Blood Oranges

Citrus County
John Brandon
2010, McSweeney's


Citrus County arrived in my mailbox several months ago from the McSweeney's book club and it wasn't until the New York Times featured it in the book review that I finally got around to picking it up. I'm not altogether certain what I was expecting but Brandon's work is at turns both vulnerable and chilling.

The novel takes place in a county in Florida that Brandon portrays as the sort of borderline white trash community that seems to consistently exist within a five year time lag. Initially I assumed the book's locale was fictionalized - a combination of the backwater setting of True Blood and the Wal-Mart strewn landscapes regularly featured on Cops. But after extensive internet sleuthing, I have determined that Citrus County is in fact an actual place.

Citrus County is something like 95% white and 12% below the poverty line. It is the sort of swampland riddled with dilapidated shacks unadorned with modern utilities. It is within one such shack that Citrus County's knotty, bitter heart beats.

The main character is an eighth grader named Toby, a boy who is struggling against inner demons to define himself. He is bright, but disinterested (as so many eighth graders are) in "working to his potential". In the early portions of the book, Toby makes snide comments to strangers and executes a deliciously apathetic prank phone call (he tells his victim exactly where he's calling from and then waits for him when he threatens to come and beat him). He has the sort of sardonic detachment from polite society that characterizes the "bad boy" archetype that so enthralls most adolescent girls.

This last is proven true by Toby's classmate Shelby, an honors student who is attracted to Toby's outer self-possession and disinclination towards impressing others, in stark contrast to her own need to advertise her abilities but shrug them off as incidental to her identity by lusting after said bad boy. Brandon spends a great many pages building up an achingly accurate portrait of the adolescent struggle to define oneself.

Discontent to let his novel stand at a superbly well-written examination of the adolescent mindset, Brandon complicates the experience with a dash of psycho with the psyche.

Within the first fifty pages, the reader is alarmingly introduced to a twisted side of Toby's character and from this point forward, Brandon constructs a rather tight tale of suspense that, rather than distracting from the quite engrossing character development, is augmented by the deep psychological realism present in his characterizations.

Almost as quickly as the reader realizes Shelby has a crush on Toby, Toby executes a precociously meticulous plan to kidnap Shelby's younger sister. He breaks into their house, stuffs her into a duffel bag and ties her up in an underground bunker. Federal and local law enforcement agents, as well as mass media outlets, swoop down upon Citrus County and turn it on its end.

The kidnapping has two primary effects, both on our two adolescent (anti-)heroes. Shelby, who has already survived her mother's death psychologically intact, grows utterly wearied by her sister's disappearance. In the later portions of the book, she does not suffer fools gladly; when, for instance, a schoolmate comes to provide her with solace in her religion, Shelby flings grits in her face.

She is dismissive of the students in her class and is unfazed by their attempts to comfort her. The more the adults and schoolmates in the outside world treat her with kindness and patience, the harder she tests this patience with outlandish behavior.

The only person who fails to treat her with respect is, naturally, her sister's kidnapper and so her relationship with Toby grows closer and closer the further Toby tries to distance himself from her.
After a fumbling, furtive attempt to pleasure him on a bus, Shelby reflects:

She was struck by a fresh and potent curiosity. She wanted to know, now, not only Toby's darkness but where he slept and what he ate and what his favorite type of weather was and what made him sneeze...She felt lush.

Meanwhile, Toby's sense of self-knowledge is changing (not necessarily for the better) throughout the kidnapping. He (thankfully) does not sexually abuse his victim. In fact, he does not harm her physically in any way and treats her rather well, bathing and feeding her. Toby alludes to an inner evil that possesses him and it becomes apparent that Toby's crime is a means of testing self will. He dreams of a normal life for himself.

Toby had glimpsed it. While walking alongside Shelby, he'd seen how things could be, how they would be, when Toby had nothing to hold him back, nothing squeezing his soul like a terrible vine...The sun kept going down and it kept coming up, and if Toby could keep clear of the bunker then one of these days when it came up it would find Toby unfettered.

His violence is a mean to test his ability for self-starvation, asceticism. Can Toby resist his urges despite providing himself with an environment within which he may indulge those desires at his discretion? Can he temper his evil nature with the kindness with which he treats his victim?

Brandon's novel is tightly constructed. It is populated by realistically bleak characterizations of the ways in which we fall short of our own aspirations to goodness. His subject, it would seem, is the root of self-loathing that lingers in many people's lives and is at its sharpest in junior high. We aspire to be good but are prevented often by our failure to show kindness when presented the opportunity, to deny ourselves our self-destructive tendencies, to refuse to let self-pity cloud our ability to empathize.

Yet, Citrus County despite the bleak twistedness at its antihero's core and its devastatingly stomach-churning plot is a surprisingly optimistic book in regards to our capacity for empathy. It does not offer pat resolutions to the thorny problem of its characters' inner lives and its resolution is all the more sincere and rewarding for that fact.