More than kidding around
I once witnessed two casual acquaintances debate the relative merits of various North American cities. One championed Victoria, B. C. because “you can be walking down the street and just happen upon a real live seal, right in front of you!” The other rolled her eyes. “That happens in New York City too.” ( If perhaps the sudden appearance of random animals in the Big Apple seems far- fetched to you, consider that on Feb. 21 NYPD spent most of a day pursuing a cow through several neighbourhoods in Queens. It was the second such incident of 2017.)
Anne Fleming would likely side with the eye- roller. Her newest novel and her first for children is The Goat, a book about a mountain goat that has somehow made its way onto the roof of a New York City apartment building. While most of its tenants express mild surprise at the news, no one is exactly shocked by the idea of wildlife living eleven stories up in urban density. It’s just another day in New York.
The mystery of the goat is less whodunit and more what is it even doing there. Six residents each hold a piece of the puzzle, and we put together the story through their reactions to the four- hoofed beast. A blind skateboarder suspects something is nagging his seeing- eye dog. A man recovers from a stroke and watches the goat daily, but is unable — or maybe unmoved — to disclose his sightings. A wife neither sees nor hears the animal but wonders whatever became of her windowsill wheatgrass. An opera lover knows more than he is letting on. And a slightly manic and clearly very hungry goat cares more about food than how he ended up a New Yorker.
But mostly this is the story of a kid named Kid. Newly arrived to NYC by way of Toronto, Kid takes up temporary residence, along with her parents, to care for a distant cousin’s dog, named Cat. The beloved pet comes with a handmade instruction book, filled with detailed drawings of all the people she regularly encounters.
This is how Kid meets Will, who speaks in “spoonerisms” ( the transposing of sounds or letters to humorous effect) and is uncomfortably comfortable in his weirdness. Kid and Will eventually strike up 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 c hooses 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.