What do you think?
Rate this book
Javascotia
Melvin Podgorski is young, naïve, American - and a coffee fanatic. His obsession propels him from Chicago to Glasgow as a scout for US coffee franchise Burbacks. Putting behind him a messy divorce, he's here to make something of himself. And make Glasgow fall in love with coffee. But Glasgow has one or two surprises in store for Melvin. Firstly, they don't speak American. Not even English. He's got to get his head around the Scottish patter. Next, there's the radical politics he's sort of - by accident, you understand - become involved in. And lastly, there's Nicole, about to become his new favourite obsession. Is Glasgow ripe for an American invasion? Will the past catch up with the present? Or will Melvin's mania be his making?
437 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2009
3 people are currently reading
27 people want to read
About the author
Benjamin Obler
6 books10 followersI teach fiction at Gotham Writer's Workshop in New York City.
My first novel, Javascotia, came out from Penguin Books UK in 2009. In 2015 my story "The White Man's Incredulity Furrows His Brow" won the short fiction contest with the journal PUERTO DEL SOL. In 2016, I published essays with the Guardian, LongReads, Electric Literature, and The Times (of London) magazine.
My first novel, Javascotia, came out from Penguin Books UK in 2009. In 2015 my story "The White Man's Incredulity Furrows His Brow" won the short fiction contest with the journal PUERTO DEL SOL. In 2016, I published essays with the Guardian, LongReads, Electric Literature, and The Times (of London) magazine.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 21, 2014
I recommend this book. But then I am not an impartial reader.
July 20, 2016
Very little action - too much belabouring of the cultural differences between USA & Scotland - oh come on! what did he expect? a dismally slow pace. I abandoned the book.
September 27, 2021
This story is not ageing well, if it was ever acceptable at all.
It doesn't take long to realise the main character is an a*hole, but I honestly don't think the author intended him to be this way. Huge creeper vibes from the very first girl he meets and by page 37 she should have booted him out of the cab and moved on with her life, but she invites him for drinks. It reads like a male fantasy written by a high school kid with a large vocabulary and some travel experience. I felt too sick about it to continue - the author should have engaged more female editors.
It doesn't take long to realise the main character is an a*hole, but I honestly don't think the author intended him to be this way. Huge creeper vibes from the very first girl he meets and by page 37 she should have booted him out of the cab and moved on with her life, but she invites him for drinks. It reads like a male fantasy written by a high school kid with a large vocabulary and some travel experience. I felt too sick about it to continue - the author should have engaged more female editors.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 10, 2010
It’s 1994, and Mel Podgorski – still in his early twenties, with a failed marriage behind him, and a year spent in the doldrums – gets another chance to make something of himself. He lands a job as a market researcher working on behalf of a large coffee chain, and is sent across the Atlantic to Glasgow, to scope out the competition. Whilst there, Mel finds himself falling for an art student named Nicole Marston – and gets caught up in the group of anti-motorway protestors to which she belongs.
Javascotia is one of those frustrating reads which is never quite as good as one senses it could be. Benjamin Obler has a flowing prose style, tending towards lengthy expression, but only rarely in a way that outstays its welcome. However, some aspects of Mel’s first-person narration are more problematic: for example, he’ll note the differences in language (“[...]most of the listings were bedsits – in American English, studios or efficiencies – and the section of the paper was headed adverts”, p. 39); which is fine at the beginning, to show that Mel is still finding his feet – but he’s still making such remarks towards the end of the novel, when the technique is redundant and can be pretty irritating. I’m also not sure that the novel’s structure serves it all that well – Mel’s life in the US is dealt with mainly in one long section (over a hundred pages) in the middle, which I found to really disrupt the momentum built up in the earlier part of the book.
There is an interesting theme running through Javascotia, though, which I’d characterise as exploring the gap between impression and reality. It’s there in the way that Scotland doesn’t live up to its tourist-brochure image for the American characters (Mel isn’t the only scout we meet), and the way that Glasgow’s coffee outlets aren’t as Mel imagines them to be. It’s there in the way that Mel is shown not to have known his wife (and, indeed, his parents) in the way he thought he did. And it’s there in a nicely rueful ending.
There’s an interesting story told in Javascotia, but the way it is told doesn’t quite do it justice.
Javascotia is one of those frustrating reads which is never quite as good as one senses it could be. Benjamin Obler has a flowing prose style, tending towards lengthy expression, but only rarely in a way that outstays its welcome. However, some aspects of Mel’s first-person narration are more problematic: for example, he’ll note the differences in language (“[...]most of the listings were bedsits – in American English, studios or efficiencies – and the section of the paper was headed adverts”, p. 39); which is fine at the beginning, to show that Mel is still finding his feet – but he’s still making such remarks towards the end of the novel, when the technique is redundant and can be pretty irritating. I’m also not sure that the novel’s structure serves it all that well – Mel’s life in the US is dealt with mainly in one long section (over a hundred pages) in the middle, which I found to really disrupt the momentum built up in the earlier part of the book.
There is an interesting theme running through Javascotia, though, which I’d characterise as exploring the gap between impression and reality. It’s there in the way that Scotland doesn’t live up to its tourist-brochure image for the American characters (Mel isn’t the only scout we meet), and the way that Glasgow’s coffee outlets aren’t as Mel imagines them to be. It’s there in the way that Mel is shown not to have known his wife (and, indeed, his parents) in the way he thought he did. And it’s there in a nicely rueful ending.
There’s an interesting story told in Javascotia, but the way it is told doesn’t quite do it justice.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews