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A painful and powerful
look at fraternity violence Goat: A Memoir By
Brad Land Random
House, 224 pp., $22.95 There’s not a single pleasant moment
in Brad Land’s memoir, “Goat.” The
writing is spare and brutal, and his story teems with violence and humiliation
as he recounts assaults experienced over two yeas of his life. What results
is a startling picture of accepted cruelty and a haunting look inside the
mind of a victim. Land opens with the first attack,
which takes place late one night after leaving a fraternity party. When asked for a ride by two people
characterized only as “the smile” and “the breath,” he is too timid to refuse
and ends up driving to an isolated road in the woods. What follows is a disturbing account of a
beating, which ends with Land forced to lie in front of his car with his face
pushed so hard into the gravel road that rocks cut into his cheek and
forehead. He expects to die, telling
us that he only waits for “the tires to break my skull, to crush my ribs,”
but his attackers drive away. Land runs through the woods in
search of help, and though he’s jarred enough to hallucinate
a conversation with a fox, he knocks on the door of a house and persuades the
answering couple to call the police. Even after the bruises heal and
one of his assailants is sentenced to prison, Land’s experience, which his
family euphemizes as “the incident,” leaves him with a ruptured eardrum and
permanent emotional scars. For a
while, he takes a hiatus from life until he decides to join his younger
brother, Brett, at At Clemson, Land can’t escape the
nervous, social awkwardness and loneliness that plagued him even before the assault,
so he seeks to resolve these problems by joining his brother’s fraternity,
Kappa Sigma. The rest of “Goat” follows Land as
he documents the procedure of pledging for the fraternity and unmasks the
systematic degradation the experience entails. The hazing the new pledges endure
is at times physically brutal, but what resonates beyond the beatings and
forced alcohol poisoning is the vile undercurrent of severe emotional battery
that seemingly has no end. At one
point, when a fraternity brother tells the pledges that they had better
prepare to copulate wit a goat, “ ’Cause right here
in a minute, that’s what you’re going to be doing,” there’s no reason to
believe he’s lying. For Land, the hazing dredges up and mirrors memories of “the
incident,” turning him into even more of a recluse. For the others, the consequences are even
more severe. In the end, Land’s purpose here
isn’t to win pity from his readers, and he isn’t even in the business of
making himself particularly likable.
But clearly, he is a victim. If
it weren’t being sold as truth, pieces of “Goat” easily could be viewed as a
parody of college frat boys who govern their lives by beer, sex and power and
have a handling of expletives that puts “The Sopranos” to shame. With that “memoir” label, however,
Land’s story proves to be a scathing account that highlights the hypocrisy of
groups claiming to promote brotherhood while practicing subjugation. -Vikas Turakhia Special
to the Plain Dealer March
2004 |