The Washington Post, July 11th, 2004
YOU HAVE TO BE CAREFUL IN THE LAND OF THE FREE By James Kelman. Harcourt. 410 pp. $25 P. G. Wodehouse once remarked that sometimes a writer decides he's such a hotshot stylist that he can just dispense with plot or action. Not so. Yet this is the basic problem with You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free. James Kelman -- winner of the Booker Prize for How Late It Was, How Late -- possesses an astonishing voice on the page, mixing interior monologue, colloquial speech, run-on sentences, the occasional Scots word (e.g., wean for child), fancy nouns to spark up a phrase (spleneticism) and...
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