The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Kieron Smith, Boy, by James Kelman
reviewed by Stephen Bernstein

Harcourt, 2008. 432 pp. Cloth: $26.00.

Kieron Smith, Boy, a first-person account of several years in a young boy’s life, is surely James Kelman’s finest work. He has long been a genius at rendering the rhythm and vocabulary of speech, but Kelman endows Kieron’s voice with unprecedented music and emotional intensity. He modulates Kieron’s voice as he ages, finding myriad ways to let language demonstrate changes in understanding. As the novel begins, Kieron is a small child alive to the sounds, sights, and smells of his 1950s Glasgow home. Kieron is the younger of two brothers, and his strongest attachment is to his maternal grandfather, who lives nearby. Home-life is tense, Kieron’s mother unwilling or unable to defend him from the frequent beatings he receives from his father, a commercial seaman. Against his domestic situation Kieron finds pleasure in adventures with other boys, wandering by the river and going to football matches. At all times he is alert to the distinctions—whether class, religion, ethnicity, or gender—through which his society is structured, distinctions he often finds unfair even as he attempts to adopt them. When the family moves from Glasgow’s center to newer suburban housing, Kieron’s life becomes more difficult. He is farther from his grandfather, his father has taken factory work and is home more often, and Kieron must fit in at a new school. Climbing trees and drainpipes becomes his greatest passion, as well as the novel’s governing metaphor. Nearly all of Kelman’s fiction focuses on alienation, and this novel is no exception. Here we see Kelman exploring more fully than ever before the ways that families, peer groups, and schools help to weave the socio-economic web, but the novel’s greatest achievement remains the richness of its evocation of Kieron. His sadness, humor, indignation, and occasional triumphs are brilliantly realized.