Merry Christmas!

The Story of a Goat by Perumal Murugan

First published in India in 2018; published in translation by Grove Press/Black Cat on December 10, 2019

An anthropomorphized goat named Poonachi thinks human thoughts, or perhaps her goat thoughts happen to coincide with those that are common to humans. Her simple life as a goat opens a window on human behavior and attitudes. Poonachi experiences love and desire, loss and depression, jealousy and bitterness. She relishes freedom and resents limits that are placed on her behavior. As do many people who have little control over their simple lives, she bemoans her fate.

The story is set in an arid stretch of land called Odakkan Hill, presumably in or near the state of Tamil Nadu in India. An old man receives a black newborn goat as a gift from a tall stranger in a loincloth who predicts that the goat, as the last kid from a litter of seven, will give birth to seven kids of her own. The stranger is looking for a kind heart to raise the goat, knowing that “men of fortune are as plentiful as fruit worms, but a kind heart is rare.”

The old man’s wife names the malnourished kid Poonachi and raises her as if she were a daughter. The couple’s own daughter lives in another village. They see her only once a year when they travel to the daughter’s village for a festival.

The old man and his wife graze goats and grow a few crops, barely surviving from year to year but living serene lives. Poonachi’s life is equally difficult. Soon after the old man brings her home, Poonachi is nearly carried away by an eagle and is later threatened by a wildcat. She suffers a fever after her ear is pierced by a vindictive bureaucrat. When she is older, Poonachi becomes lost in the forest. Exhilarated by the richness of her new environment, however, she isn’t sure she wants to be found.

Poonachi earns a reputation as a miracle goat, particularly when she fulfills her destiny by giving birth to seven kids. But later, in a year of no rain when the couple faces starvation, they wonder whether she is a curse.

While the story creates sympathy for the kindly old man and his wife, the reader’s most tender feelings will be devoted to Poonachi. Mixing with other goats, Poonachi is bullied by an old buck and feels like an outsider. Still, she slowly makes friends and develops a sense of security, a knowledge of her place in the world. That changes when she is taken to visit the old couple’s daughter. The trip is frightening but it opens Poonachi to new experiences and gives her the opportunity to meet Poovan, a buck who kisses her gently and makes her tremble “at the slightest touch of his horn on her body.”

Poonachi feels despair when she must leave Poovan and again when she must leave the forest. Being bred against her will makes her hate the world. She cries when her kids are taken from her and sold. She sees other members of her herd killed for their meat or as a sacrifice to the gods. Eventually she wonders whether life is worth living if everything that matters is sure to be lost. Only her memories of her second encounter with Poovan, who “helped her learn the secrets of her own body,” sustain her.

The novel’s lessons about the joys and hardships of life come from Poonachi and the old couple, but the novel offers some collateral lessons, as well. Farmers and goatherders impart their wisdom in bromides like “only the egg-laying hen knows the pain of an inflamed asshole.” The novel imagines a ruling regime that is a bureaucratic nightmare, one in which government officials carefully regulate the purchase, sale, and registration of goats. People are encouraged to inform on their neighbors if they do not report the birth of a goat. “The regime had the power to turn its own people, at any moment, into adversaries, enemies and traitors.” In the presence of officials, people have “mouths only to keep shut, hands only to make obeisance, knees only to bend and kneel, backs only to bend, and bodies only to shrink before the authorities.”

I don’t recall when I last read a novel that was quite so charming. The story is sad but enriching. Writers often anthropomorphize animals to illuminate the human condition. I wonder if Perumal Murugan anthropomorphized goats to give them a voice. He may be inviting the reader to consider whether animals are like humans in fundamental ways. Why do we assume that goats do not love each other, do not suffer when we separate them from their lovers or offspring, do not feel abused by owners who dictate their limitations?

I live near some goats who, when I pass them, stare at me with utter malevolence — or so it seems to me. Perhaps this story explains their animosity. It certainly reminds us how simple people, and simple goats who think like people, experience love and pleasure while enduring pain and loss in the course of lives that, in the end, are never simple.

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The Weddings by Alexander Chee

Published digitally by Amazon on December 19, 2019

Amazon commissioned five stories for a series it calls Inheritance. The stories are unconnected to each other except by the broad theme of family secrets. In a departure from its usual format, Tzer Island will review one story in the Inheritance series each day this week.

“The Weddings” is a story of romance and changing times, focusing on a gay character who considers for the first time the possibility of marriage after the Supreme Court prohibits states from banning same-sex weddings. Jack met Scott in college and they became good friends. Jack came out and Scott had sex with him, but Scott otherwise confines himself to dating Asian women. Jack is a Korean-American.

They go their separate ways after college but Jack carries a torch for Scott. The advent of Google makes it possible for Jack to find Scott and renew their friendship, prompting Scott to declare both his love for Jack and the disclosure that Jack is still his only male sex partner. They live on different coasts and their friendship continues, but not in the way Jack would like. Still, he feels special because Scott did not experiment with any other man.

Now in his forties, Jack explains that backstory to Caleb after they attend the wedding of two gay men who have lived together for years and can finally marry. The wedding makes Jack think about Caleb as a potential husband. Jack asks Caleb to another wedding when he learns that Scott is marrying a Korean woman. The wedding gives Jack the opportunity to fret about his inability to speak Korean, about the wedding gossip he hears about Scott’s past, and about his confused mashup of feelings toward Scott and Caleb.

As I read “The Weddings,” I kept wondering whether it was going anywhere. It went to a predictable destination. That isn’t necessarily a complaint — not all stories need to surprise, and predictable endings are often the endings that readers want. The ending is nevertheless anticlimactic, given the drama that Jack builds as he frets about Scott and straight weddings.

The story is nevertheless admirably observant. Jack takes note of wedding customs that he’s never understood and comments on the changing nature of society, both in terms of gay acceptance and in the willingness of Korean-American women to pursue their own lives, rather than the lives their mothers want them to have. On occasion, the story smacks of a Harlequin romance. Sentences like “How long he had wanted to hear something like this” make me cringe. Still, the story is heartfelt and honest, two qualities that largely offset its faults.

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Zenith Man by Jennifer Haigh

Published digitally by Amazon on December 19, 2019

Amazon commissioned five stories for a series it calls Inheritance. The stories are unconnected to each other except by the broad theme of family secrets. In a departure from its usual format, Tzer Island will review one story in the Inheritance series each day this week.

“Zenith Man” is a nice story about a couple who, married for 32 years, kept their mutual promises. The story begins when the husband, a TV repairman named Harold Pardee, calls 911 to report his wife’s death. The fact that Harold has a wife shocks the gossipy Appalachian town in which he lives. Other than Harold, only one person even knew his wife existed. “She passed through life like vapor through a keyhole.”

Some people interpret Harold’s matter-of-fact reaction to his wife’s death as indifference. A pinkish tint on the body’s teeth and gums convinces the medical examiner that she died of suffocation. Harold is charged with her murder and a recent law school grad, filling in as the local public defender, is appointed to represent him.

Barbara Jean (Barjean), we learn, married Harold in Texas at the age of 18. Before they met, Harold and Barjean were reclusive and largely friendless. Harold is a recluse by nature. Barjean had a medical condition that left her feeling ashamed. Both are odd and seemingly meant for each other. “For thirty-two years, each had been, for the other, the only person in the world.” Why would Harold kill her?

Barjean’s family thought Harold was strange because of his Catholic upbringing. Barjean’s family is Full Gospel but her father was not unhappy that someone was willing to marry her, even if her husband was of a different faith. They weren’t prepared for the couple’s decision to move to Pennsylvania and cut the family out of their lives. Like the police officers who track down Barjean’s family, the reader might wonder if Barjean’s separation from her family supplies a motive for her murder.

The story is more a character sketch of two people who live inside their own world than a murder mystery. Taken in that spirit, the story is a success. Jennifer Haigh creates Harold and Barjean in accumulating detail. They keep secrets from the outside world because that is how they make their lives work, even if secrecy infuriates the busybodies who give small towns a bad name. A reader might not want to know them if they were real people — a reader would have no chance to know them, because of the fence around their property and their guard dog — but Haigh makes it easy to understand them.

Even people we might not want to know, and who might not want to know us, have value. That value will always be recognized by someone. The story’s value lies in its illumination of that truth.

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The Lion's Den by Anthony Marra

Published digitally by Amazon on December 19, 2019

Amazon commissioned five stories for a series it calls Inheritance. The stories are unconnected to each other except by the broad theme of family secrets. In a departure from its usual format, Tzer Island will review one story in the Inheritance series each day this week.

“The Lion’s Den” is an exceptional story about the evolving relationship between a father and son, told from the son’s perspective as he recalls his father’s death. Michael’s only accomplishment in life has been to write a vengeful tell-all memoir of his father, commissioned by a rightwing publisher that resented the rehabilitation of his father’s reputation in the public eye. Michael’s father, a combination of Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, leaked documents revealing the extent of government surveillance of American citizens. For that he was vilified as a traitor and then heralded as a hero (often by the same columnists) after the Bush administration fell into disfavor. After six years in prison, he was pardoned by Obama.

Michael’s family suffered financial ruin after his father’s arrest. Michael resented his father’s refusal to profit from his actions by selling the rights to his story to Oliver Stone. “Moral heroism in America usually has the longevity of celebrity marriage,” Michael explains, “yet my father’s caught fire and kept burning, in no small part because he refused to speak of it at all, declining every opportunity to explain himself.” Hence Michael’s decision to profit from his father’s life and help his family by writing the memoir.

The story’s focus is the day Michael takes his father to see the lions at the zoo and the following day, when Michael serves as an emergency replacement speaker at the ethics symposium hosted by the Catholic grammar school he attended. He is replacing a securities trader who has been arrested for fraud and less savory crimes, making the trader a poor choice to speak about ethics, although the school had always been more concerned with a speaker’s name recognition than good character. Unfortunately, it “couldn’t afford the speaking fees of those uncorrupted by power.”

Low-key humor permeates the story. The ethics symposium is one example. Here’s another: “My mother, the most devout Catholic among us, didn’t believe in divorce, which was problematic in that her husband didn’t seem to believe in marriage.” And the thought that “parents love empty gestures,” in this case a school honor code, because “It’s about feeling that your children are decent, honest, and virtuous, rather than doing the work to make it true.”

Anthony Marra packs a surprising amount of characterization into this relatively short story, including Michael’s observation that he and his father conduct their emotional lives through newspaper clippings and “torn-out articles. Our conversations followed similar patterns of recycled factoids.” Despite their difficulties, there is something touching about the relationship, about the father’s jovial lack of resentment concerning the memoir, about the mundane truths (the father’s fame, the shadow in which the son lives) that had become life-defining family secrets. Even more touching is the gesture — in this case, not an empty gesture — that Michael makes at the story’s end, creating a fleeting tribute to his father that only Michael will understand.

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