Innocence Lost By DANIEL HANDLER
CITRUS COUNTY
By John Brandon
215 pp. McSweeney’s Rectangulars. $22
Nothing conforms to expectations like a novel that subverts expectations. John Brandon’s terrific new novel, “Citrus County,” opens with a slap in the face to the adage that an author ought to identify his hero by having him do something nice for a kid:
“Toby stood and brushed his hands together, cleaning them of the gravelly dirt. He touched the boy’s shoulder. ‘Your mom doesn’t love you as much as she used to. She thinks there might be something wrong with you. Is she right? Is there something wrong with you?’ ”
To call this kind of opening subversive would vastly undersell Brandon’s novel, because what, really, is subverted by the scene? Smart, mean heroes are startling to a reader of modern literature only if the reader has not actually read any modern literature. From Philip Marlowe’s wisecracks to Alexander Portnoy’s complaints, American literature offers a barrage of good (mostly) men who say (mostly) bad things, and if you think that’s faded since feminism I have some David Gates to sell you.
The passage above displays Brandon’s strong chops — the phrase “gravelly dirt” has the beautiful obviousness of all good prose — and his sure handle on Toby, who finds ways to use all of the quick, nasty things he dreams of saying. But if a mean protagonist isn’t especially shocking these days, what’s truly subversive about “Citrus County” is that Toby is also, simultaneously, something of a sweetheart:
“He could feel himself as a kid with a ripening heart who looked forward to things, who borrowed his schemes from the same old shelves as everyone else, who loved dumbly like people were meant to.”
Such a bighearted self-image is a bit jarring alongside Toby’s heartless put-downs, but this is a character who slouches squarely in the middle of adolescence, a very jarring time of life, in which ignorance collides with certainty, inexperience with instinct, desire with scorn, and in which the deep need to be loved walks hand in uncomfortable hand with hatred and shame. Brandon lays out these contradictions like a sure hand of cards, imbuing Toby with traits and actions that are at complete cross-purposes but utterly complementary. It’s a subversion of our expectations of people in books — particularly adolescents, who are supposed to remind us of our own revised history — but it conforms perfectly to humanity. In other words, Toby is less like a character and more like a person.
There are other people in the novel. There is Shelby, a girl Toby’s age with her eye on him, and there is Mr. Hibma, a teacher at their school, whose own troubles and urges are as helplessly chaotic as those of any of his students. You might think you can see where this is going, since so many recent novels have gone right there: the three characters will circle one another for a hundred pages or so, until there’s an incident (an accident perhaps, or somebody gets sick), and then you’ll turn the page and start Part 2, which will happen some six months later as the characters process the incident through the prism of the very specific location in which the book takes place. (I just went to my shelf and pulled down eight novels published in the last five years that follow that structure, and then I had to stop because it was too depressing.) And Brandon does give us some of that, but only the way a firing squad gives you a cigarette before it kills you.
Because then, almost before we’ve even had a chance to settle in, Toby does a very bad thing.
Brandon’s first novel was a fine piece of work called “Arkansas,” and it was basically a crime novel, so readers who have been following his career — call if you want to join us; there’s plenty of room at the booth — will not be surprised that “Citrus County” also begins to inhabit that general space. The law arrives. Suspects are questioned. A thin, taut line of suspense is drawn around the furtive, nervous actions of the book, so that, as with all great crime novels, the pace simultaneously quickens and slackens. We don’t know what’s going to happen, and yet we don’t see a way out.
What is so remarkable is that “Citrus County” does not turn its back on its first 30 pages. The novel of rural adolescent longing carries on as though it is not also a crime novel, and the crime novel tightens its grip on characters who would really rather tighten their grip on one another. “I’m still coming after you,” Shelby tells Toby shortly after the crime, unaware that the object of her affection has just ravaged her life. “I’m going to pick up where I left off.” “I’ll be all the places I normally am,” Toby replies, not mentioning that one of those places is the focus of a criminal investigation. “Most mild mysteries in Citrus County boiled down to drunk teenagers,” the novel tells us, and yet the sober teenagers on whom the book concentrates are swimming in a mystery that is anything but mild. Toby’s violence and amorality feel as organic and unstoppable as Shelby’s intelligence and desire, and when the two pair up at last, the novel fires on all burners:
“She was kissing him. Shelby’s mouth was moist and assertive and Toby could feel the world’s vastness. He knew there were oceans out there that made the Gulf look like a puddle. There were places covered in snow, places where people ate snakes for dinner, places where people believed that every single thing that happened in their lives was determined by ill-willed spirits.” The prose gives us the vast mental reach of a good makeout session, but the story reminds us that there is also a place, quite close by, where a small child is trapped in an underground bunker. Just when things get better they get worse, and then even worse, and then even worse and then — suddenly but believably — much, much better. This feels like adolescence and crime and, in the end, life. With “Citrus County” John Brandon joins the ranks of writers like Denis Johnson, Joy Williams, Mary Robison and Tom Drury, writers whose wild flights feel more likely than a heap of what we’ve come to expect from literature, by calmly reminding us that the world is far more startling than most fiction is. He subverts the expectations of an adolescent novel by staying true to the wild incongruities of adolescence, and subverts the expectations of a crime novel by giving us people who are more than criminals and victims. The result is a great story in great prose, a story that keeps you turning pages even as you want to slow to savor them, full of characters who are real because they are so unlikely. “Citrus County” subverts countless expectations to conform to our expectations of a very good book.
Daniel Handler is the author of “Adverbs” and, as Lemony Snicket, “A Series of Unfortunate Events.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/books/review/Handler-t.html?_r=1&nl=books&emc=booksupdateema1&pagewanted=print
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