Repetition is a mainstay of comedy: the return of the same pratfall or catchphrase over and over. Repetition is also central to tragedy; Sigmund Freud called it the “return of the repressed.” Caren Beilin‘s novel Revenge of the Scapegoat, winner of the 2023 Vermont Book Award for fiction, is both comedy and tragedy. It’s structured by repetition, with an ending that echoes its opening. And the catalyst for its action is the return of objects from the protagonist’s past that she hoped never to see again.
Iris, an adjunct college writing teacher in Philadelphia, considers herself the family scapegoat. When she was in her teens, she received two letters from her father that she saw as encapsulating his hatred for her. Now 36, she’s left all that behind — until one day both letters reappear in a UPS package from her father.
While Dad claims he was innocently decluttering the family homestead, Iris greets the letters as if they were a missive from the Unabomber. She describes them as “things that had torn through me as a teenager sent as a totally perverse encore … like an insane boomerang the stars had drilled strings in.” Desperate to escape the memories, she trades her house for a beater car, drives the car until it gives out, renames herself Vivitrix Marigold and takes a job as a cowherd at a hilariously highbrow rural art museum called the mARTin.
If this sounds like an overreaction, it is. But Iris’ odyssey makes perfect sense within the comically skewed universe of Beilin’s experimental fiction, where the confessional meets the surreal.
An assistant professor at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts who lives in Bennington, Beilin is also the author of the nonfiction Blackfishing the IUD and the memoir Spain. Like many younger novelists with an academic background and an avant-garde bent, she embraces autofiction, or the merging of fiction with autobiography. Endnotes reveal that she lifted chunks of the book’s dialogue from recorded conversations with friends (with permission). The book’s last chapter consists of two photos that cement our identification of the author with her protagonist.
Beilin has crack comic timing and a knack for pushing the boundaries of language.
Given all this, Revenge of the Scapegoat reads as part memoir and part metaphor. There’s certainly more fancifulness than documentary realism in the events at the mARTin, where Iris encounters “heart-stepping cows” from Germany. Originally bred to catch escapees from a concentration camp, they literally step on people’s hearts and have been imported for a performance art piece.
While the absurdism runs high in such scenes, nothing in them is random, including the Holocaust reference. One of the novel’s central motifs is physical suffering, which the heart-stepping cows threaten but mysteriously manage not to inflict.
“[Y]ou can’t simply make up a character,” Iris tells her writing students. “Pain springs them, bonkers, out of the walls and out of body parts.”
Pain is certainly a wellspring of creativity for Iris. Early in the novel, when her rheumatoid arthritis makes walking unbearable, she names her complaining feet after the autodidact retirees in Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet, “the one only lit majors and bookstore owners read.” From then on, Bouvard and Pécuchet are characters in this novel, too, kvetching and philosophizing about each agonizing step. They keep Iris company, and they keep us amused.
Stuffed with references to literature, art and critical theory, Revenge of the Scapegoat might be unbearably pretentious if it weren’t so funny. The dialogues of Iris’ two feet bring to mind Samuel Beckett’s leavening of despair with humor in Waiting for Godot. Beilin has crack comic timing and a knack for pushing the boundaries of language while keeping it straightforward and readable.
Struggling to describe the insidious harm done by her father’s letters, Iris says language is “like a perfume or toxin spreading with infusing sensations, mindlessly.” One possible defense is to transform language itself.
Iris sprinkles her narrative with neologisms — “turmoilous,” “irresist,” “proxious,” “betwixted.” She describes the bold yellow of her jumpsuit as a “molten marigold soufflé spilling out boldly onto Tilda Swinton’s complete oeuvre of Irigaray.” Swinton and Luce Irigaray are feminist icons, and the “burning color” reflects Iris’ sense of having been “burned alive by my dad.” While the metaphor may seem far-fetched, it conveys how, for Iris, marigold yellow is both a stigma — a mark of violence done — and a shield against further aggression.
The book is suffused with self-consciousness about language and storytelling. Iris often pauses to recap advice she hands out to her writing students: Grammar is “marketing,” for instance. “[I]n fiction you don’t say everything unless you’re a man,” she notes after acknowledging that she neglected to describe a trip to the bathroom.
Beilin doesn’t take any of these dictates too seriously, though. In Iris’ telling, her students counter her pretensions to expertise with laments about their debts: “They said, ‘Iris, we can’t afford to be here anymore.'” Just like their teacher, they speak and write most eloquently when the subject is their own pain.
Accepting the Vermont Book Award in May, Beilin spoke of the role of personal trauma in shaping the novel. Pain and trauma have become so central to modern literature that they inspired Parul Sehgal to write an influential 2021 New Yorker essay called “The Case Against the Trauma Plot,” which concludes that “The trauma plot flattens, distorts, reduces character to symptom, and, in turn, instructs and insists upon its moral authority.”
While Iris’ inner wound is central to Revenge of the Scapegoat, the book reads more like an ironic reflection on the trauma plot — and all our trauma plots — than any kind of moralizing fable. Almost everyone Iris tells about the letters is skeptical. She sums up a colleague’s reaction as “You’re too good for these problems, and other things, politics, the socius … are way more interesting.” All the way to the novel’s wickedly clever dénouement, she encounters reactions that boil down to “Get over it, you know?”
Yet Iris can’t get over it, because the wound inflicted by her father’s letters is as irreducible and indelible as it is difficult to explain to anyone else. Turning language and narrative inside out seems to be her best bet for conveying the nature of a trauma that doesn’t fit into a tidy category — a trauma that connects her and her father as much as it separates them.
“A scapegoat does not believe, and I’ll say this twice, that anything coming out of her mouth can be heard,” Beilin writes. “Not without SCREAMING. Not without a trick.” She plays many tricks in this heady little novel, and the best of them is that she makes Iris’ tragicomic dilemma both relatable and accessible.
From Revenge of the Scapegoat
The package’s harm was very specific to me. I was my family’s scapegoat. There was hatred I was meant to hold in the place of a loved self. The letters included in the package delivered to me last July were some of the finest proof of that anyone has ever seen. But there was nothing political, nothing topical to it. This was my own personal turmoilous history with my people. Except that I wanted, most of all, for these letters, in that package, to be made public, to become a topic, that the public should really see this, and publishing should be like that, like a tactic. A book should be like a lot of spit. But who would publish me? Who publishes a person who’s sort of soaking in pain, who can’t always walk, employed only pretty much in name?
Did writing exist in books anyway these days? I thought, perhaps very defensively. Maybe it didn’t.
Where does writing foment? Where does effulgence slip in the innerlining of which writing? That is what I meant.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Vigilante Wit | Book review: Revenge of the Scapegoat, Caren Beilin”
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This article appears in The Animal Issue 2023.
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