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A review by mattnixon
The Kept by James Scott
2.0
(2.5-star review) The Kept, James Scott’s debut novel, is a blizzard of a book: oppressive, bleak, messy and (mostly) barren of humanity.
A snow-choked 1897 upstate New York provides The Kept’s setting and Scott’s greatest exhibited strength is the book’s sense of time-and-place. Locations and the difficulties of day-to-day life are vivid and evocative. The Kept’s atmosphere is robust and sensory – I felt the cold and smelled the heady mixture of hay, burning wood and horse manure in the streets. Ultimately, the strong atmosphere chokes out everything else…in fact, the atmosphere is the only thing that has stayed with me.
The modern Western genre’s themes of vengeance, judgment and redemptive violence largely comprise The Kept’s story elements. I’ll refrain from plot explication – those interested in reading it would find it spoilery, but that’s not my reason. Ultimately, I find a discussion of the book’s plot pointless because Scott could have made almost anything happen within his 350-odd pages and each action and outcome would have been equally plausible to what he decided on.
And therein lies the problem with The Kept: character action is solely dictated by plot demands. Mother Elspeth and son Caleb are the lynchpins of the narrative. We see the world through their eyes and perceive the events through their backgrounds and emotions. But both characters are only the sum of their past actions (as related to the reader). Neither has a coherent inner life. Neither is an actual person.
Scott (over) uses flashbacks (to often confusing effect, though I admit this could just be my problem) to fill in Elspeth and Caleb’s backstories, but those stories ultimately do little to illuminate their actions…in some cases they obfuscate them. I never knew why either character was taking their respective actions except to move the plot forward and set up dramatic ironies.
Elspeth’s motivations vacillated between guilt, revenge, self-preservation, and self-indulgence. But these weren't the result of a coherent, narratively-earned inner conflict, but rather of plot exigencies.
In Caleb’s case, his motivations were clearer but his faculties and intuitions were wildly discordant. One moment he was a sheltered naïf who had never left his isolated farm and never interacted with a human being outside of his parents and siblings. The next, he moves effortlessly within a city, employed at a saloon/brothel so he has a better vantage from which to find his targets and hatch his plan of revenge. And then back again…Like Elspeth’s, Caleb’s actions (and abilities to perceive a situation and competently carry out these actions) weren't logical manifestations of his character, but rather driven solely by plot concerns.
In The Kept, author James Scott slathers atmosphere with a garden trowel—effectively at times, but ultimately oppressively—to build a sense of doom and inevitability, yet fails to create fully-formed, coherent human characters that drive action.
The modern Western frequently provides heroes whose lives lead up to a decisive, near-inevitable act of redemptive violence. The Kept required decisive, violent acts and yanked around its two-dimensional, people-ish characters to make them happen.
A snow-choked 1897 upstate New York provides The Kept’s setting and Scott’s greatest exhibited strength is the book’s sense of time-and-place. Locations and the difficulties of day-to-day life are vivid and evocative. The Kept’s atmosphere is robust and sensory – I felt the cold and smelled the heady mixture of hay, burning wood and horse manure in the streets. Ultimately, the strong atmosphere chokes out everything else…in fact, the atmosphere is the only thing that has stayed with me.
The modern Western genre’s themes of vengeance, judgment and redemptive violence largely comprise The Kept’s story elements. I’ll refrain from plot explication – those interested in reading it would find it spoilery, but that’s not my reason. Ultimately, I find a discussion of the book’s plot pointless because Scott could have made almost anything happen within his 350-odd pages and each action and outcome would have been equally plausible to what he decided on.
And therein lies the problem with The Kept: character action is solely dictated by plot demands. Mother Elspeth and son Caleb are the lynchpins of the narrative. We see the world through their eyes and perceive the events through their backgrounds and emotions. But both characters are only the sum of their past actions (as related to the reader). Neither has a coherent inner life. Neither is an actual person.
Scott (over) uses flashbacks (to often confusing effect, though I admit this could just be my problem) to fill in Elspeth and Caleb’s backstories, but those stories ultimately do little to illuminate their actions…in some cases they obfuscate them. I never knew why either character was taking their respective actions except to move the plot forward and set up dramatic ironies.
Elspeth’s motivations vacillated between guilt, revenge, self-preservation, and self-indulgence. But these weren't the result of a coherent, narratively-earned inner conflict, but rather of plot exigencies.
In Caleb’s case, his motivations were clearer but his faculties and intuitions were wildly discordant. One moment he was a sheltered naïf who had never left his isolated farm and never interacted with a human being outside of his parents and siblings. The next, he moves effortlessly within a city, employed at a saloon/brothel so he has a better vantage from which to find his targets and hatch his plan of revenge. And then back again…Like Elspeth’s, Caleb’s actions (and abilities to perceive a situation and competently carry out these actions) weren't logical manifestations of his character, but rather driven solely by plot concerns.
In The Kept, author James Scott slathers atmosphere with a garden trowel—effectively at times, but ultimately oppressively—to build a sense of doom and inevitability, yet fails to create fully-formed, coherent human characters that drive action.
The modern Western frequently provides heroes whose lives lead up to a decisive, near-inevitable act of redemptive violence. The Kept required decisive, violent acts and yanked around its two-dimensional, people-ish characters to make them happen.