This novel is funny. Not witty or zany, but funny, actually funny. This is a wonderful thing. Maybe if there were more funny writers about we could stop trying to laugh at the work of a certain few. Laughing may be good for the health, but fake laughing, let alone lying, is definitely bad. Maybe we pretend because we know it’s very important that we get some funny novels, at least a few a year. Whether you’ve been playing along or not, it’s a relief to find this one, and then you lean into the book to be sure you don’t miss the next laugh, and then every sentence is more alive than before. Alive, that is, which does not mean lively (almost as bad as zany), because this brat is tired, unhealthy, and feeling lousy. As his house of Usher falls around him, he’s not laughing much: when we laugh, it’s neither with nor at him.
Following up on short fiction in The Drift and New York Tyrant Magazine, Londoner Gabriel Smith has published his first novel, Brat. Are all young people American now? Smith’s narrator, in his twenties, in the twenties of the twenty-first century, sounds pretty much American: deadpan rather than sardonic, discontented rather than bothered. He doesn’t tend to name any of the major characters, but we learn that he is named Gabriel, and his mother, Rebecca Smith. He has published a book and is supposed to be working on a second, but his father dies just before the story begins, and with ailing Rebecca already moved to a home, he now needs to clear out the big house in the country so that it can be sold. He gets into fights with his brother’s teenaged son, and with a lady named Cheryl at his dad’s funeral, a lady who likes to wear purple even to a funeral. He feels like someone is watching him, and his skin starts peeling off. His girlfriend who may no longer be his girlfriend has published a short story that makes him feel bad. Alone in his parents’ house, he watches with mild concern as mold and vines grow, and pokes around in Rebecca’s study, where he finds a manuscript that changes each time he reads it. He sometimes sees in the garden an intruder, wearing a deer mask and armed with rusty shears.
Nearly without affect, Smith’s narration is already asking to be read twice in case you missed something, and in conversation, his brat is obdurate and given to repetition. He puts on a novelty t-shirt, one in a series which is like a running gag, this one with lots of Phils (Leotardo, Neville, The Philippines); his brother’s wife tells him he can’t wear it, and he says, “I am going to change.” Brother walks in, gives him the sarcastic treatment, and he says again, “I am going to change.” If having the hero shedding his skin and saying that he is going to change seems too obvious, that’s because that’s the joke. Smith is up to more than one trick with repetition: he is everywhere making the obvious absurd. Cheryl “said it had been a beautiful ceremony. ‘That was a beautiful ceremony,’ she said.” There are many, too many variations on “I felt like I was being watched.” It is not just his refusal to clean up the house, the squabbling, or his drugs and drink, or the failure to write. He is tired, crimped by fatigue or by hidden grief, so much that he is reverting to childish diction: “The air smelled different, damper, badder”; “Once the bathwater was coldening”; “I looked up at the biggest tree. I knew it was an ash. It had some kind of lesion on it. It looked dying.” There are many laconic, dead-eyed, stunted narrators around, but Smith has a much stronger sense of what he’s doing with this one, and what the story is doing to him, too. The scariest moment in the novel is when being scared doesn’t wake him up, when the house is haunted but the hero only half cares: “I looked around the attic again. Everything was still dusty and boring and scary.” Detached from his feelings, he can hardly attach himself to us.
As with the quiet, slightly solemn voice, so with the novel’s structure: Brat may evoke other novels written in very short paragraphs and fragments, but these bits and pieces are fit for Smith’s purposes, or, considering them another way, one could call them authentic. The many punchlines and disquieting images call for visual breaks, and these are provided by the novel’s division into sections which are mostly between half a page and three pages long, and not contained by numbered chapters. Smith likes to use the narrative ellipses and skip to the bloodied and bruised aftermath when he knows this will be funnier than showing the brawling. There are passages from books, or at least manuscripts, breaking up this book, and a screenplay too, and these give us more repetitions, this time with a difference, as the narrator keeps returning to the first chapter of his mother’s unpublished work. The disjointed pieces jostle and the scenes end early as the narrator gets tired or gives up, but Smith is working his way towards some longer conversations with the older brother, in which Brat will reach its bantering pitch as they exhume their bones of contention. The protraction of their football and beers on the sofa is felt by contrast with all the vignettes, and the bickering brings out some new notes. While family breeds contempt, contempt can turn to pity, which is a return to affection. “‘You are the reason there’s no show called Gayest Man,’ my brother said. ‘Because everyone already knows who the gayest man in history is.’ ‘You?’ I said.” (The thing with family members is that it takes one to know one.) The affairs of this rather complicated clan, so far faintly sketched, are made a little sharper, but since they are never explained away, the novel’s progress is toward the completion of a circle, not an escape. That moment when things do join up is not exactly a triumph—that trumpet tone is not available to this muffled man in mourning—but something more promising, the end of a very good start.
FICTION
Brat
By Gabriel Smith
Penguin Press
Published June 4, 2024
