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readingweird 's review for:
Goat Mountain
by David Vann
Goat Mountain follows an 11-year-old boy, his father, grandfather, and family friend as they seek to navigate their respective levels of culpability in the unspeakable act that upends a routine hunting trip.
The narrator (the boy, now a man, looking back on the incident) offers retrospective reflections that are repeated with such rhythmic regularity that they become a bit like philosophical wallpaper at times. But Vann’s prose is, more often, haunting and brutally poetic—he parses the matter-of-fact brutality of Old Testament law, and muses on the primordial connectivity of humans to the natural world. There is an unnerving flatness to the novel’s unmarked dialogue—as the men repeatedly argue about whether a primal wrong can or must be righted and how, the narrator’s retelling shrouds the words of his kinsmen in the dulling haze of memory and childhood naïveté.
This is a book about how humans create meaning through ritual, tradition, law, and responsibility—and how masculinity is bound up in the making and unmaking of it all.
The narrator (the boy, now a man, looking back on the incident) offers retrospective reflections that are repeated with such rhythmic regularity that they become a bit like philosophical wallpaper at times. But Vann’s prose is, more often, haunting and brutally poetic—he parses the matter-of-fact brutality of Old Testament law, and muses on the primordial connectivity of humans to the natural world. There is an unnerving flatness to the novel’s unmarked dialogue—as the men repeatedly argue about whether a primal wrong can or must be righted and how, the narrator’s retelling shrouds the words of his kinsmen in the dulling haze of memory and childhood naïveté.
This is a book about how humans create meaning through ritual, tradition, law, and responsibility—and how masculinity is bound up in the making and unmaking of it all.