Book Review: Caren Beilin's Revenge of the Scapegoat

Caren Beilin's novel Revenge of the Scapegoat, winner of the 2023 Vermont Book Award for fiction, is both comical and tragic. Revenge is marked by repetition, with an ending that mirrors its beginning. And the substance for its action is the restoration of objects from the protagonist's past that she hoped would never return. The Vermont Book Award, given out annually, "shines a light" on a book and focuses readers' awareness on work they may have otherwise missed.

Iris, an adjunct college writing teacher in Philadelphia, thinks of herself the family scapegoat. When she was in her teens, she received two letters from her father that she saw as encapsulating his hatred for her. Now 36, she's left all that behind — until one day both letters reappear in a UPS package from her father.

While Dad says he was decluttering the family home, Iris sees the letters as if they were a message from the Unabomber. She depicts them as "things that had torn through me as a teenager sent as a totally perverse encore ... like an insane boomerang the stars had drilled strings in." Desperate to escape the memories, she trades her house for a beater car, drives the car until it gives out, renames herself Vivitrix Marigold and takes a job as a cowherd at a hilariously highbrow rural art museum called the mARTin.

If the response seems like an overreaction, it is. But Iris' journey makes perfect sense within the comically skewed universe of Beilin's experimental fiction, where reality meets the surreal.

An assistant professor at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts who lives in Bennington, Beilin is also the author of the nonfiction Blackfishing the IUD and the memoir Spain. Like many younger novelists with an academic background and an avantgarde bent, she embraces autofiction, or the merging of fiction with autobiography. Endnotes reveal that she lifted chunks of the book's dialogue from recorded conversations with friends (with permission). The book's last chapter consists of two photos that cement our identification of the author with her protagonist.

"A fresh, funny, and striking experimental work

 with surprises at every turn." - Kirkus Reviews

Revenge of the Scapegoat reads like a diary and an allegory. There’s a lot of quirkiness but a perverted realism in the book’s events, where Iris encounters "heartstepping cows" from Germany. Originally bred to catch escapees from a concentration camp, they literally step on people's hearts and have been imported for a performance art piece.

While the farcical is substantial throughout the book, nothing is random, including the Holocaust reference. One of the novel's central motifs is torment, which the heartstepping cows threaten but mysteriously manage not to inflict. "You can't simply make up a character," Iris tells her writing students. "Pain springs them, bonkers, out of the walls and out of body parts."

Pain is a fountain of inspiration for Iris. In the novel, when her rheumatoid arthritis makes walking unbearable, she names her grousing feet after the autodidact retirees in Gustave Flaubert's Bouvard and Pécuchet, "the one only lit majors and bookstore owners read." From then on, Bouvard and Pécuchet are characters in this novel, too, kvetching and philosophizing about each agonizing step. They keep Iris company, and they keep us amused.


Filled with references to literature, art and critical theory, Revenge of the Scapegoat might be too pretentious if it weren't so comical. The dialogues of Iris' two feet bring to mind Samuel Beckett's leavening of despair with humor in Waiting for Godot. Beilin has crack comic timing and a knack for pushing the boundaries of language while keeping it straightforward and readable.


Straining to illustrate the harm done by her father's letters, Iris says language is "like a perfume or toxin spreading with infusing sensations, mindlessly." One possible defense is to transform language itself.


Iris sprinkles her narrative with neologisms — "turmoilous," "irresist," "proxious," "betwixted." She describes the bold yellow of her jumpsuit as a "molten marigold soufflé spilling out boldly onto Tilda Swinton's complete oeuvre of Irigaray." Swinton and Luce Irigaray are feminist icons, and the "burning color" reflects Iris' sense of having been "burned alive by my dad." While the metaphor may seem farfetched, it conveys how, for Iris, marigold yellow is both a stigma — a mark of violence done — and a shield against further aggression.

Caren Beilin, Author

The book is saturated with insecurity about language and storytelling. Iris often pauses to recount advice she hands out to her writing students: Grammar is "marketing," for instance. "In fiction you don't say everything unless you're a man," she notes after admitting that she neglected to describe a trip to the bathroom.

Beilin doesn't take any of these issues too seriously, though. In Iris' telling, her students counter her pretensions to proficiency with lamentations about their debts: "They said, 'Iris, we can't afford to be here anymore.'" Just like their teacher, they speak and write most eloquently when the subject is their own pain.

While Iris' inner wounds are paramount to Revenge of the Scapegoat, the book reads more like an ironic reflection on the trauma narrative — and all our trauma plots — than any kind of moralizing fable. Almost everyone Iris tells about the letters is skeptical. She sums up a colleague's reaction as "You're too good for these problems, and other things, politics, the socius ... are way more interesting." All the way to the novel's wickedly clever dénouement, she encounters reactions that boil down to "Get over it, you know?"

Yet Iris can't get over it, because the wound inflicted by her father's letters is as irreducible and indelible as hard to make understandable to others. Turning language and narrative inside out seems to be her best bet for illustrating the nature of a trauma that doesn't fit into a known definition — a trauma that connects her and her father as much as it separates them.

Accepting the Vermont Book Award in May, Beilin spoke of the role of personal trauma in shaping the novel. Pain and trauma have become so central to modern literature that they inspired Parul Sehgal to write an influential 2021 New Yorker essay called "The Case Against the Trauma Plot," which concludes that "The trauma plot flattens, distorts, reduces character to symptom, and, in turn, instructs and insists upon its moral authority."

"A scapegoat does not believe, and I'll say this twice, that anything coming out of her mouth can be heard," Beilin writes. "Not without SCREAMING. Not without a trick." She lays tricks in this stimulating little novel, and the best of them is that she makes Iris' tragicomic dilemma both relatable and accessible.

Purchase through Amazon: Revenge of the Scapegoat