Goat
by Brad Land
Random House

The trouble with the memoir is it promises that, if you have lived a uniquely tragic, funny, brilliant or otherwise touching life, writing it all down will automatically make a good book. Seductive as the genre is, readers are now awash in tragic, funny and brilliant tales that, somehow, just don't measure up on the last page.

Brad Land's "Goat," straddling the boundary between searing honesty and frustrating banality, could not be a better example. You cannot put it down, but, when you finally do, you will wonder why you picked it up in the first place. The memoir cloaks itself in a generosity of spirit; in reality it is a selfish genre, claiming that interpretive reading is not necessary. In the case of "Goat," this generic egoism is actually a blessing. Land's sparse style starves the imagination. "Goat" wouldn't be worth interpreting even if it were a work of fiction.

But prose that does not challenge can still compel. And Land is compelling, partly because of "Goat's" tight chronology. Land gets brutally mauled by two car thieves, whom he identifies by the monikers "Smile" and "Breath." He recovers in a few months, only to follow his better-looking younger brother to Clemson, where he pledges to join his brother's fraternity. More mauling ensues. Land starts hoarding in classic obsessive-compulsive style. He quits the rush. One of his pledge brothers dies of a stress-induced heart attack. The book ends. Between these brackets of violence, there is a lot of hideous frat-boy dialogue and the occasional name-dropping of some good bands. Like the rush itself, "Goat" is luridly fascinating, at times harrowing, occasionally funny and ultimately anti-climactic.

Much of the book feels voyeuristic, and this is partly because Land's prose style mimes the stream-of-consciousness style popularized by James Joyce, Marcel Proust and other heavyweights who had the good sense to fictionalize their lives, thereby making them more interesting. At times Land hits the right notes, evoking with startling clarity the idiom of his 19-year-old neurotic self. Elsewhere, though, the book's narrative sputters on its own stylized simplicity:

I keep drinking keg beer outside, talking but never really listening to people who wander out, looking over at Brett standing at another apartment there the way he won't talk to me. I keep wondering if he'll come back but he doesn't. He goes inside and I don't see him again.

Dave comes out after a while. Looks carefully at the steps walking down, pauses on the third step and takes a breath. He brushes the hair away from his face and it gleams in the over-head light. Comes down and starts filling his cup.

Whew, he says. His eyes are bloodshot. Gettin' drunk in there.

Yeah, I say. Me too.

Land wants to strip away the pretense of narrative and show us his reality as it was and his innocence and confusion as they were, too. "Goat" demonstrates that Land isn't as innocent and confused as he appears. He has concrete reasons for joining the fraternity, reasons he still finds mockingly compelling after he gives up the rush. At one point late in the book, when he's begun talking to himself, he has the following auto-conversation in the stairwell:

Why are you doing this? I say.
You know.
No, I don't know.
Yes, you fucking do, you know it's all there is.

That Land wrestles with questions he's already answered for us is understandable — in life, one seldom solves big problems in one go. On the page, this kind of cyclical pleading is tedious; it also takes away valuable time that could have been used to render the louts in Kappa Sigma in a more encompassing light. Besides Land, whose viewpoint we enjoy, and the doomed Will Fitch, none of the characters in "Goat" enjoys much depth. Thus, each villain appears appropriately odious, eliciting hate in bunches. But how these thugs justify the hurt they cause, and ultimately the death, is a question unasked and unanswered. Still, the best passages deal with the fraternity hazing: unflinching chronicles of brothers inflicting pain and humiliation on their pledges, in violation of their own sacred handbook. "Goat" is easy to find fault with, but its implicit criticisms of the Greek system are, to put it mildly, unimpeachably sound.

Alas, righteousness is not the same thing as narrative skill. Land wanted to join the fraternity for the usual reasons — friendship, booze, girls — and because he wanted to repair his relationship with his brother, a dour, volatile fellow whose experience in the fraternity transforms him into a disaffected social critic. But what we do not know, and never glimpse, is how the rush, or his assault, actually changed the memoirist. Is the young man who sends us off with a hopeful, ambiguous gesture of catharsis the same bashful kid we meet in the first pages, terrified of girls and awestruck by his younger brother? If these experiences are not life-changing — and one suspects they are — why write about them in the first place? Lessons learned are a staple of every memoir, even ironic ones. How odd that "Goat," while a conventional memoir in so many respects, doesn't take this path.

— Joshua Adams (joshua at uchicago dot edu)