The Adolescent Gaze: On Dizz Tate’s “Brutes”
Dizz Tate | Brutes | Catapult | 2023 | 304 Pages
The “we” of a novel’s first-person plural point of view is often exclusive: it defines and sets apart a group. The “we” appears separate from the rest of the cast, and the only details that matter are the ones the collective voice deems important enough to mention.
Take Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides, where the teenage boys speak as “we” and describe the events of their high school years by way of their obsessive observations about the Lisbon girls. During baseball season, the boys neglect to mention the score, the names of the players, or what the cheerleaders look like, but recall how the Lisbon girls chewed their fists when watching a close game. The only relevant details are those connected to the girls. In Julie Otsuka’s The Swimmers, the devotees of an underground pool cement their in-group status by providing details about the pool, its guests, and those aboveground, the non-swimmers. “There are those who would call our devotion to the pool excessive, if not pathological,” they admit.
In each of these novels’ particular narrative groups, some members are named, but no finite number of voices is established. In first- or third-person novels, a character’s voice is unique to that individual, and readers understand who the narrator is through individual thoughts and actions. A collective voice, on the other hand, necessarily speaks through characters with differing traits and beliefs. In this way, the “we” in fiction often operates to provide the reader with a sense of the group’s activities, fixations, and structure. (The collective in The Swimmers quite literally sets out a list of rules: “Be nice to Alice. Obey the lifeguard at all times.”) Being told what the group does and how it thinks may provide readers with a sense of the collective’s norms, but without an outsider’s perspective, the resulting story can be—is often designed to be—unreliable or disorienting.
In her debut novel, Brutes, Dizz Tate embraces the exclusivity and oppressive closeness of the “we” in her exploration of the gritty, violent side of girlhood. The thirteen-year-old girls (plus Christian, who “became a girl and now he is one of us”) live in a swampy Florida town at once vivid, stale, and nefarious. Although each member of the six-person group is named, they operate as a single group—“Brutes!” their mothers call them. Together, they watch; they crouch behind bougainvillea bushes and watch kids on the basketball court, lure sandaled church women toward fire ant nests and wait for the screams, and stand vigil over the dilapidated show home teenagers sneak into at night.
A person’s odds of attracting the girls’ obsessively watchful eye increases if they’re either a slightly older girl or a boy who interests her. The girls watch Sammy, the fourteen-year-old preacher’s daughter, until she goes missing at the beginning of the novel: “Where is she?” the book opens. They watch Eddie, the boy Sammy sometimes sneaks out to meet, as he sets up a ladder for Sammy to clamber over the high wall that separates her housing development from the girls’ shabbier apartment buildings. They watch Mia, Sammy’s best friend, and take note of her nail polish so they can paint their own nails the same colors. In these cases, watching becomes an act of admiration and love. Turned on objects of less affection, such as the girls’ undifferentiated mothers, watching can also be an act of scorn. They note their mothers’ smudged makeup, the lines around their eyes and lips, the patches of dead skin and peeling cuticles. Above all, watching is an act of power.
We lie flat on our bellies, so we are less visible, though we realize it does not matter. They are not looking at us and have never looked at us. No one looks at us and this gives us a brutal power.
While there is power in watching, being watched carries its own power, albeit more tenuous. Being the object of another’s gaze means ceding control over how you are perceived, but to be watched is also to be worthy of someone else’s voyeurism. The girls implicitly recognize this and, at times, seek to be watched themselves. In particular, each of them yearns to be discovered by the Star Search talent scouts at the mall. They hope to become famous and wield the power of being watched and adored in the way they watch Mia and Sammy.
This desire for individual fame, to be something beyond a member of a posse, conflicts with the function of the group. In the rare instances in which a girl’s desire to feel special in her own individuality leads her to branch out on her own, she risks vulnerability outside of the group’s protection. One of the girls, Leila, momentarily breaks away and gains Mia’s special interest. The older girl bestows a compliment on Leila—“You know, you’re really pretty”—just like the girls have imagined and rehearsed, when they practice showering each other with the compliments that signal they are special and may one day be chosen to pack their bags for Hollywood. Mia approaches Leila with a dubious modeling opportunity, reassuring Leila that the pictures “don’t have your face in them.” But in this sun-bleached Florida town, with its ominous lake and sleazy talent scouts, to be a singled-out girl is to be imperiled. It is to risk, like Sammy, going missing. Or worse. When Leila declines Mia’s offer, Mia pushes her into the lake. The other brutes are watching, of course. But they do not call for help or rush to save their friend. “She betrayed us by leaving us, we think.” There are consequences for leaving the rest of the girls behind, and Leila must find another means of rescue.
This tension between the group and the individual propels the novel forward. The girls test the boundaries of their own pain, experiences that are necessarily individual, even when witnessed by the other members of the group. They hold their body parts to flames or streams of boiling water until their pink skin turns red, stopping short of inflicting lasting damage. They do this repeatedly, testing how long they can put their body in peril and come away unscathed, resulting in lasting scars for those of the girls who fail to pull away from the source of danger quickly enough.
Brutes has been compared to The Virgin Suicides, and for good reason. Both are told, mostly, in the first-person plural. Both involve obsessive acts of watching. Both are stories of teens whose later adulthoods center on the horror-tinged events of their adolescence. At one point in The Virgin Suicides, the boys reflect on one of the Lisbon girls’ diary entries, in which she wrote of her sisters and herself as a single entity. Perhaps the point of view in Brutes resembles what Eugenides’ novel might have been like from the Lisbon girls’ perspective: that of the inscrutable subject turning the lens outward and becoming the watcher. But where the boys in Eugenides’ novel never deviate from their joint telling of the story, Tate’s narration sometimes shifts from “we” to “I”; each of her brutes has an individual chapter told in the first-person singular, in which each girl—Hazel, Britney, Leila, Isabel, Christian, and Jody—wrestles with the aftershocks of that summer’s events.
Tate’s debut confronts the weird, the gross, and the downright bizarre truths of adolescence. In its depiction of girlhood, Brutes eschews the sugar-and-spice trope in favor of split earlobes from a botched piercing, of hiding dead wasps in their mothers’ purses, of an ominous creature lurking in the lake. The girls balance their ruthless gaze with their desire to have the spotlight turned on their individual bodies without fully understanding the dangers of being seen. In so doing, Tate captures this transitional period in all its messy, terrifying glory. Readers who prefer their endings tidy may finish Brutes feeling unsatisfied. Much is left to mystery, and in many ways the reader’s bewilderment intensifies as the narrative proceeds. But the lingering sense of disorientation feels purposeful. Some things, like the monsters lurking in Brutes’ dark lakes and pink houses, evade explanation, evade even the girls’ obsessive gaze, until it’s too late.