Brat2Brat: On Gabriel Smith’s “Brat”
Gabriel Smith | Brat | Penguin | June 2024 | 336 Pages
“Hi Gabriel,” the email begins. “My name is Charli - perhaps you know my music, which I put out under the name ‘Charli XCX.’”
Charli is writing to ask Gabriel a question. The question is about her new album, which she plans to title Brat after Gabriel’s forthcoming novel. “Kind of like a tribute,” she says. Would he mind terribly if she did? She knows it will make promotion more difficult (something-something SEO). But it would mean a lot to have his blessing, artist to artist.
Two Brits with projects called Brat. Two British Brats. Both out in summer 2024. So sweet of her to check in—and so affirming, really, that a popstar of her caliber would read and engage with contemporary literature at all. “Thank you,” she signs the email, “Charli.” Then adds, “(XCX),” in case there was any doubt.
Twenty-four hours and seven million views later, the artist known as Charli XCX took to X, née Twitter, to clear things up.
“ive never heard of you,” she wrote. “good luck with your book tho !”
•
Of course, if you look closely, the email is obviously fake. The address charli@charlixcx.com is listed as the recipient, not the sender. Her avatar photo is a blank gray face used in anonymous Facebook profiles. A community note saying as much has been appended to the original post. “Readers added context,” it says. “Do you find this helpful?”
But what more fitting way to advertise a novel that is, at its core, about false documents? Gabriel Smith’s Brat—the Brat I’ve been entrusted to review here—follows a writer named Gabriel Smith as he works on his second novel in the wake of his father’s death. His skin is peeling off in large sheets. Is it eczema, as everyone around him seems to be asking? No, it’s not eczema; it’s something much worse and more insidious, something that parallels the mold wrecking his now-empty childhood home, empty because of the aforementioned dead father, yes, but also a facility-bound mother, tortured by dementia.
You may be tempted to read it as autofiction. I certainly was. But we ought to know who we’re dealing with: an unreliable narrator, a photoshopper of emails, a delightful troll. Smith himself railed against autofiction in the Summer 2022 issue of The Drift, calling it “a symptom of a couple of generations being told they could not imagine alternatives to the present.”
In Brat, he has taken his own advice. He has imagined many alternatives to the present. They manifest in the novel’s embedded texts, which change each time the narrator looks back at their pages. First there is a story by his ex-girlfriend called “Cum Tributo.” Then a manuscript discovered in his mother’s old desk called A Bit of Earth. A screenplay uncovered in his father’s old notebooks: “The Tape.” A memoir from his grandmother, the only character who seems to understand him, called Fables / Aphorisms: A Memoir. Another story from the ex-girlfriend, this one called “About Love.”A Bit of Earth and “The Tape” become objects of the narrator’s obsession in particular. The former seems to imply the existence of a secret family—a dark past the narrator’s mother has hidden throughout her adult life. Each time Gabriel returns to the text, though, its plot has warped; details change like a trick of the light. The manuscript opens with a child’s funeral, set to the procession song “Morningtown Ride.” Gabriel reopens it and the song becomes “In Dreams”; the dead child who “couldn’t have made it past four stone” suddenly couldn’t have made it past five. These changes create a sense that something dark and ominous is at play.
He keeps turning the pages. Lo and behold, there’s a character shedding skin like a snake! Could this be a clue to Gabriel’s own molting? The uncanny self-recognition causes so strong a reaction in Gabriel that he stops reading and gets into the bath, picking at the skin around his dick and thighs “like a fishhook.” He bleeds and digs until he reaches “the raw flesh, all pink and meatlike underneath the parts of me that I had dug away.”
Digging through the house, he enters his late father’s office and discovers more clues. “The Tape” is another metafictional text—a TV pilot his father penned about a group of friends watching a TV show that changes every time they press play. That might explain why all these texts keep changing every time Gabriel returns to their pages. Like his own body, they molt and regenerate, new plots lying painlessly beneath the original pages. Or is it the other way around: is his body a text, too?
Rather than working on his second book, which he was supposed to have finished by now, or cleaning out his parents’ house, or even grieving his father, Gabriel turns his focus toward these documents—these alternate realities that might help restructure the present, or at the very least, provide a distraction from it. He calls his mother to see if she remembers writing the manuscript. No, she doesn’t. His brother and his wife call to ask if he’s made progress on the cleaning. No, he hasn’t. He buys alcohol and cigarettes for two teenagers he secretly suspects are the half-siblings alluded to in A Bit of Earth. He spots a man in the garden wearing a muddy brown deer costume, emerging from a shed with rusty shears. Who is that guy, and why does his grandmother know him?
If we hope for a clean answer, Smith is not going to oblige. Does the fog of grief lead his protagonist to blur fiction and reality? The copious Xanax he does throughout the novel, from beginning to end? Or is there really something magical going on, a secret force behind these nested plots, always one step ahead of narrator and reader alike?
“I’m not terribly interested in performing reality,” Smith wrote in his Drift essay, “and I doubt you’re terribly interested in reading about it, either. I just want to get right in your face and lick it. I want you to feel me in your chest.”
•
For all the posturing online, Brat itself is deceptively sincere. The place Smith takes himself seriously is on the matter of style. His prose reads clean and sparse. “I was in the waiting room,” he begins. “Then I was in the examination room. There was a chair, and another chair, and a hydraulic doctor bed.”
Note the repetition of the verb “to be”: “I was,” “I was,” “There was.” The spare description of the room. The plot unfurls in these liminal spaces, among a good deal of literal white space on the page. All the while, the narrator is vague and imprecise. Things are described as “strange,” “disgusting,” “weird,” and “very bad.” In the Baffler, Rhian Sasseen called this lack of precision “lazy writing,” and yet, for me, it read as a show of restraint, a novel-long exercise in maintaining the depressed, disembodied voice of its protagonist. Drained of his desire for sex, food, and beauty, Gabriel’s world blends together. His senses are blunted, his interests obscured. How better to capture the brain rot of grief?
Through this haze, Gabriel is debilitated to his most base form. He becomes disgusting. He doesn’t shower; he doesn’t eat; he gets drunk and sleeps his days away, never knowing if it’s Sunday or Tuesday or whatever. Three times over the course of the novel, the narrator describes his body as feeling “bad and full of movement.” Each time, he wants to make the movement stop. He dulls his feelings by guzzling Xanax, floating in and out of drug-induced dreams. It’s all reminiscent of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, down to the cum-covered canvases. Very Drake on Sicko Mode (“I took half a Xan, thirteen hours ‘til I land”). As Charli put it recently in her version of brat, very “Why I wanna buy a gun? Why I wanna shoot myself?”
Still, much like the album, Brat deftly avoids being humorless. Gabriel manages to retain control of his quips even as he loses control of his mind. “I saw I was dressed Winnie-the-Pooh style: an orange T-shirt, but no trousers or underwear or shoes,” he writes, reflecting on a xanny dream. “I thought to myself: style it out, style it out. So I said: oh, bother.”
Another joke, this one recited to his grandmother:
“Two whales walk into a bar… One whale goes hurrrrggggnnhhhh weeeoooooooow clik clk clk hrrrnnnggg.”
“Very good,” his grandmother says.
“The other whale goes: are you okay, man? You sound pretty drunk.”
Humor is a good cope—we watch him wield it to grasp at connection with his remaining family members, strangers, even himself. These are the moments when Smith shines through: you can almost hear him chuckling to himself at the keyboard, alive with the same clever thrill that fueled his Charli shitpost. I suppose this is what he means by “I just want to get right in your face and lick it.” I was tickled. Among his irony-pilled cohort, this was a refreshing angle from Smith—not just jokes, but earnest jokes, jokes that read like his protagonist trying desperately to break out of something, to smoke signal his aliveness to other people.
And eventually, finally, he does. He calls his ex and they confront the mess they both made. He scatters his father’s ashes. He goes back to the doctor for his skin. Suddenly, sweet relief: he feels hungry again. He opens the fridge to find “beautiful red and yellow tomatoes. Basil that smelled pepper sweet. Rosemary.” The subtle sweetness, again, struck me like a wet tongue.
•
But to evaluate Smith on his own terms: when it came to feeling it in my chest, I was left waiting for the drum to beat.
The late Giancarlo DiTrapano, Smith’s mentor and first true believer, the Godfather of the New York Tyrant literary movement (a scene of edgy, mostly white writers, who have for some reason become synonymous with “internet writing” whether they write about the internet or not), once tweeted:
5 things that dont matter
arc, narrative, characters, plot, epiphany
1 thing that does
style
In Brat, Smith perpetuates this mindset—sometimes to a fault. In pursuit of style, he eschews arc and plot altogether, save for a few trips down the intratextual rabbithole. He neglects the few characters beyond his eponymous protagonist, and tends to the novel’s central epiphany only implicitly, without much interest or investment in the outcome.
This is a fine choice for a novelist to make, but it gives the final product a shifty, ephemeral finish. Style is sexy, but without its earthly trappings—the meaty, earthy details that give texture and life to a novel—it floats away as soon as the book is shut. It was like going on a fun trip to a haunted house but not remembering what, exactly, made you scared, because you were too focused on impressing your crush the whole time. The reveal? Underneath Gabriel’s peeling skin is just more skin; we never find his beating heart.
This is compounded by the fact that Smith’s focus is not singularly fixed on style, but also on making a capital-P Point about autofiction. He pokes fun at the genre by manipulating its tropes (writing about a writer named Gabriel Smith, closing on Gabriel writing the first lines of the very same novel). If you’re not in on the joke, these read as strange deviations, seemingly pulled from thin air—and if you are, they read as Smith drunk on his own cleverness.
“Music alone,” said the real Charli XCX recently, promoting her brat on the TikTok show “Subway Takes,” “is just not giving me the world. I need an artist to create the world… more than the songs, it’s the entire culture and space they inhabit.”
On this, perhaps Smith could take a note from his countrywoman. Like his Brat, hers is swaggering and self-referential, drunk on its own cleverness, full of inside jokes for a certain bicoastal in-crowd. But tracks like “So I” and “I think about it all the time,” bring her back down to earth, show her soul.
That’s the thing about art. Autofiction or not, there has to be a little truth in it.