David Vann
Goat Mountain by David Vann is not for the faint of heart. Deceptively simple, the story is dark and unsettling.
The narrative unfolds in the first-person point of view of a man recalling a specific hunting trip he took when he was eleven years old. With his father, his grandfather, and his father’s best friend by his side, he makes the annual trek to the family ranch on Goat Mountain every fall to go deer hunting. Although he has been on the deer hunt many times in the past, this time is different. This time he is actually considered old enough to fire his rifle at a buck. He is eager to taste his first kill.
When they arrive at the family ranch, they see a poacher in the distance. The father hands his son a rifle so he can view the poacher through his scope. It takes only a split second, but in that split second the boy does something that changes their lives forever. He intentionally shoots at and kills the poacher.
In this haunting and unsettling story, David Vann explores what it means to be human. He asks the same questions William Golding asked in his 1954 novel, Lord of the Flies. Is bestiality intrinsic to our nature? Is it ever present, hovering under a thin veneer of civilized behavior, ready to surface at the first opportunity? What code of ethics, what rules operate when we are isolated in the wilderness, far from the social, cultural, and moral norms of society?
The wilderness setting and harrowing events are heavily imbued with an atmosphere regressing to a primal time and place. Atavism is stretched to its limits. References to the biblical story of Cain and Abel abound, as do echoes of ancient myths, especially Oedipus. The companionship and bonding that presumably take place among men on hunting trips is missing. Theirs is a contentious relationship with constant quarrels that frequently deteriorate into fists and blows and even threats of murder. The characters seep into the landscape, almost becoming a part of it. The boy imagines monsters and dinosaurs traipsing the earth as he slithers across the terrain like a snake. He admits to feeling greater kinship with hunter-gatherer societies than with his own time and place. He sees the act of killing as wired into our nature since the beginning of time. He lusts to kill. And it is only after he has shot the buck, witnessed its agony and heard its deafening screeches as it struggles to survive, does he begin to question his assumptions about killing.
This is not an easy read. The prose is heavy, intense, and saturated with explicit detail. The language is visceral, at times too heavy, too conscious of itself, too anxious to hammer the point home. The graphic violence borders on being gratuitous. The description of killing the deer, gutting it, and dragging its dismembered corpse back to camp extends for several interminably agonizing pages. It is in stark contrast with the clinical, dispassionate nature of shooting the poacher. The savage nature of the boy is fully brought home as he bites into the raw liver and heart of the buck he has just killed. As they watch blood dribbling down his chin, his father and grandfather bequeath on him the honorific title: “Now you’re a man,” they say.
A haunting and provocative novel that poses questions about human nature, about kinship, and about actions and their consequences. It provides no answers. The adult narrator seems satisfied with merely describing a harrowing experience of his childhood without articulating in what ways—if any—it has transformed or impacted him.
Recommended with reservations as this is not a book for everyone.