Caren Beilin’s Revenge of the Scapegoat begins with a simple declarative statement — I was upset — that unfolds into a surreal yet logical fever dream.

The novel’s protagonist, Iris, receives a letter from her father that he wrote when she was a teenager, in which he blames her for leaving their dysfunctional family. This same father was physically and psychologically abusive for years, especially after his wife became ill. Iris is now thirty-six and an adjunct at an arts college in Philadelphia. The trauma of receiving the letter, which reminds her of her role as the family scapegoat, propels her out the door again. After a conversation with her friend Ray at Good Karma, a local café, she trades her shadowy and mildewed house (inherited from her dead mother) for Ray’s Subaru and heads out to the countryside, where fresh adventures await. Her journey comes full circle when she returns to Good Karma and another conversation with Ray.

This brief novel is funny, clever, and serious by turns, yet it is always compelling. The plot, while incorporating elements of surrealism, is easy to follow, and the novel’s weirdness springs organically and logically from its thematic concerns: pain, illness, and trauma, both familial and institutional, born of intent or neglect. For instance, the protagonist suffers chronic pain, particularly in her feet, from early-onset rheumatoid arthritis brought on by her copper IUD. As pain rewrites the topography of her body, Iris imagines her feet are two old retired men in a novel by Flaubert. Nights spent tossing and turning from inflammatory pain become a philosophical conversation between the eponymous Bouvard and Pécuchet.

Once Iris lands in the countryside, the surrealism kicks into high gear along with another element: satire of the art scene. After the Subaru breaks down, Iris wakes up in a field next to a rural New England museum called the mARTin, the kind of museum that is “remote but at the center of money,” where “New Yorkers make an arty annual pilgrimage, wafting around the grounds — sculpture garden, an outdoor pop-up orchestra — in white linen tunics looking a lot like modernist rheumatologists.” The museum, which is only open one month out of the year, bears a sign proclaiming “Summer is our resting period. A time to create and curate. To reflect. We’ll see you soon.”

Not simply mockery for the sake of amusement, Beilin’s satire weaves together the novel’s disparate elements: violence, both physical and psychic, the cyclical nature of trauma, the role of the scapegoat. At the mARTin, Iris works as a cowherd, managing cows sourced from a dairy farm outside of a Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Nazis trained the cows to step on any still-beating hearts of escaping prisoners and hold them in place until a farmer came to shoot them. The cows, while temporarily on exhibit at the mARTin, are also scheduled for slaughter. Eventually, the copies of her father’s letter, in which he blames her for their family’s dysfunction, are printed onto the cows themselves. Here, the genocidal scapegoating of the Jewish people during the Holocaust rubs up against the narrator’s individual trauma at the hands of an abusive and gaslighting father, and these two details simultaneously rub up against the industrial victimization of the heart-stepping cows of Sachsenhausen.

Beilin’s prose turns from serious to beautiful to funny, often within the same paragraph. After encountering the heart-stepping cows of Sachsenhausen, Iris wonders, “A cow’s eyeball, what is that? Warmest stone struck by lightning, fluidic, no, a perfect ball, the pit, each one, of a perfect brown and shining pond” and then, just sentences later, proclaims, “I needed some beef like you wouldn’t beleef.” These moments are overlaid with an effortlessly cool, punk feminist Riot Grrrl sensibility, evident in this description of the protagonist’s shoes: “a black-green leather more like a liquid you would press from a hot tampon you are pulling now, by the lamplight, out of a toad’s omnibus of Anaïs Nin.”

The novel is most satisfying when its various thematic elements converge in surprising ways. For instance, when Iris meets Caroline, the director of the mARTin, their conversation simultaneously skewers pretentions of the art world while tapping into themes of familial violence:

It is not clear … that the command to have a family is any different than the command to kill your family … that explosive unthinkable act of violence is there and is equally normative, and it has as much of a command, and we want it as much as we want the family. It’s a death drive that is in its own way productive, and it’s not just annihilating, right, it’s like constructing a sacrifice, or it’s constructing a sacrifice of itself. There is a command that comes, and you can hear a mixed music in it, and it is both ‘Have this thing’ and ‘Destroy this thing.’ And how do you be at peace with that?

Later still, Caroline’s son Matthew describes their own late father’s attempt to trick him into killing off some ugly heritage trees in their property by driving copper nails into the base because “copper kills their nervous systems,” a detail that echoes the protagonist’s father’s abuse and the autoimmune side effects of the copper IUD. Further on, Bouvard and Pécuchet discuss the scapegoating of Jews during the Black Plague. Even a chance encounter with a bee at the café Good Karma foreshadows some of the concerns of the novel:

It’s not going to sting me, is what I was thinking. Because it doesn’t want to die. A hive is not around. A bee doesn’t develop a personal vendetta. Even if I upset it quite a lot. A bee is only a terrorist. It would never kill itself without a politics backing it up, and the hive is political and there’s no hive in any of these trees near here. I’ve looked up. I’ve checked it out. And I feel more comfortable around bees, around women, and all kinds of terrorism than around many many many men. Men are terrorists, fine, they are … You don’t want to be with a man in a house. I’d rather be in a school than a house in terms of abuse. I’d rather be killed outside, on a stage, than beaten indoors for more than five years.

While Beilin has been compared to Kathy Acker and Lynne Tillman, she has her own unique style, one that fluidly juggles surrealism, intellectualism, satire, and comedy. And while all of the plot points and characters in the novel connect, those connections are not didactic or obvious. It is up to the reader, ultimately, to discover Beilin’s intuitive leaps. Doing so is like discovering the hidden underground network of fungal threads that produce the spotted red cap of a particularly gorgeous fly amanita mushroom on a rainy July afternoon. Pick up this slim powerhouse of a novel, one that entertains and surprises at every turn, and discover these moments for yourself.

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