More than kidding around

BOOK REVIEW a friendship, and upon learning that a real live sighting of the rumoured goat will procure them seven gears of lewd yuck (seven years of good luck) they decide to seek it out.

Fleming chooses her words carefully. She has been called playful, a master of the literary sleight of hand. These ascriptions are accurate, about things useful to have in the arsenal when writing for the not-yet-teen. And so naming her protagonist “Kid” was no accident. The fact that every review of this book is not titled with a pun on the goat/kid joke shows more restraint than I would suggest advisable when appraising children’s literature. But more poignantly, Fleming avoids pronouns. So much so that Kid’s gender is fuzzy in the mind’s eye. I believe this to be intentional. I believe this to be beautiful.

Buried somewhere in the middle of The Goat is a scene where the blind skateboarder is working on a fantasy novel. He explains that each of his books is just a mash-up of other books he loved. Here, Fleming is winking. She too loves books, and this one pays tribute to the structure of The Westing Game, the city of Harriet the Spy and the language of everything ever written by Polly Horvath.

This book could have gone astray. The tale’s trajectory is tied to Kid trying to determine something the reader already knows for sure, and yet it’s hardly the point. Bits of everyday conversation between parent and child, a chess game in Washington Square and an age-appropriate explanation of 9/11 have nothing to do with the plot and go nowhere, but are far from boring. Characters are drawn as more than their characteristics, with likes and moments and mannerisms that reflect but don’t rely on their brownness, their blindness, their crippling shyness.

The Goat takes a concept easiest told as zany and madcap, but instead wisely presents it as perfectly ordinary. If Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach made a kids’ movie (pun intended), this would certainly be their script.