Brad McLelland’s novella bruisers received a killer review from The Chiron Review:
A lot of romanticized drivel has been written about life in the heart of the country: freckled young boys and girls learning “life lessons” in a small town surrounded by fields of golden grain. Such books fail both artistically and morally because they erase the record of human struggle that makes life on the prairie worth talking about at all. Fantasizing about a “simpler time” or a “quieter place,” books about the middle of the country often rob the real inhabitants of the plains and farmlands of the dignity of their own bloody and sweat-soaked history. I find such stories more than a little insulting.
Brad McLelland’s novella, Bruisers, is also set in the middle of the country – Oklahoma and Colorado, to be exact – but his account of life in the “heartland” is anything but romanticized. All those endless fields of wheat seem to suggest to McLelland not a dreamy nostalgia but rather a paradox of fertility and emptiness. How can a place be so rich with life giving soil and so draining of life at the same time? This paradox is the thematic engine that drives Bruisers.
It is a paradox well suited to what is essentially a coming of age story. It is the story of two young men forced into each other’s company for a twisted road trip. The book’s young protagonist, Jeremy, is himself both full of the life-energy of youth and all too aware of his own emptiness. He is a character driven increasingly toward his own destruction in what seems to be an attempt to fill the void inside with flame and wreckage. The tension and energy in the plot really derives from Jeremy’s struggle to restrain his own self-destructive instincts, born out of a severely damaged relationship with his father.
Bruisers is also an odd sort of buddy story, a story of the bonds that are formed in the midst of common suffering. Jeremy finds himself in the company of a wounded young man named Jalbert, who is, arguably, a manifestation of Jeremy’s own hidden vulnerability, but not in a way that reduces the character to mere metaphor. Every wounded person we meet is a manifestation of our own vulnerability. McLelland masterfully brings that vulnerability to the surface as his characters crawl their way through a series of mishaps and bad choices. This is not, however, a “touchy-feely” book; if it is tender, it is the tenderness of a black and swollen eye after a hard right hook.
McLelland’s prose is appropriately muscular. Consider just this one sentence: “I know you can’t make out his face from here, but you can see his long, arched back pushed forward by momentum, the lean and hefty figure of him, the shadow he casts on the smoking black farmland.” McLelland’s sentences make me think of the big, black bull snakes we’d occasionally stumble upon in my own Midwestern youth: long but with nothing extra, just a kind of pulsing strength from one end to the other. McLelland’s story-telling is like that as well, propelling the reader through the novella as events unfold with a tragic sense of inevitability. This is a definite one-sitting kind of read.
Bruisers tells the truth, ugly and compelling, about rural life in the middle of America. It is a tough story beautifully done, which puts McLelland in the company of writers like Cormack McCarthy. We certainly have much to look forward to in the future from this new writer.
- Benjamin Myers -