Goat Mountain

Summary (from the publisher): In David Vann’s searing novel Goat Mountain, an 11-year-old boy at his family’s annual deer hunt is eager to make his first kill. His father discovers a poacher on the land, a 640-acre ranch in Northern California, and shows him to the boy through the scope of his rifle. With this simple gesture, tragedy erupts, shattering lives irrevocably.

In prose devastating and beautiful in its precision, David Vann creates a haunting and provocative novel that explores our most primal urges and beliefs, the bonds of blood and religion that define and secure us, and the consequences of our actions—what we owe for what we’ve done.

Review: I received an Advance Reader Copy from HarperCollins. 

This is the second David Vann novel I have read, the first being Caribou Island, and it confirms for me that Vann's writing style is not one I enjoy. This novel is told from the perspective of an unnamed 11 year old boy who is on an annual hunting trip in 1978 with his father, grandfather, and family friend Tom. In the opening pages, his father spots a poacher and when he lets his son look through the gun's scope, the boy shoots and kills the poacher. 

At heart, this novel is about primal urges, as well as the consequences of our actions. Although all three adult men argue about what to do, it's clear that they can neither cover up, undo, or make amends for what has happened. The characters explore the difference between killing a man and a buck, "Well what is the difference? Your son has killed a man and a buck, and you and he have hung them here. You hung the man himself. You skewered his ankles as if he was an animal. 

They're not the same. 

How are they not the same?" (188). Each of the adults diverge on what their next step should be. The father wishes to bury and forget, the grandfather thinks the boy should die, Tom thinks they should turn themselves in. Their failure to act and multiple days of indecision and hunting on the mountaintop before they decide was the unforgivable act to me.

There are many spiritual undertones and Christian references throughout this book, as the characters and narrator grapple with the distinction in killing man versus beast. There are numerous references to Cain and Able, comparing the 11-year-old to the original murderer. "The beast is what makes the man. We drink the blood of Christ so we can become animals again, tearing throats open and drinking blood, bathing in blood, devouring flesh, remembering who we are, reaching back and returning. We reassure ourselves. The Commandments impossible, and we can only fail, so we need this reassurance every Sunday that who we are has not been lost" (159).

I don't agree with the narrator's analysis of Christianity. However, I don't think the reader is supposed to like or even sympathize with the narrator. The narrator himself confirms that he is not normal. "Some part of me was not right, and the source of that can never be discovered. I was able to walk up and look at that body and somehow I was not upset by it any more than looking at the carcass of a buck. If anything, I was excited" (23). 

Although it's clear that the 11-year-old boy of the story is re-telling this story from the perspective of a remove of many years, no indication of what happens in the aftermath of the killing is given. I suspect that Vann is trying to use this as some sort of metaphor along the lines of they never leave the wilderness, they can never move past that moment and that act. Yet the ending was unsatisfying to me, just as it was in Caribou Island. To me, that shooting was only the beginning. How did they re-enter civilization and deal with the consequences? I know the focus of this book is on the elemental nature of killing and hunting, but the narrator's age indicates that he did in fact move forward from this hunting trip. 

Vann tells a dark and disturbing tale in this novel. I was disturbed by the story, rightly so, and by the gruesome and graphic scene where the buck is killed. I did not like the fragmentary narrative style, which I think is meant to mirror the elemental and back to our origins style of the story. I also did not like the plot, aside from the violence, because the climax of the novel occurs in the beginning with the shooting. The rest of the novel is waiting around for the men to make a decision. Although Vann certainly forces the reader to consider our primal urges, I thought the choice of relaying the tale through an 11-year-old who is by his own description "not right" was a poor way to encourage honest reflection on the human urge to kill.

Stars: 2