I Heart Oklahoma!

by Roy Scranton Narrated by Rebecca Gibel

Overview

Roy Scranton, controversial and critically acclaimed, brings us a formally daring road trip into the heart of present-day America.



Suzie's seen it all, but now she's looking for something she lost: a sense of the future. So when the chance comes to work with a maverick video artist on his road movie about Donald Trump's America, she's pretty sure it's a bad idea but she signs up anyway, hoping for an outside shot at starting over.



A provocative, genderqueer, shapeshifting musical romp through the brain-eating nightmare of contemporary America, I Heart Oklahoma! is a book about art, guns, cars, American landscapes, and American history. This kaleidoscopic novel moves from our bleeding-edge present to a furious Faulknerian retelling of the Charlie Starkweather killings in the 1950s, capturing in its fragmented, mesmerizing form the violence at the heart of the American dream.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

The Millions Most Anticipated Fall Books

Praise for I ❤ Oklahoma!

“Few critics quite understand the implications of our cultural divisions in the warm autumn of the Anthropocene more than University of Notre Dame English professor Roy Scranton.”
—The Millions

“Part existential farce, part metatextual dystopian road trip romp, I ❤ Oklahoma! is ambitious, omnivorous, inventive, and imbued with a dark and hilarious sense of whimsy. If your personal journey through the American wasteland has begun to feel like a slog, this book will remind you that there's a certain thrill in watching the show unfold from the first-row seats, the ones in the splash zone.”
—Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

“With whip-smart, multivalent prose akin to Barry Hannah spliced with William S. Burroughs, I ❤ Oklahoma! reads like a hypermodern Heart of Darkness, aimed straight into the malefic gnarl of Trump's MAGA. The result is an epochal, brainbending prism of a road novel, catalyzing any branded icon that might crop up into its wake—from Deleuze to Taylor Swift, Beuys to Bonnie and Clyde, ISIS to TMZ—into an immaculate reflection of a nation mesmerized by its own free fall through oblivion.”
—Blake Butler, author of Three Hundred Million

“Roy Scranton’s fiction has a shattering and deranged vitality. It breaks into your mind and hangs on. I ❤ Oklahoma! reads like a fever dream—cacophonous road-tripping anti-manifesto gives way to lavish degenerate theatre gives way to bloody killing spree. In this eventful novel, the precipitating event is always and ever language—transgressive, rhizomatic, and infinitely mutable.”
—Noy Holland, author of I Was Trying to Describe What It Feels Like

"There is something dangerous and dizzying about Scranton's writing, a violence of ideas. In I ❤ Oklahoma!, he turns his intellectual weapons on an elusive and necessary subject—the mystery that is America, and the extent to which even those people marinated fully in the mythology of this country can find themselves at a loss to understand it."
—Omar El Akkad, author of American War

“I ❤ Oklahoma! invents new forms to capture the psychotic break that is present-day America. It’s simultaneously a deconstructed road novel, pop culture avalanche, and historical serial killer story—a book about how the country’s rotted myths have come home to roost. Boasting gleaming intelligence and batshit abandon, this is vital, unsettling, and urgent work.”
—Jeff Jackson, author of Destroy All Monsters

“Scranton isn’t just a writer; he’s also a musician. Language bops, pops, hisses, and yowls throughout this marvel of a novel, evoking the sounds and rhythms of regional dialects, Beat poetry, and art rock. At base, this is a story about a cross-country road trip in the age of MAGA. But Scranton explodes the traditional journey narrative with daring inventiveness and an unflinching look at the bloody violence that has always pumped through the heart of America.”
—Literary Hub

“Scranton loops and wheels through states of varying lucidity, sometimes employing a stream-of-consciousness prose style and sometimes more straightforward storytelling . . . This novel of sex, violence, apathy, despair and art offers a bizarre, lightning-paced excursion through the present. For those readers on board with its wild, winding style, I ❤ Oklahoma! incisively parodies a weird time to be alive.” 
—Shelf Awareness 

“Simultaneously high flown and earthy, like a Platonic dialogue as written by Quentin Tarantino . . . this novel has big ambitions, a whipsawing imaginative energy, and, at its heart, the urgency and earnestness of a jeremiad.”
—Kirkus Reviews

Praise for Roy Scranton

“[Scranton] writes clearly and convincingly about the emotional, existential challenges that attracted him to war, and how he was changed by the time he returned home.” 
—The New York Times 

“One of the best and most disturbing war novels in years.” 
—The Wall Street Journal 

“What impresses is the brutal immediacy of the writing, its authority. Roy Scranton is a truth-telling war writer.”
—E.L. Doctorow, National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Ragtime and The March

“Roy Scranton’s searingly honest first novel is surreal, ultra-real, and like everything he writes from the heart. This examination of the tragedy of what happened in Iraq reaches out to touch of all us. A brilliant literary achievement.”
—Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Southern Reach trilogy

  “Powerful, engaging, heartrending, corrosive and unyielding.”
—Joyce Carol Oates

“Roy Scranton is one of the most gifted writers of his generation.”
—Amitav Ghosh

Kirkus Reviews

2019-05-13
Scranton's second novel (War Porn, 2016, etc.) is less genre-bending than genre-shredding: part Kerouac-ian road trip, part end-of-days satire of Trump-era America, part fever dream, part extension and revision of Badlands and Natural-Born Killers.

At the book's center is a jaded writer named Suzie. She agrees to go on a cross-country road trip with an iconoclastic video artist—a former Wall Streeter who seems like what would happen if one of Tom Wolfe's Masters of the Universe quit finance and decided to remake himself by method-acting Wolfe's prose style—and the filmmaker's videographer/aide-de-camp. The early chapters, as the three of them clash and bristle and preen as they try to find the shape of the thing—of their quest, of themselves, of America itself—are fascinating and hyperkinetic. These pages are simultaneously high flown and earthy, like a Platonic dialogue as written by Quentin Tarantino. All art is bluster and nonsense, Suzie says to the filmmaker, but the "best stuff...is so highly refined and audacious and dense that nobody cares whether it's bullshit or not." That theory of art is this novel's aim and ideal, and for a good while Scranton succeeds at it. But midway through, the trip flies apart—the center cannot hold, or at least the vintage 1971 Plymouth Valiant they're driving cannot hold these three egos—and the book becomes, for a time, a fever dream, what Scranton calls a "dream ballet," before we rejoin Suzie, heading west again, alone this time, as she composes a retelling from Caril Ann Fugate's perspective of her murder spree with Charlie Starkweather. Not all Scranton's risks pan out—the descent of narrative into chaos is more appealing in principle than in, you know, narrative—but this novel has big ambitions, a whipsawing imaginative energy, and, at its heart, the urgency and earnestness of a jeremiad.

America, Scranton seems to argue, will not, cannot, end well.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171734206
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	08/13/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

“Reality has no audience—wait, tilt back, get more of the sky.”
      “I’ve got the sky. How much sky would you like?”
      “I want him framed.”
      “He’s framed. Fleet of foot and bearing his caduceus, he juts, chiseled limbs bursting from the façade, veiled in shifts of tattered steam, god of speed framed in blue.”
      “Okay. Just keep rolling.” Jim started over. He could feel the flicker, the fortune in the cookie from lunch: Travel will bring you luck. Fuck, oh—“Reality has no audience, the world no eye. We are the warp and woof, the quanta of its waves, the thing itself: deep surface . . . Deep surface. We are the wave . . . Surface. Wave. Wave, surface.” He exhaled sharply. “How’s that sound?”
      “I’m not the writer,” Remy said, running the camera.
      Jim turned and looked down the glowing red-eyed stream of fleeing UberATs “Christ, I hope she says yes.”
      “You’re going to pay her, right?”
      “Yeah, sure. All artists fucking care about. Worse than Wall Street. You still rolling?”
      “Yeah,” Remy said.
      “Nexus of roads, speed and space. Only in space do we become substantial, only in time do our lives take on meaning. Can you see yourself seeing? Can you look inside your eye?”
      “Are you asking me?”
      “No, keep rolling. Can you look inside the eye? Reality has no audience.” Jim turned again and squatted on the sidewalk. Foot traffic split around the two, the click and slap of heel and sole, nowhere stares plugged into screens catching the blaze of towers burning down the West. “How was that? I just made that up. I just riffed off what I was thinking.”
      “I’m not the writer. Ask Suzie.”
      “She’d say it’s pretentious. She’d say it’s pretentious and what do I know from space and time.”
      “Is Carol coming?”
      “Carol left ten days ago. Left a half carton of Silk.”
      “Oh, Jim. I’m sorry, I—”
      “Fuck that. Been a long time coming. Some people can’t fucking roll with the punches, y’know? Can’t fucking adapt, adapt to change. Like fucking monkeys, adapt or die. She wants the old James, the golden days, but it’s all space and time now.”
      “That’s nice with the sun going down.”
      “You don’t think it’s too baroque?”
      “It’s all in the editing. Right now it looks pretty sublime.”
      “Sublime,” Jim repeated, tasting it on his tongue. “I want medieval . . . You see that documentary about the bears?”
      “Which one?”
      “Fucking bears. It’s just adaptation. These fucking polar bears are all gonna die because they have to swim all the fucking way out in the water to eat fish or baby seals or whatever and it’s too far and all the ice is melting. The polar ice cap is melting. Imagine whiteness for miles, collapsing into encroaching black seas. So they have a choice, right, adapt or die, and they’re gonna die because they’re fucking bears. But that’s the difference, see. We’re not bears. We’re like fucking not evolve maybe but whatever, pick up a stick, you know, duh duh duh. Ascend. Go west.”
      A bearded wreck swaddled in layers of sweatpant and plastic bag spun off the sidewalk into traffic shaking his paper cup, strips of foil glittering on his newsprint shawl like antimissile chaff. An UberAT swerved, honking, missed by inches. Jim watched, not quite tense but interested, wondering if he’d catch the whack and slam of body and street, hobo skull rebounding off yellow lines, the empty car’s collision sirens keening. He thought to tell Remy to film it but no, wrong beginning. Wrong end. Why they do that, he half thought, on purpose? Or they so far gone past what’s purpose, it isn’t real? Everything meant but barely conscious, rationality of pure instinct. Sure, but which is more human, then, the wreck or the robot car? All secret agents of the brighter hive. Deep surface, Jim thought. That’s good.
      The man made it across the street and disappeared into the crowd. Another day, another failure to adapt. The smell of ash, charred flesh, and electrical, stone looming over shadowed warrens filled with particulate smoke. History’s drone: a year is as a day.
      “Good,” Remy said, looking up from his crouch. “Shall we go?”
      “Sure,” Jim said.
      Remy shut off the camera and disassembled the setup, unhooking the unit from its tripod mount, unplugging mikes, bagging gear.
      “You want a drink?” Jim asked.
      “Are you meeting Suzie?”
      “Down in the East Village, one of those holdout trash bars from the nineties.”
      “I should drop the gear off.”
 
 
 
Down the gulley of worn stoops and crumbling brownstones bopped the gleaming machine, a chrome-detailed hydraulic import blasting Dominican rap, heavy beats in subtonal shudders making her knees vibrate, gut-thudding percussion wired to spat rhymes ending in long vowels and riding trilled errs like fast gears, East Coast style, a little reggaeton, a little islandy. If she was on her game she’d know what there was to know, but she’d been off lately, slippy, and she kept running into her ignorance like it was stalking her, pleading special intimacies. She’d open a new tab on her browser and there’d be this giant asshole, sucking the world inside.
      And the solution was this? A field trip? She peeked out her window at the car going by below, the driver’s arm out the window, the depleted afternoon light, brujas and abuelas on the stoops, then turned and looked at Steve the Cat looking back at her from under her bed.
      Oh, Steve. She could text Cathy and be fairly certain she’d take okay care. It would be a favor owed, time expensed to Cathy’s self-sniffing crises, but she was reliable. Yet more trauma for the pobrecito gato, already as New York neurotic as the pinched matrons of the parkside forts, those dowagers stumbling from affront to affront, Steve who was already Krazy Kat, who lived under the bed and under the shelves and under the chair, Steve who did not like reggaeton.
      This, though, here, right here, was what she loved, or so she told herself: the noise, the hum and thump, she never even had to put on music. There were those who needed quiet, to be wrapped in the numb hush of absorbed mind, but that was never Suzie’s bag: she wrote in cafés, on the subway, in traffic, she wrote in the chatter of crossed wires, snatching bits of language and turning phrases from the air, pulling the true speech of men from the mouths of baristas, scripting it verbatim into fiction—she needed noise and pulse, tweets and hot takes—she thought herself a creature with antennae, a flesh-and-metal receiver, a time-traveling anthropologist making field recordings of the oversoul.
      She drank her tea and looked at the screen. This, though . . . This was maybe not such a good idea.
      It took about a day to get overwhelmed with sublet responses. She’d picked her fave by noon, a Finnish grad student researching American ethnonationalism. Suzie worried: Helsinki was a city, sure, but with reindeer, or without? Would Sinikka be bereft out here among the Dominicans and spend the first week huddled indoors, terrified of going out, her only sight of the city the peaks of its jagged skyline: the Chrysler and broken Empire, the more recent arrivistes at 432 Park and One57, the black mass of Trump Tower? I need to give her the address of the bodega, Suzie thought. For some reason the UberATs always got the street wrong. So there was that, and utilities, work, clear the calendar. Artforum owed her a check. Steve the Cat. Call Cathy.
      All expenses, per diem, her own room, plus twenty-five hundred up front and the same at the end, and cash, too, not even PayBits. A JetBlue ticket back from LA. Contractually obliged to two pages of dialogue each day on the road, plus forty pages beforehand to get them going, maybe a bonus for more. They’d share print rights, and she’d get an extra commission for any catalog accompanying the eventual show, if such a show were to happen. One-month commitment, though the plan was eighteen days, twenty max. It wasn’t much, except it was, and it had potential, visibility, it could be—what?—not fun, what’s fun? Fun was no longer a criterion, especially not with guys like Jim.
      She could feel Steve watching her, prescient in his cat cynicism, already knowing she’d abandon him to her sublet’s Finno-Ugric ministrations, already too disappointed to be sad, his Cheshire eyes gliding closed with shamed chagrin at the dumb vigor of the human species, the flailing wreckage these primates make of their lives.
      Happy face. Out is back, away is forward. Life’s not a luge but a gyre. That’s the cost of something better than nine-to-five, anyway, the price of what you wanted, what you want, what did you want? Maybe you should have thought about that before the party ended, the lights dim in the dawn and the edge cutting back in through the haze you wallowed in, fondled by some jerk with too much bling and a bad, expensive haircut, the waves in the distance beyond the window you can’t hear, rolling silently, the dawn silent, world silent, life silent and trapped in the spent mess of money, this jerk snuffling your hair, groping, waves rolling, was that what you’d had in mind? The lights so bright . . . Yet that wasn’t even the nadir, tbh, especially once the bloom came off the barely legal, harder to maintain target weight, knowing too much to convincingly match the fresh new crop’s blasted naïveté, especially as powders and pills came to occupy center mind, the account of a day tracked in altered states, so long until the next hit, so long, so long, but this one is the moment she’s fixed on, fooling around with the heir to the fortune on his island, after the party, him grunting something Slavic, her putting herself through her paces.
      Then there was a marriage. Now there’s this.
      She took a drink of tea. So long ago she counts it in lifetimes. What was important now was to focus on the way forward, do the work, put sentences together on pages and words in the mouths of imaginary people. Some days, though, she couldn’t quite remember why this was so, crowded on the train watching the Hulu posters flicker, shoulders stooping, runway poise collapsing into the ruins of a former you, she couldn’t really say what it was she thought she was doing, this bullshit sitting in classrooms listening to people talk, talk, talk. What a flagrant waste of human possibility.
       Whatever. You gotta do something. When you’re done maybe go out West and write a pilot. There are worse ways to make a living. Most important was to get free from this sense of cowering slippage, this feeling of having been pummeled by life, of looking for somewhere to ride out imminent storms. To find that thing, whatever they call it, where people look forward to stuff.
      So the money’s not great, but it’s good enough, and it would be kind of like a vacation and maybe be a chance to get perspective, see the “big picture,” visit that fantasyland called America, and maybe think things through in the slack hours spent rolling over interstate blacktop, maybe some feeling of freedom, a chance to wriggle out of the gray muck that lived inside, that shit her therapist called the past.
      And Jim, she thought: Friend or foe? Was his fervor a phase, or a transition?
      She shook her head, glancing at her pack of Parliaments silent on the windowsill. Not yet, she thought. Do your twenty lines.
      Start over.

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