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Summary
Summary
Booker Prize winner James Kelman's new novel, Dirt Road , tells the story of a teenage boy who travels with his father from Scotland to Alabama to visit with relatives after the death of his mother. In the American South, he becomes swept up into the world of zydeco and blues. ""A powerful meditation on loss, life, death, and the bond between father and son. . . . Kelman has created a fully-realized, relatable voice that reveals a young man's urgent need for connection in a time of grief." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
After his mother's recent death, sixteen-year-old Murdo and his father travel from their home in rural Scotland to Alabama to be with his émigré uncle and American aunt. Stopping at a small town on their way from the airport, Murdo happens upon a family playing zydeco music and joins them, leaving with a gift of two CDs of Southern American songs. On this first visit to the States, Murdo notices racial tension, religious fundamentalism, the threat of severe weather, guns, and aggressive behavior, all unfamiliar to him. Yet his connection to the place strengthens by way of its musical culture. Murdo may be young but he is already a musician.
While at their relatives' home, the grieving father and son experience kindness and kinship but share few words of comfort with each other, Murdo losing himself in music and his reticent and protective dad in books. The aunt, "the very very best," Murdo calls her, provides whatever solace he receives, until his father comes around in a scene of great emotional release.
As James Wood has written of this brilliant writer's previous work in The New Yorker , "The pleasure, as always in Kelman, is being allowed to inhabit mental meandering and half-finished thoughts, digressions and wayward jokes, so that we are present" with his characters. Dirt Road is a powerful story about the strength of family ties, the consolation of music, and one unforgettable journey from darkness to light.
Author Notes
James Kelman was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1989 with his novel A Disaffection , which also won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. He went on to win the Booker Prize five years later with How Late It Was, How Late , before being shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in both 2009 and 2011. He has taught at the University of Texas, Austin, and San José State University in California. Kelman was born in Glasgow, Scotland, where he currently lives.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Kelman's (How Late It Was, How Late) peregrinating novel is a powerful meditation on loss, life, death, and the bond between father and son. Sixteen-year-old Murdo and his father travel from Scotland to America to visit an aunt and uncle living in Alabama. As the family grapples with the recent death of Murdo's mother, the father and son find it increasingly difficult to speak with one another. Their interactions are an accumulation of near misses-attempts and failures to communicate in the midst of loss. As we explore the American South through the eyes of a thoughtful Scottish teenager, we see it afresh-the severe weather, racial tensions, zydeco music. Murdo, an aspiring musician, is enthralled by his encounters with American people on American land, and his growing connection to these new surroundings mirrors his struggle to cope with a loss that seems almost impossible for him to comprehend. Throughout the novel, Murdo's observations are prone to long, circuitous paths, but they are strikingly astute. Like in his previous works, Kelman has created a fully-realized, relatable voice that reveals a young man's urgent need for connection in a time of grief. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Kelman (If It Is Your Life, 2014) earned praise, if not quite the fame he richly deserves, by writing about Scots in Scotland. In recent years, he has written about Scots in America. In his latest novel, the main characters, two of the most appealing creations in his canon, are a father and Murdo, his self-aware teenage son from rural Scotland. After his mother's death, Murdo and his father travel to Alabama to visit Murdo's Scots uncle and American aunt. At the Amsterdam airport, waiting for the plane to Memphis, Murdo observes, Not one Scottish voice apart from him and Dad. Different people from all different parts of the world. Dirt Road is full of unobtrusive observations, touching on such issues as poverty, race, and the potential for violence. Soon after arriving in the U.S., Murdo is smitten by a family playing zydeco music in a small town. In typical Scottish fashion, a lot of what goes on between the grieving father and son is left unsaid. Instead, they turn to their respective modes of comfort: music for Murdo, books for his father. Kelman has written a moving tribute to the unbreakable bond between fathers and sons.--Sawyers, June Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
JAMES KELMAN HAS made a career out of giving voice to the ordinary thoughts of his ordinary characters. And not just their literary-flavored ordinary thoughts, but their banal, sentimental, sometimes incoherent ramblings. His work has been amply rewarded with literary prizes, most notably the Man Booker, which he won for his novel "How Late It Was, How Late" in 1994. But Kelman has never made the commercial breakthrough of other Booker winners of his generation like Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro, partly because he specializes in the kind of novel in which not much happens. Actually, that's a category that has more to do with style than substance. Things do happen in Kelman's books, but he does his best to disguise them. His latest novel, "Dirt Road," follows a Scottish father and son on a holiday trip to Alabama. Although there's plenty of drama, much of it takes place offstage. The boy's mother and sister have recently died from the same kind of cancer; these two survivors are trying to escape the misery of home while visiting some relatives who escaped to America a few decades earlier. The father's uncle has made a new life for himself, often working three jobs to pay for it, and one of the questions the protagonists face is whether they should follow his lead. The narrative unfolds from the point of view of Murdo, the 16-year-old son: musicmad, bad at school, angry (for understandable reasons) about his life in Scotland and fighting with his dad for freedoms he hasn't done much to deserve. When Murdo goes walkabout in a bus station, they miss their connection and have to spend the night at a motel in Allentown, Miss. This delay allows Kelman to develop the chance meeting between Murdo and Sarah, a girl who works at a local convenience store and whose grandmother turns out to be a famous musician, the zydeco "legend" Queen Monzee-ay. This encounter will eventually frame the action of the story a week later when Queen Monzee-ay invites Murdo to join her onstage at a festival in Lafayette. The happenstance nature of all this is carefully orchestrated. Sometimes Kelman's carefulness shows through, a visible seam holding the plot together, but he compensates for this with the wonderfully observed slow accumulation of detail that makes up Murdo's world - both inner and outer. Father and son fight about pocket money, about race, about music, about Murdo's tendency to disappear into his bedroom. Predictably, he takes to Aunt Maureen, his great-uncle's warm American wife, who can play mother to a motherless boy. And he thinks a lot about music - what makes it good, why he listens to it - in terms whose interest lies not so much in the thoughts themselves as in what they reveal about the cognitive ruts a 16-yearold boy is digging to stop himself from thinking about other things: "I'm not talking about other people. Just myself Dad. What Idol listen. I listen and just kind of- I dont know if it's taking it in. Only it's something I do Dad I mean if I'm bursting to play and I cannay I mean that happens too, I'm bursting to play and I cannay. So I've got the music to hear. Just hearing it the way I'm hearing it, it's like learning, although I'm just listening like I hear it and I learn it. It's just the way I do it Dad so I mean that's just how it is." It takes discipline for a writer to stick to the commonplace so religiously, but over time that discipline pays off. The ordinary becomes the real, and as Murdo sets off to find that gig in Lafayette the casual descriptions of his journey become almost breathlessly anxiety-producing. There's an element of wish fulfillment here that's unusual in Kelman's work, but he's paid for it, as it were, in advance. And the novel's ending is more than justified by Kelman's means of getting us there. Akid is trying to overcome his grief without forgetting about it: a contradiction that serves more generally for what's involved in being an immigrant, or in growing up. And "Dirt Road" is about all of those things. The teenage narrator explains his reliance on music to his father: 'I'm bursting to play and I cannay.' BENJAMIN MARKOVITS'S most recent novel is "You Don't Have to Live Like This."
Kirkus Review
An award-winning Scottish author sets his coming-of-age story in the U.S. South, where a father and son on holiday from rural Scotland discover life can be as wrenching as death.Murdo is nearly 17, as he often says, for 16 sounds much younger. He's just shy of official adulthood, a time when it's hard to meet expectations while seeking whatever self seems right. He still feels deeply the recent death of his mother from cancer and his sister's death from the same malady seven years earlier. On the trip to a small Alabama town where relatives have settled, it's soon clear Murdo yields easily to distractions and nettles his fretful father. When the boy's wandering mind and body cause them to miss a bus connection, Murdo meets an African-American family and makes an impression playing the accordion, his regular instrument in a band back home. He slowly comes to envision a possible future with music in America that sounds miles better than his father's agenda of schlumping back to Scotland and repeating a year of school because of poor grades. Kelman (A Lean Third, 2014, etc.), who won the 1994 Booker Prize for How Late It Was, How Late, puts his skill with interior monologue to work here, delivering a lot of the book through Murdo's thoughtswhich can be delightful and a bit tiresome. Still, they offer intimate access to a young man facing huge choices amid new family situations, cultural oddities, and his father's constant lectures on poor manners. Their shared pain, efforts to understand each other, and slow acceptance of inevitable change are beautifully rendered. Kelman also conveys a gifted artist's keen sensitivity to music as a treasured craft and maybe another kind of family. A rich tale of family, dislocation, the joys of creativity, and the torment of painful choices. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
