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| Photo By Matthew Land |
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Brad Land discusses his memoir, Goat, at Joseph-Beth Booksellers on Tuesday
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Brad Land's
Goat is an exhausting ride. Reading the 28-year-old's memoir amounts to holding your breath for 208 pages. Set in the post-high school South of Land's youth,
Goat is the story of an acutely sensitive young man's experience with physical violence and psychological humiliation, both voluntarily and involuntarily.
Early on, after a then-19-year-old Land has agreed to drive some strangers home from a frat party, we get this visage, almost out of nowhere: "And the forearm comes from behind me, fills the space between my chin and breastbone. I can feel my neck bend and cave, my Adam's apple cracking and the light shrinks around me. The smile next to me. It's motionless, still as the moon."
The effect is devastatingly visceral. Land's spare, terse prose style colors the proceedings with an impressionistic feel that reads more like fiction than your standard, by-the-numbers memoir. His tension-filled, first-person narrative approach effectively puts the reader in his shoes, yet there's also a detached quality that's oddly appropriate. Land calls his attackers "the smile" and "the breath." The police officer who investigates the harrowing beating that follows the initial blow described above is dubbed "the mustache."
"I was using the idea of the objective journalist's view and just watching and showing and applying that to the memoir," Land says by cell phone from somewhere in his native South Carolina. "I also thought that distance was helpful to show the psychological state of the narrator. It's a storytelling device but it also works with the psychology of the book."
The narrator of which Land speaks heads to Clemson University a few months after the opening scene, where he intends to join his beloved younger brother, Brett, at Kappa Sig, a fraternity on campus.
And so begins the next phase of Land's bumpy ride, as he endures the humiliating, often wince-inducing hazing process of being a fraternity pledge (a goat), in large part to satiate his "frantic need to belong."
Ted Conover, acclaimed journalist and author of such books as
Newjack and Coyotes, is an immense influence on
Land's relentless, almost matter-of-fact telling of the events
in Goat.
"I always had this idea of the reporter, like, watching and
experiencing something," he says with a slight Southern twang,
bringing to mind a less manic Owen Wilson. "Conover talks about
this idea of immersion journalism. That's what I was trying to
do. The kind of book I wanted to write is the kind I want to read.
Which is not a book that just hands things to a reader. And, you
know, some critics will come back and say, 'Well, you still have
to give them something.' I just tried as well as I know how to
put the readers in the story and let them be there and not tell
them what it means. And, frankly, I don't know what it means.
I'm not that kind of writer. I'm not a sociologist."
The response to Land's memoir was immediate and far-reaching.
Reviews were largely positive and the populist-friendly Entertainment
Weekly ran a lengthy profile on Land the week of Goat's
publication in February 2004, an occurrence he found surprising.
"I thought it was a weird book," he says. "I didn't think it was that commercial. I never really entertained that. But I think there's a piece of you that always hopes that will happen. Well, maybe not commercial, but you hope that you'll get published at some point. That's all I wanted, just for the book to be out there."
Land is currently working on his next book, a novel about a young couple on the run. It's just another step in what he hopes is a long literary journey.
"I can't think of anything I'd rather do."
BRAD LAND signs and discusses Goat at Joseph-Beth Booksellers 7 p.m. Tuesday.
