anyway, I’ll have more thoughts Monday. Thanks for participating!
Thanks for the responses. I actually ok with all kinds of diction when it feels to me like it serves the story – I like David Mamet and Gertrude Stein and lots of other writers who mess around with cadence and words,etc. And Re: Wes Anderson – yes, Wes is Wes and we expect archness and abstraction from him, but his characters aren’t naifs in the Florida scrub where introspection and self-reflection and/or ironic distance liekly aren’t absorbed through the muggy air (or maybe in Citrus County they are). They’re more like New Yorker readers and people with big ideas and 75-year plans and such. So the archness doesn’t feel fake, like it does (to me) in both of Brandon’s novels. The one thing I do like about it, though, is that its fakeness provides a perhaps unintentional buffer between me and the horrible things these characters do – how many pretty perfunctory bludgeonings and dismemberments were there in Arkansas, for Pete’s sake???? It signals almost like the author’s winking to me that these people can’t possibly be real, like breaking the fourth wall in film or something. (If it’s satire I don’t understand it as satire or even what it’s satirizing.) And maybe I’m just a mom who also has a masters in child development, but I was pretty convulsed with dread the whole way through Kaley’s imprisonment. It was pure *evil*. I mean, torturing small animals is always the big red flag for identifying really disturbed kids, but Toby tortured an innocent little girl just to feel powerful. Or maybe just to feel something, anything. Good god that makes my blood run cold. And I sort of get the feeling that some readers might actually want Toby and Shelby to live happily ever after (even though it’s clear they won’t ever be together again), and that’s really creepy to me, that that could be a hoped-for possible outcome.
Well, I’m just one reader and sometimes I get a little too wrapped up in what I read. Plus it’s been, oh, a few decades since I discussed literature in any sort of life-of-the-mind way like in college. I notice writers notice all kinds of things I never do, too, so it’s really great to get your insights. Sometimes I feel I need a push to be a bit more cerebral in my reading – that there are whole worlds of meaning in these books I’m probably missing. That’s why I’m here! So: Thanks!
I think that maybe, part of the reason we don’t get a clear picture of Kayley’s kidnapped life is because, although the book is told from a third-person point of view, it isn’t third-person omniscient. In middle school or whenever, we’re all taught a book can be told in first person, third person limited (narrative is tied to one specific character’s point of view), and third person omniscient (narrative can enter into any character’s consciousness). Brandon’s novel is somewhere between limited and omniscient here: we DO get to enter the thoughts of multiple characters, but only Toby, Shelby, and Mr. Hibma. SO, we wouldn’t get any sort of narrative of Kayley’s life in the bunker because Shelby and Mr. Hibma don’t know that she’s there, and Toby, as a character, doesn’t really seem to realize how awful life in the bunker would be for her. We as readers aren’t supposed to see Toby as a sadistic sociopath, or else we would get those details, because he would be deriving pleasure from them. Instead, we get descriptions of him repeatedly going to buy new flashlights when Kayley breaks them so she doesn’t have to be in the dark. He’s concerned with bringing her food and water, and with washing her. He buys scissors to cut the knots out of her hair when it gets too matted. I’m not saying that any of this makes the kidnapping an excusable thing, but Toby is 14 years old and I’m willing to bet that, as a character, he doesn’t realize the damage he’s causing–and if he doesn’t realize it, he can’t narrate it to us.
The same goes for the why-did-he-kidnap-her-in-the-first-place question. I have a sister who’s 14, and I was 14 once, and ok neither of us ever did anything so dramatic as kidnapping somebody BUT…14-year-olds do stupid stuff pretty often, without clear motivation. At the age of 14, you’re still developing your sense of self-awareness, and a lot of times you do things and don’t really realize why you’re doing them. I mean, people of all ages do this but…14 is probably the age when it happens the most.
Anyway, I think plenty of things happened in the story that I wouldn’t buy as something that happens in real life…but I also would classify the novel as a quirky/weird coming-of-age story, and entering into a mindset specific to that genre allowed me to suspend my disbelief pretty easily–but if you don’t buy into those genre conventions, then I can definitely understand disliking it. Personally, I read the book in less than 2 days, and I was totally taken in and enjoyed the experience of reading it a lot–and I mean, that says nothing about its moral or artistic qualifications, but I think it definitely counts for something.
I totally agree with Katelyn. If we just say Toby is evil and that’s it, we pretty much have to write off the rest of the book. I enjoyed this book too and didn’t hate any character.
I’d been thinking about why we never really get discriptions of the inside of the bunker, and I hadn’t really thought about it this way, but I think this is a definite possibility. I also think that this book is, in a lot of ways, about identity and these characters all trying to figure out who they are–what their place in the world is. Perhaps, we get Toby’s point of view only from the Toby outside of the bunker. When he puts on the mask and goes inside, he becomes someone else who we don’t really get to see.
I can also see this as a technique Brandon may have used so that we don’t come to hate Toby as we would if the sections dwell on the terrible conditions inside the bunker or how afraid Kayley was. As awful as it might sound to say, I don’t think the book is about Kayley and therefore, maybe her experience isn’t that important. If, as the moderator brought up in his inital post, this book is some explanation of why a character in Arkansas named Toby is the way he is, perhaps Brandon will next write a book with a woman named Kayley as a main character, and that will be her story.
I didn’t see Toby as a sociopath, or even evil as he, himself, implies. Sociopaths are cold and confident. Toby is not so much self-absorbed but self-conscious and self-loathing from the beginning. He believes he shouldn’t even have been born. Enter Shelby – smart, pretty, a good student and a good person, who is hot for him and not only completely out of his league but doesn’t even belong in the county with all these “losers” who are going nowhere. The status quo changes.
Toby hates himself and hates Shelby even more for being interested in him and thereby reminding him that he’s not worthy. He hates her for it and wants to bring her down. He perceives her as having a perfect life with no tragedy, so he gives her one. That’s plenty of motivation for the kidnapping.
Toby doesn’t purposely torture Kaley. He doesn’t even see her as a person and thinks it will be easy. It’s partially to prove to himself and everyone else that he’s evil, so he has a romantic notion about it. After he does it, however and he has to keep her alive, we can see his slow demise. He hates going to the bunker but cares for her basic survival as long as he can. At the end, he simply couldn’t bear to see her. Showing her struggle at the bunker would have been distracting and would have made Toby seem worse. So, there IS a rebirth at the very end of the book when she is found. Everyone really gets a chance at a new life, even though now that we know these people, we know that their new lives probably won’t be better considering who and where they are.
As for the characters – Mr. Hibma – I found myself drifting off every time he came into the picture. Something better should have been done with him. Much of his plight is irrelevant except for being similar to Toby. I was hoping he would actually finally kill someone. I thought he was boring.
Shelby – honestly, I hated her a little too and wanted something bad to happen to her. She’s annoying and follows Toby around promising him kisses and hand-jobs in the future. If she’s as smart as we are to believe, why did it take her months to follow Toby home to see what his life was like? Why wouldn’t she try doing that the first week she met him and couldn’t get any info from him? In a sense, the tragedy was good for her because it helped release the bitchy, slutty teenager inside that perhaps she was destined to be. Unlike Toby, Shelby’s negative actions, like throwing grits at that girl, are done for the sole purpose of being a bitch.
I don’t typically mind precocious teens in books or films. However, the snappy, smart dialogue at the beginning of this book is inappropriate because first, these kids are in middle school, not high school, and therefore don’t have the experiences that would make them even be aware of the references they are making, and second, they are simply NOT as inherently intelligent as Wes Anderson characters. They are sheltered in trashy towns where some kids don’t even have cable or read books, and the witty snappy dialogue falls apart after awhile because it just doesn’t work in this atmosphere. It would be different if these kids had constant internet access and use cell phones and ipods, but they don’t.
I really liked how the name of the novel and town suggest bearing fruit, yet no one in it can birth anything positive.
I’m kind of with Sarah. Something seems off. I can see, I think, Brandon’s thought process. Maybe not describing Kaley’s ordeal is even more horrific than describing it could possibly be, because it’s in the back of our mind the whole time. But then the question becomes how that terror contrasts with the tone of the rest of the book. And then there’s two choices: we either assume Brandon is making light of something that’s really terrible and is having a failure of empathy, or we assume he meant the kind of “snappy, smart” tone of the book to go up against this terrible situation that’s made to play out almost entirely in our heads. If it’s the latter, isn’t that kind of brilliant. But then of course it’s a huge risk, because if people assume the former, than the entire book doesn’t work.
Seth, this is SO well put: [from comments on the previous blog, #2] “All I’m sure of is that it made me keep reading while also making me uneasy and unsure.” Ditto, ditto, ditto. Something curious is at work here. (And yes, I also have finished the book.)
Also, I love the Mr. Hibma comments thus far–this book club is brilliant because it brings such a unique confluence of individuals together. I can only imagine backgrounds/locations/occupations.
Re: Mr. Hibma, though, he was my favorite character, and I took a particular attachment to him because he reminds me so, so much of an old high-school teacher with whom I had some sort of ‘relationship’ (or something) years after graduation. I’m clearly posting under an alias, as his wife would assuredly still like to have my head (and no, he wasn’t married at the time), but I’m drawn to Hibma like I was drawn to this other individual in my life–because of his humanity and his flaws. These sorts of people/characters can invoke a certain vulnerability from others—vulnerability others may not have initially wished to share—and the sorts of actions and reactions they’re able to elicit…well, when you’re on the outside (or it’s after the fact) and you can see it all, you see so clearly exactly how much (or how little) change and self-analysis these sorts of individuals/characters are capable of…despite outward protests that may imply otherwise.
I initially wasn’t keen about posting that on the Internet, but I’m having very clear, real feelings as a result of Mr. Hibma. I read a great deal, and I haven’t so vividly remembered what it was like to interact with that person for years…so I had to say something. ☺ So, see, Mr. Brandon—the book is working. Humanity is quite present within those pages.
I am curious, though, on how the comments play out re: Mr. Hibma and the conclusion of the book. I’m curious about what you, Jeremy, and others think about the closing pages of the novel. I have my thoughts on what we’re supposed to be buying versus what we see on the page yet know to be false/know it’s something of which the character is [or the characters are] incapable, but I’ll pipe down for the time being until the next blog post.
Thanks so much, everybody! This has been such a fantastic discussion from the get-go. It doesn’t look like I’ll have my final post up until tomorrow, so until then…
I have to thank Katelyn for her analysis of Toby’s character and why perhaps Brandon portrayed him the way he did. It makes all the sense in the world, especially the part about how an author’s choice of point-of-view places limits on what the reader can be told and that there’s always stuff that is left out, for good reasons (or bad reasons or no reasons at all I suppose).
(Parenthetically, what I know about kids and psych and dealing with both for years probably narrows my views of possible outcomes for a kid who says things like “Bet your mom doesn’t love you as much as you think” and smashes bird eggs “just because” and keeps a toddler underground for more than nine weeks no matter how “well” he thinks he’s treating her (and by age 14 you either know you just don’t do shit like that or you don’t, and not knowing it sorta makes you a sociopath by definition but we’ve been over this enough). So Toby’s kind of a character I’m just never going to fall in with because of that so I should probably recuse myself from discussing him further. Plus, even though it’s been over a year since I read 2666, I’m still unable to process the trauma I went through while reading Part Four (or whatever it was) and I’m not kidding. So, this kind of mindless violence against females still disturbs me terribly, even more than it ever did before and I should probably not discuss it, either.)
As for everyone getting a chance at a new life at the end as Charlene suggests, I think the way I look at it is like that Bon Iver line from Wisconsin: “Cause every place I go I take another place with me,” which means everything that’s happened in the book is going along as baggage for better or probably, mostly, for worse. So there’s a sense (to me) of lives having been mucked about with for no good reason. Which is life and life only I suppose. When I think of new life I think of washed clean and born again and I think maybe the most you can hope for these characters is that the pain and powerlessness they (Toby mostly; Hibma a close second; and Shelby a distant third) seem trapped by is somehow mitigated even a little.
There are lots of little things that I wonder about but I’ll just point out one or two: Why was Mr. Hibma snatched for six hours as an infant by a nurse? Is that some kind of writer’s foreshadowing? And why is Toby’s surname McNurse? Of all the names a writer could choose?
Since such an extensive discussion has been going on here and I don’t have much to add to it, I decided we should keep going on this post rather than start another, and I directed people here from the home page.
I did want to add one quick thing though, which is that the one book I keep thinking of comparing Citrus County to, on the moral/ethical level, is the Vatican Cellars by André Gide: there is a more or less unmotivated crime (a murder in that case) that Gide doesn’t dwell on much, and the character who commits it, Lafcadio, manages to have it blamed on another man, and the morality of killing somebody for the hell of it is not explored at all. But Lafcadio eventually becomes a normal person and is sympathetic to the degree where you almost forget that he pushed somebody off a train for no reason, and then framed someone else for the crime. For me this creates a critical dilemma very similar to the one I find in Citrus County — the André Gide studies website has this great line about Lafcadio, that he gradually “invades a familiar moral universe” (that is, ours), which can cause significant unease if you’re alert to that, as many of us are. Of course, Gide’s novel is definitely very rich with ideas, and Brandon’s novel strikes me as not much more than a perverse take on the coming-of-age story. But enjoyable!
Self-Effacing comment: I actually haven’t finished the book… I’m just starting Part 3… so what I type here may or may not be relevant by the end! 🙂 But anyway…
What if Brandon never meant for us to take Kaley’s kidnapping seriously? What if the entire kidnapping is more of a device to explore Toby’s need to do something–anything–drastic in order to feel alive in a place like Citrus County… a place whose name implies life but whose reality is decay (overgrown tennis courts, creaky houses, litter and abandoned bunkers, etc.)? What if this 15 year old kid is just maybe trying to figure out, in a really rotten way, who he is (even if he’s too cool to ever admit that this is what he’s doing)?
I understand and agree that Kaley’s kidnapping is traumatizing and inexcusable, and mostly just dumb, even for a 15 year old… *if kidnapping a four year old was really Brandon’s point.* But what if that’s not his point? Maybe his point is: here’s this kid in a rotten town with a rotten uncle and at age 15 he’s in danger of becoming another rotten kid. Except he has just enough self-awareness to know that he has the potential to be rotten, and so instead of just BEING rotten he decides to test the limits of his rottenness. He has this teacher who tells him striving for detention is about the dumbest thing a rotten kid like him could do, so he litters and says mean things to the kid at the beginning of the book, and then when that doesn’t satisfy him he does the most rotten thing he can think of–kidnap a little girl to piss off her cute sister (Shelby’s a whole different topic)–to see if he’s really as rotten as he thinks he has the potential to be.
And he succeeds. But the thing is, I don’t think he’s actually that rotten. Any kid with enough self-awareness to test the limits of his own rottenness isn’t a bad kid… at least in my opinion there has to be a distinction between doing bad things and being a bad person. Toby did bad things, but he wasn’t a bad person.
And here’s really why I think this: Being rotten becomes a burden for Toby. He can’t control Kaley and he starts to hate going to the bunker, because the rottenness of what he did became more than he could handle. While Kaley’s in the bunker Toby is studying to become a good pole vaulter. I know that sounds random but while he’s struggling to perform his experiment in rottenness he’s also experimenting with productivity and success. And girls… except he compromised that experiment with his experiment in rottenness… but again, Shelby’s a different topic.
The kid’s just trying to figure himself out! And Brandon uses the kidnapping as an absurd device to defamiliarize a pretty common theme in literature. I don’t necessarily love this whole device in the book… but that’s that, I guess.
And the McSweeneys references: Mr. Hibna is practically Will from “You Shall Know Our Velocity”… an expected inheritance, a character who doesn’t feel like he’s earned anything for himself in life… a deep-seated dissatisfaction with where his circumstances have led him… and feeling vulnerable to those circumstances… Iceland (well, Greenland I guess but it’s close)… yep. That’s what I think, for now. I’m going to keep reading…
When is the discussion w/Brandon today? And where? All the links to “Book Club” are confusing. Maybe it could have its own single destination for all the BC posts?
I joined the book club for book #2 because I’d already purchased Citrus County from the McSweeney’s book club. I’d still like to listen in on the discussion today if I could. Thanks.
Also: I know Toby’s kidnapping Kaley is supposed to just be an interesting “device” or whatever. Mine is a highly idiosyncratic, personal, and admittedly extreme reaction against how frivolously we accept such treatment of females, in literature and in real life. That’s it. I’m sorry I responded so strongly against it.
Hey there! The discussion is tomorrow as far as I know. I will send you an email with the details.
I completely agree that the way we did this turned out to be relatively confusing, and that’s something that needs fixing for next time if blog discussions continue to be a feature. We need to discuss it over here, but possible solutions are a single page or a column to hold all related posts, so that there’s only one link to go to, as you suggest.
And no worries whatever about having strong reactions! That’s part of what makes discussions about art interesting — please don’t apologize for that!
Liked the book. Read it quickly. Sections where Mr. Hibma coaches the girls basketball team I think are the most entertaining: “You are a silent avalanche”. I’m still laughing.
However, I think many of the concerns noted above express what was troubling me throughout my reading. I try not to get caught up in “believability”–you only know at the end of the book if you believed the work as a whole, and I think I did. But I look to literature for moral guidance. That sounds old-fashioned I know, but I do think, as someone who survives in a morally relativistic world, that I parse what is right and wrong, the truth about how to behave, through fiction. And I get disappointed when I feel the author is trying to be “current” (precocious children giving hand-jobs in buses, horrible plot twist with no real resolution or consequences, etc) at the expense of the truth.
There are too many Aunt Dales in modern fiction.
Also: Why is the father a boxer? Why does no one mention what happened to Shelby & Kaley’s mom although it would be hugely relevant? What’s the deal with the division of the book into three parts? Why is everything a trilogy these days?
I’ve enjoyed reading everyone’s comments and am glad to see I am not quite the outlier I thought I was. Sarah, I am also still scarred by Part 4 of 2666, despite skipping more than half of it. Even though it is fiction, when people are murdered (or kidnapped) on the page it still matters.
I’ve got book #2. Looking forward to further discussion. Would be helpful to be able to opt in (is this possible?) for a notification when a new comment has been posted to the discussion thread.
When I arrived at the part (p. 172) when Uncle Neal is reading the book of poetry that he found in the trash can at a gas station (tragic in its own right), I felt the urge to track down the poem he recites to Toby, and I wanted to share it with all of you. The poem is called “To Satan in Heaven,” written by Florida-born poet Donald Justice (incidentally I got this from the same edition that Uncle Neal found, with the “smudgy paintings” on the cover):
Forgive, Satan, virtue’s pedants, all such
As have broken our habits, or had none,
The keepers of promises, prizewinners,
Meek as leaves in the wind’s circus, evenings;
Our simple wish to be elsewhere forgive,
Shy touchers of library atlases,
Envious of bird-flight, the whale’s submersion;
And us forgive who have forgotten how,
The melancholy who, lacing a shoe,
Choose not to continue, the merely bored,
Who have modeled our lives after cloud-shapes;
For which confessing, have mercy on us,
The different and the indifferent,
In inverse proportion to our merit,
For we have affirmed thee secretly, by
Candle-glint in the polish of silver,
Between courses, murmured amenities,
Seen thee in mirrors by morning, shaving,
Or head in loose curls on the next pillow,
Reduced thee to our own scope and purpose,
Satan, who, though in heaven, downward yearned,
As the butterfly, weary of flowers,
Longs for the cocoon or the looping net.
My take: the poem’s images remind me of several of Brandon’s characters: the “cloud-shapes” that we model our lives after (p. 160: “The only clouds that could survive were the nimble, vicious ones”); the mirror (the mirror, belonging to Toby’s mother, that he is looking into, seeing nothing, just before he goes out to the woods to discover Kaley has escaped); the “shy touchers of library atlases” (Mr. Hibma’s strange geography class, and Shelby’s quiet longing to visit Aunt Dale in Iceland). The poem is a prayer to Satan, which is a confusing idea, just like this book is confusing. Toby and Mr. Hibma, for at least most of the book, seem to be “downward yearning,” just like Satan in heaven, feeling that they have an unexplained but certain dark purpose that they are destined to achieve.
I liked this book quite a bit, and I’m really enjoying everyone’s comments.
Wow, thankyou for posting that poem. It’s beautiful, and, you’re right: it meshes with so much in CC. Really glad I read that and I will be looking for more Justice poems. Thank you again.
I just wanted to express my thanks to John Brandon and to Stephen Elliott and Issac (I’m sorry I forgot Issac’s last name) and Jeremy Hatch for last night’s live Book Club discussion. It was really kind of electric what with all the questions people had and exciting to see comments flying by. I really liked it. Such great things came up I wish we could’ve hung around after John Brandon left to hash things out but I understand there had to be limits on time, etc.
I’m really looking forward to the next one, though I wonder how we’ll manage to discuss so many differnet stories. I guess we should give some thought how to approach that – do you think John Brandon felt ambushed by all the questions? I hope not.
Well, I just wanted to really thank everyone – all the participants – for a great “meeting of the minds.” Have a great weekend, everyone!
After finishing this book, my initial thought of there being something “off” about Toby still seems correct. I don’t think he’s a sociopath, simply because he took no joy out of the kidnapping, was even going to return Kaley, but he just seems detached. It’s as if he doesn’t really understand people around him. He doesn’t understand why Shelby feels about him the way she does (and honestly, does she even understand?), he seems oddly unaffected by his uncle, as well. Only Mr. Hibma seems to break through to Toby, but just barely, and not very often.
After processing this book. I’m trying to understand the point of it, honestly. I can’t say I disliked it, but what, as a reader, was I supposed to gain from this? I didn’t see it as satire, really. I mean, what problems was it trying to point out? And it certainly wasn’t a true coming-of-age story… I feel like we didn’t get enough of any of the characters to have that genre attached to it. And, although I enjoyed the limited omniscient narrator, it left me unfulfilled from both teenage characters’ perspectives. Shelby was a better portrayal, I thought, because she was more dynamic and interesting. Toby was just there. Again, he seemed disconnected from everything around him.
Oddly enough, as a teacher, I found the teacher parts of the book dull. I just didn’t care about Mr. Hibma and his sad little life.
I realize I’ve done a bit of complaining here, but honestly, I read the book is just a few hours, found myself wanting to see what happened, was caught up in some really amazing language, but am still just wondering what the point was.
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