It seems appropriate that Shaft posted about Tony Earley’s Jim the Boy on Monday.  Tony Earley writes about changing times in the small town South.  Many of us in the South can relate to the characters in Earley’s work based upon our parents’ or grandparents’ experiences and stories.  It’s nostalgic writing about a romanticized, pastoral South.  John Brandon’s Arkansas is the flip side of that coin.

The characters in Arkansas are from small towns and they are going nowhere.  They have no opportunities, they have poor educations, they are broke, but mostly they are just bored.  Boredom, poverty, and a lack of opportunity are often recipes for crime and drugs. Arkansas tells the story of two likeable-ish losers who stumble into a life of lower-tier criminality because they don’t have anything better to do.  Things go well for the pair, they are set up with a good situation with with cover as employees at an Arkansas State Park, with free accomodations. One even lands a girlfriend.  Of course, crime doesn’t pay, and a freak incident leads to the wheels coming off their simple life of hopes and dreams.

Brandon lays out the construction of a mid-level crime syndicate in such detail that I feel, should my current employment situation not pan out, that I have sufficient information to start my own.  How the author came to acquire this kind of knowledge, I can’t say.  It’s the question that I’d ask were I to see him read anytime soon.  The author is from the Florida Panhandle, so his descriptions of small town boredom and desperation are pretty spot on.

I came to read Arkansas after seeing Brandon read 1 1/2 times locally.  The 1/2 occured when Brandon was part of a McSweeney’s event at Criminal Records/Aurora Coffee.  Unfortunately, I had to bail just as Brandon began his reading.  A few months later, Brandon was back in town at Wordsmiths, and I was able to stick around.  I am fairly confident that I would not have read Arkansas had I not seen the author read.  Attention publishers:  the system works - send us your authors!

I ought to just bite the bullet and sign up for McSweeney’s Book Release Club - 10 hard cover books/$100.  It’s not like they put out crappy books.