The Scapegoat by Sara Davis

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on March 2, 2021

The Scapegoat is proudly promoted as a postmodern novel. “Postmodern” is a red flag that often warns “this novel won’t make much sense.” The narrator, who views himself as a “glorified secretary” employed by Stanford’s medical school, decides to investigate the death of his father, who taught there as a professor. A school official is aware that the narrator’s father has “moved on” from Stanford but seems unaware of his death. Perhaps the narrator is confused about his father’s death. That would not be surprising, as the narrator is in a constant state of confusion, which necessarily leaves the reader confused.

The narrator describes his dreams, then sees people he recognizes from the dreams, people who disappear when he looks again. He sometimes mistakes one person for another — unless the person has transformed from one to the other. A key character who is about to meet an unfortunate fate seems to be a guest lecturer and then a graduate student and then the narrator’s mother, all within minutes. Sometimes characters have conversations with the narrator despite his failure to speak a word (or to remember that he has spoken), answering questions he didn’t ask (or doesn’t recall asking).

The narrator is doing his best to ignore people but sometimes recognizes them, almost as if he does so against his will. The narrator’s father was apparently absent quite often during the narrator’s childhood, or at least that’s what the narrator recalls. The narrator evidently has unhappy feelings about the mother who raised him. Perhaps this accounts for the narrator’s isolation, his determined attempt to avoid all social contact despite the characters who keep intruding on his solitude.

The narrator “herds” himself “from one confusion to the next” in a story that attaches great importance to a hotel room, a briefcase, and a paperweight shaped like a whale. The guest lecturer keeps popping into his life, apparently holding but concealing the key to some of the novel’s mysteries. What are the circumstances of his father’s death, assuming his father is dead? Why did his father check into a hotel using a fake name? Or is Shriver actually his name?

The hotel seems to have been built on the site of a California mission where a genocidal event occurred — perhaps it is now a tourist attraction for that reason — but how does the narrator’s father connect to the hotel that he apparently played some role in opening? What was his father doing in the hotel? Did the briefcase that the narrator found in the guest lecturer’s hotel room belong to his father? Is a briefcase that he later retrieves from the hotel the same briefcase, given that it is no longer covered in or stained by blood? Don’t expect any of these questions to be answered. The few answers that suggest themselves are not necessarily reliable.

As I understand it, the idea of postmodern literature is the recognition that meaning is subjective, that a story can have many meanings, or whatever meaning you want to ascribe to it. That seems true of all art, but postmodern writers often manufacture ambiguous, contradictory, or impossible events and then challenge the reader to interpret them. But why should I? a reader might ask. Perhaps the question is a sign that the reader is too lazy to engage in interpretive thought, or perhaps the reader thinks that the author is being lazy by stringing together a bunch of nonsense and saying, “You figure it out.” Both viewpoints are valid — in fact, in the postmodern world, everything is valid.

I am not a big fan of postmodern fiction, so perhaps I am one of those lazy readers who thinks the author should take responsibility for telling an intelligible story, perhaps leaving room for the reader to interpret ambiguities or symbols or to imagine what happens after the final chapter without sacrificing the coherence of traditional storytelling. There’s nothing wrong with making a reader think, but if I wanted to invent my own story, I’d be writing novels, not reading them. And if the story’s events are just a fiction within a fiction, are the events worthy of attention? If there’s no difference between a story and a dream, shouldn’t the story, like a dream, be quickly forgotten?

If I were to interpret The Scapegoat, I might guess that the narrator has a brain tumor, which would explain his apparent tendency to faint or black out or misremember or misperceive. But that interpretation might add a level of rationality to a novel that is intended to operate under rules that don’t exist in the rational world.

I have enjoyed some postmodern novels simply because they are whacky and playful, or because they accomplish the postmodernist goal of making me see the world in a different way. I was intrigued by The Scapegoat — the novel held my interest — but, promotional promises notwithstanding, I wasn't sufficiently "mesmerized" to spend significant time trying to make sense of it. The narrator tells us several times that nothing in his world makes sense. I agree, making it a world that I wouldn’t want to visit again, interesting though it might be.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS