A debut novel can't dethrone its models

BY DAN FEDER

Ellis has not, by any means, had a normal childhood. His divorced mother, an unrepentant hippie, has pretty much left his upbringing to Goat Man. Goat Man lives in the pool house, raises goats in the backyard, grows weed in the greenhouse, and occasionally cleans the pool and does landscaping. Ellis' father, affectionately called "Fucker Frank" by his mother, lives across the country from Ellis's home in Tucson. Until now, Ellis has gone to a public school at home, but he hates it so much that going to Gates Academy, an elite college preparatory school on the East Coast, seems like a great idea.

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A great idea, despite the fact that he will no longer have a steady supply of weed from Goat Man. Mark Jude Poirier's book Goats begins with the line "Goat Man taught Ellis how to do bongs when Ellis was eleven," and it gets weirder from there. It's not hard, despite the novel's attempts at relevance, to imagine the entire book as some kind of pot-induced fantasy of what growing up with non-existent parents and a really cool older roommate might be like.

Goats, Poirier's debut novel, strives to be a seminal growing-up story along the lines of J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye or John Knowles' A Separate Peace. All the elements are there: the prep-school setting, run-ins with the law, and the main character's final realization that he has been valuing the wrong things in life. But Poirier simply doesn't dig deep enough to make the novel work in the same profound way as Salinger or Knowles.

On a technical level, Poirier's writing is not all that accomplished. He thrives on plot twists and his seemingly endless (and admittedly impressive) ability to shock. He makes the most of depicting underage use of alcohol and drugs, the bowel and mating habits of goats, the bitterness of Ellis's divorced parents, and affairs between grown men and underage girls (or grown men and very, very old men).

Poirier's problem is that, like so many Hollywood movies, he overdoes it. By the time the reader finds Ellis and Goat Man (along with a few goats) in a whorehouse in Mexico, Ellis covered in his own puke, and Goat Man about to sneak drugs into the U.S. on the backs of his goats, Poirier has lost any of his coming-of-age credibility, and the book starts to feel like a rejected script for The Mexican.

Poirier's characters, too, are rather unimaginative. Ellis's father has predictably remarried to a bleached-blonde employee named Judy who wears too much lipstick. Goat Man listens to nothing but reggae when he smokes pot. Ellis' crew coach at Gates Academy is a hardass. And Ellis' legacy roommate is Barnabus, who talks incessantly about his overachieving older brother who (surprise) goes to Yale and who is (surprise, surprise) an alcoholic.

The biggest problem, however, is the main character himself. In his own way, Ellis is very much a Holden Caulfield, except that Holden never shows quite as much self-confidence. Ellis is convinced throughout the book that he is right. About everything. As a 15-year-old boy, one might expect him to be pretty self-centered, but even as he changes, deciding that his father is not such a bad person after all and that maybe Goat Man is really just a sad old man who smokes too much pot, one never gets the sense that he has learned anything from these realizations. Ellis's preferences, his likes and dislikes, his drug use, and his needs and wants change during the course of the novel, but his character and personality remain pretty much static throughout.

Still, Goats is very funny. There are many laugh-out-loud moments, and Ellis is adept at making biting remarks about everyone in the novel. In the end, however, it's more sitcom humor than literary wit, and while there's nothing wrong with that, it makes for even more problems with the novel's lofty aspirations.

Every generation needs its own coming-of-age classic, and with The Catcher in the Rye over 50 years old now, it seems like we might be due for another one. Goats accurately captures much of the life of a modern, privileged high school or college student: the world-weariness at a young age, the drug and alcohol use without regard to consequences, and the idea that authority figures are always just plain wrong. What the novel fails to show is whether or not it's possible for this jaded character type to transcend his or her self-righteous limitations. Maybe it's not possible, but it should at least be worth a try.

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