THE SCAPEGOAT

In this unnervingly good debut, Davis’ narrator pieces together details of his father’s death.

N is an employee at a prestigious San Francisco Bay Area university. “As a rule…,” he says, “I preferred not to involve myself in university gossip, or department politics, aware, without regret, that I had chosen for myself a somewhat lonely stance.” N’s father has recently died, and the circumstances surrounding his father’s death nag at him, invading his waking and sleeping hours. “The more I considered them, the stranger they seemed,” he says. When he happens upon a connection between his father and a hotel built over the site of a former California mission, the investigation begins to consume his life. He encounters a female guest lecturer who might have some answers, yet she tells him that his current actions are “not the right sequence of events.” N’s dreams become a robust portion of the narrative, as do his affinity for Swedish crime novels and classical music and a fraught relationship with a young female colleague. His daytime hours take on a soporific quality. Underscoring N’s search for answers is the haunting idea that the hotel, like so much of California’s celebrated history, is built on the destruction of the state’s Native population. It is, as one character says, “like making a hotel out of Auschwitz.” As N tries to piece together clues, his vision of what he’s pursuing becomes increasingly cloudy: “Don’t, I told myself, lose the thread.” He loses trust in a clear sequence of events. “Not everything is connected, I thought, weary of myself.” The tension of the novel builds to delirious heights, and he gets closer to answers about the death he’s been trying to reconstruct, yet he struggles with his memory and his ability to stay alert. “How did people do it? I wondered. How did they insert themselves into the present?”

An eerie and surprising reconstruction by an unreliable narrator.