Zombie Land
Gabriel Smith's Brat is a short novel about a young man named Gabriel who must sell his recently deceased father's house, and discovers, thanks to some fiction manuscripts and VHS tapes left behind by his parents (because the manuscripts and the tapes are magically different every time he picks them up) that parallel universes probably exist and that the interference from those universes are what we call ghosts. In the process of having this deep thought, Gabriel’s skin slakes off and heals, and slakes off again. He also has strange wounds. He also pops Xanax. It’s possible he’s just losing his mind (à la Poe).
His story is told like this. The story is told in brief sentences. There are bursts of imagery (the skin, the pus, the blood) that punctuate the long staccato march of syntax. There are also interpolated texts (movie scripts; short stories; novel fragments), but none of the characters who write—the deceased father, the mother, the grandmother, the ex-girlfriend—are particularly interesting or differentiated; they all basically sound like Smith.
As I noted in my review of Honor Levy’s My First Book, short, imagistic sentences, and endless parallelisms are well-suited to readings (which as I know from experience often means five minutes in a crowded, loud room filled with people who are there to be seen rather than listen), and Brat likely sounds good aloud–the short, dry, sentences, which largely omit conjunctions, establish a definitive rhythm–but on the page, the silent reader feels undernourished. I almost felt like I should have been multitasking while reading Brat to fill all the space left by the disaffected style.
As Rhian Sasseen points out in a perceptive review for The Baffler (which Smith attacked on Twitter)—Smith’s novel is reminiscent of the early work of both Bret Easton Ellis and Tao Lin, whose characters are similarly high and half-there, and whose prose is similarly flat. Point well taken. We’ve read this book before—or some of us from the before-times have, at least.
And yet, Brat is being marketed as something new and ground-breaking. As Smith bragged in a recent The Millions interview, “Part of what the structure of Brat is about is exploding the mode. The protagonist of it has this very autofiction voice. And then the fictional just assaults him.” This claim deserves some attention. Is “exploding” autofiction as simple as giving a character your first name, having him do a lot of Xanax or other downer, and thrown in some obvious unreal elements? I guess so. But I think Proust–whose narrator, famously, was named Marcel–would like a word. So might Dante (the poet of The Divine Comedy, not the guy who gets stuck in the Inferno).
Sometimes a book is actually not groundbreaking. Sometimes a book–despite marketing campaigns to the contrary–is just Harry Potter. It's not apparent at first—certainly the author does not realize they’re writing Harry Potter; the editors do not realize they’re buying Harry Potter; fans in the signing line do not realize what they’re getting. But nonetheless, there he is; there’s Harry (in this case Gabriel): an ordinary person from a middle-class English family who discovers he lives in a secretly magic universe…conveyed through prose that is loose, stylishly unstylized, and designed for easy reading.
I suspect Brat’s affect–the dehumidified, zombie “autofiction” voice–runs cover for a conventional tale (an unholy mixture of Rowling and Poe) and conventional metafictional devices and strategies (texts within texts, it’s the multiverse, bro) that have propped up many pieces of workshop fiction. Maybe, in another universe, Brat is just one of the many, many manuscripts of this kind that do not get published.
Matthew Gasda is a writer and director.
