A Review of Gabriel Smith’s Brat – William Tidwell
September 2, 2024
Gabriel Smith is 28. You didn’t need to know that, but you do now. You can find it on most internet pages that contain information about his novel, Brat. He also talks about having ADHD in this interview. Brat started as a short story published in 2018 titled “Some Cliffs, Which Overlooked Some Sea.” It was the first story he ever wrote. He was 24. It’s good to learn about the author sometimes. I have no problem with autofiction. I think it’s inevitable that people write about themselves, but maybe it doesn’t need to be stated so loudly and blatantly. It’s normal to blend your life experiences with those of others, as well as those imagined, in the writing of fiction. I am not so different from other people that writing about my life would have no significance to anyone. There are many ways to relate to people. One popular style is known as gossip. It treats personal information like a commodity. It often involves bargaining with this information by way of blackmail, open or implicit, for other commodities. This is perhaps where the negative reputation of autofiction stems from. Gossip isn’t concerned with the pursuit of truth, though it may be appropriated for that purpose. The gossip covets information of any kind, but the lurid and private sort is preferable. This is what the dealer has in stock. It fell off the back of the truck. Take it or leave it. At its worst, it isn’t even concerned with poetry. The gossip speaks laconically, like a medical report or business memo, which could still be interesting, but usually isn’t.
Brat begins laconically. It concerns a double of the author dealing with the death of his father, anomalous skin ailments dismissed as eczema by a mean sibling, a mystery surrounding his mother’s possible infidelity, her literary ambitions, and something more unheimlich proceeding from both. From the first pages, one might assume this to be another terse indie novel. The influence of Gordon Lish persists in contemporary literature. Bret Easton Ellis is also a recurrent inspiration, reaching further into television with shows like Skins, Succession, and Euphoria. Both Lish and Ellis may be felt in Brat, where characters talk somewhere along a continuum of zombie to bored sociopath, roll eyes frequently, and perform copious drug use. Bite-sized, visceral images of skin peeling off, masturbation, vomiting, and mindless prosocial cruelty are sequenced in a jaunty rhythm like Memphis Group style jigsaw pieces dancing on a kindergartner’s playroom carpet, or severed limbs in a pile during the Rwandan civil war, depending on how transgressive you’re feeling. Smith’s first publisher Giancarlo DiTrapano upheld the Procrustean ideal of the “sentence” until his death. In a videotelephone reading during quarantine shortly after his passing, I heard a man share DiTrapano’s advice to him: “Gian told me to write every sentence like you’re a boxer trying to hit as hard as possible.” I’ve never been a fan of this style, but some have taken it to interesting extremes, epitomizing and overcoming it (Sean Kilpatrick and “bibles” come to mind). Gabriel diverges from it early and unexpectedly in a metafictional episode containing the writing of the protagonist’s ex-girlfriend. It is about a Russian oligarch who ejaculates on expensive paintings. It didn’t floor me, but I liked the way it was written more than the rest of the novel. It led me to ask: why is he writing this way? Similar divergences occur in dialogue with an erudite grandmother and excerpts from manuscripts abandoned by the protagonist’s parents. I see a different kind of writer underneath the NY Tyrant standard here. He has an affection for vagueness at odds with hard-hitting minimalism, perhaps indicated by the double usage of the non-specific determiner “some” in the title of his first story. I can’t help but wonder if he is writing this way on purpose in order to find success.
Gabriel Smith sentencemaxxes pretty well. He does other routines, but never with much intensity. Brat is not a bad book, not good, not really anything. It is not an “internet novel,” nor does it read like a “c. 2010 Tumblr page” (which is frankly idiotic, to defend Smith for a moment). Tumblr pages c. 2010 were more verbose and concerned with sharing digitized social theory. The problem is not that it’s lazy. Working harder is not always the answer to a question, and may even exacerbate issues in this case. It is not shocking either, at least to me, having grown up on the internet and seen countless more offensive things from a young age. People mean little of what they say online, in real life, and in literature. It is an underdeveloped, neotenous work, perhaps fitting its title then. That is entirely forgivable. It can take a long time to develop one’s voice. An amateur may write many bad things, then average things, before they write something good. Smith has mentioned a 600-700 page novel he has been working on for almost four years. “So tired,” he types, “of thinking about jokes, covert ops, dreams, parties, systems, ai…” Maybe this is another prank like the Stable Diffusion images of Samuel Beckett in Japanese advertisements he posted before, or his Charli XCX fanmail that got a community note. Maybe it’s a reference to the part in Brat where the mother’s manuscript becomes its title page hundreds of times over. The paper in Smith’s photo looks like a bunch of dining handkerchiefs. Maybe Brat was a potboiler to bide time before this masterpiece is released into the world, but why is it being pitched as something provocative and boundary-pushing? It feels random, pseudo-random, or “AI-generated.” Smith is “the toast of the literary world in London.” His book has a fashionable one-word title shared with a popular record enmeshed in political discourse, connoting a zeitgeist of perpetual adolescent rebellion and weird infantile overtones. It is transparently pandering to the moment, at least on the surface, but underneath I don’t find someone who wants to be trendy or rebellious. I find someone who isn’t sure what they are saying.
The sheets of skin and writing come off to reveal nothing, or relatively nothing. The manuscripts change each time they are read, lost media cassettes are brought into play, and the book begins to recall House of Leaves. Clauses like “the deer deer-ran away” only serve to aggravate me sixteen years after the launch of HTMLGIANT. It reads more like a creepypasta, a genre that was a source of inspiration for some writers featured on the aforementioned blog. They never held a candle to The Holders series however, in my humble opinion. Is this the myhouse.wad of indie novels? What if myhouse.wad was adapted into an HBO miniseries with Ubisoft game dialogue? Do “PSX horror” games on itch.io with anachronistic framerates and depth of field effects have more substance than this book? Is this author an onion, or does he have something left inside after all the layers are peeled away? Is Brat a literary hoax for the digital age? The artform of the novel has its roots in forgery. The acts of writing and reading are a bottomless mystery, having to do with parallel universes. If these ideas sound cool to you, be assured that’s all you will receive: the idea of something cool. A more important question is: can I eat this man’s guts and wear his skin? I want to share some of it with my friends. I think they deserve recognition more than him, because they’re my friends. It’s all immaterial anyway, despite the money. In any city, in any country, get on your phone and start reading a spooky found document wiki. Click on the disambiguation and find your name in the list of alternative literary authors. You could be him, he could be you – it’s like the Sophie song. “Can you write?” A girl asks the protagonist near the end of Brat. “Not really,” he says, “I’m just good at pretending.” That’s a blend of fact and fiction; he isn’t.