Skin in the Game

BEFORE READING GABRIEL SMITH’S DEBUT NOVEL BRAT, I did the normal thing and googled him. I thought I remembered seeing his name on my Twitter feed: in February, Smith had posted a screenshot of a hoax email from Charli XCX, in which she divulged that she was “a HUGE fan” of his writing and asked permission to use the title of his book for her new album (which is indeed called Brat). Charli XCX was prompted to engage, if only to disavow the email. The Guardian found this newsworthy; Smith told the reporter that the post was meant to be “hilariously egotistical” and said he enjoys “making fun of how insanely, deludedly self-important novelists often act.” With regard to this and various other pranks he’s pulled: “I get off on provoking people and if you grew up posting online then obviously you’ve heard it all before.” 

It can be hard to discern an insanely, deludedly self-important novelist from someone lampooning one, but yes, I’ve heard it before; it’s a little funny and totally harmless. I wasn’t provoked, either, by a note he posted about how critics are “small children, desperate to be placated, entranced, or even loved by art, in place of their parents,” with an exhortation that critics “Come to Daddy”; “BRAT may soothe you.” It’s defensive—if you don’t like the book, you’re the brat—but it’s not really offensive. Publishing a book is scawy. As the writer Greta Rainbow recently observed of debut author Honor Levy, whose book, like Smith’s, was originally acquired by indie press New York Tyrant: “The most earnest thing you can do is get a book deal. The most irony-pilled, reactionary cope is to shitpost.”

I’ve broken the fourth wall and indulged in this backstory in order to confess that I approached Smith’s book feeling less than optimistic. While shitposting might work to get attention for your book, it doesn’t really work as a book, and due to my experience as a person who reads both books and the internet, I braced myself for the likelihood of this convergence. Separate the art from the artist, I muttered as I squinted at the title page. For the first sixty to eighty-ish pages, I got more or less what I anticipated: flat prose, mildly provocative characters, a sort of boring benzo realism descended from alt lit 1.0. I’m not particularly thirsty for earnest or florid “literary fiction,” I just get a little dehydrated when I sense that an author is hedging against being evaluated according to conventions like character complexity or plot development; for instance, when the most the narrator divulges about his feelings is that he has “bad feelings,” and the description is restricted to, e.g., “I went out onto the balcony for a while. The sun was setting gray.” 

But after the first quarter to a third, Brat twists around and gets weirdly good, even great. The text is increasingly ruptured by “found” texts—virtuosic experiments that complicate the plot—and the story eventually amounts to a surreal, tender portrayal of family dynamics in the wake of grief. In retrospect, the flat first part comes to feel justified as a formal choice. I’m tempted to say that Smith tricked himself into writing a good book, but if I’m going to assume authorial intent, as an adult critic should do, he tricked me into reading a good book. Touché, Brat. 

We meet the narrator, a young British man named Gabriel, in a doctor’s office, possibly concussed, and afflicted by what looks like a touch of eczema. His father has just died, his girlfriend has left him and their London flat, and he’s numb and lashing out—most recently he’s picked a fight with his teenage nephew. Later, after the funeral, he attacks a family friend for complimenting the deceased. “Listen, you stupid purple bitch,” he says to her, “shut the fuck up about my dad.” The next day, his brother assesses Gabriel’s face: “She made you look like a little bitch.” His brother’s wife agrees: “You are a little bitch.” Later, they both tell him, separately: “You’re retarded.” Of their mother, who has dementia and lives in a care home, Gabriel suggests to his brother: “Maybe we should just kill mum.” In these first sections, which rely a lot on dialogue, it’s hard to discern whether the characters are assholes or whether they’re lampooning assholes. 

Gabriel moves into his parents’ now-empty house under the pretense of clearing it out for sale. His brother and his wife need the money, but Gabriel’s listlessness and sentimental attachment to the home prevent him from completing the promised task. He also happens to be a writer struggling to make good on a £55,000 advance. Instead of tidying or writing, he drinks, smokes, self-medicates, and searches the house for—what? For the antidote to grief, for the essence of who his parents were, for his own origin story. Meanwhile, the house is rotting and coming apart. The walls are “peeling away from themselves,” the roof shingles are falling off, and mold is spreading everywhere.

Also, Gabriel’s skin is coming off his body in sheets. What the doctor on page one identified as a patch of eczema turns out to be a malady of a different order. When Gabriel grasps at the flaking skin on his chest it comes away painlessly in a “thick and translucent white flap.” He describes the process with bemused detachment. At the outset, this reads like a heavy-handed metaphor, but as Gabriel’s molting becomes more extreme, the whole novel sloughs realism like skin, edging body horror. When he pulls the skin from his hand, it comes away “like a glove of myself”; when he tries to masturbate, his whole penis dermis loosens and sheds. Perhaps uncertain what’s beneath all the layers, he burrows his thumb deep into his thigh, finding only more of himself. The wound festers. (See: mourning versus melancholia.) 

Traipsing around his childhood home with a sense of mild foreboding, he discovers enigmatic artifacts: a manuscript on his mother’s desk, a screenplay on his father’s desk, a VHS tape in the attic. The manuscripts—in addition to two stories published by his ex-girlfriend and pages of a book his grandmother is writing—are excerpted and embedded in the book, allowing Brat to spill far beyond the confines of the voice of the autofictional writer-dude with which it begins, subverting our (my) expectations. 

The discovered texts destabilize Gabriel’s assumptions about his life—and reality. His mother’s manuscript appears to be an autofictional account of an alternate version of her life, but each time he returns to read more of it, the story changes. In his dad’s page-turner of an unfinished television script, a group of university students discover a VHS tape of a 1970s sitcom called The Best Years of Our Lives, which also changes every time they watch it. The teens speculate that this has to do with “relativity,” that the sitcom may be “some kind of link to other universes.” The VHS tape from the attic—which, yes, changes each time Gabriel watches it—has footage of his young mother with a man who is not his father, and of her holding two children he doesn’t recognize. 

Back in what used to be stable reality, Gabriel meets a teenage brother-sister pair outside a gas station who seem to have emerged from one of the branching stories in his mother’s book—or maybe they’re the other kids in the footage, or in the script? Did his mother have another family? Are his parents his parents? Is anything he remembers real? Does it matter? His charming grandmother, a successful novelist, delivers evasive, cryptic lines about parallel universes and the fallibility of memory, yet she insists she doesn’t have “the answers.” “I know it’s all so upsetting,” she tells Gabriel. “But I do have Pink Panthers, or Custard Creams.” 

With his father gone and his mother’s memories becoming blank pages, Gabriel has lost his life’s two central witnesses. Yet he constantly remarks that he feels like he’s being watched, as if he both fears and desires to be haunted—or for his dad’s death to have been a cruel prank. Eventually a costumed watcher, identity never revealed, does emerge from the garden shed: “The man was dressed in a horrible mud-covered brown costume. The costume had its own fur. The fur was full of dried mud and attached plant matter, leaves, twigs, matted. And on his head he had a mask of a deer face. A woman deer, without antlers. Covering his whole head.” The literalism of the book’s uncanny events is what makes them so successful. Although it’s true that he’s drunk or high for the majority of the book, Gabriel doesn’t come across as unreliable. He’s not lying or hallucinating: these things are just happening. Maybe Gabriel’s grief is powerful enough to warp the whole world. 

This isn’t to say that everyone sees what he sees—as his brother puts it, Gabriel is “grieving very weirdly.” When the brother arrives at the house to demand Gabriel get his shit together, Gabriel convinces him to read their mother’s morphing manuscript . . . but now it’s just hundreds of title pages. The VHS tape glitches. Brother does not find these tricks amusing: “You need to see a fucking head doctor.” As they banter, it becomes obvious that the bitchy talk from the early section is part of their family lexicon, in which “Hey, fuck your mother,” or “Your dad’s a finook” are terms of endearment. Cruelty gives way to intimacy, or shows how these are twinned, and the siblings bond in their shared grief. Of the family overall: generically disaffected characters now seem lovable in their disaffections. Just as the characters reveal their provocations to be endearments, so does the book. It becomes earnest, even sentimental, in the best way: it expresses something conventional yet true. 

The many overlaps between the plot and the plots-in-plot have sinister edges, but while Gabriel’s galaxy brain expands and expands, he never becomes a red-yarn-style conspiracist. He’s too depressed to act like a detective; on some level he knows that there probably isn’t any buried family secret to uncover (much less the existence of a parallel universe). Finding mysteries—or inventing them—has been a way of keeping his father’s story alive. But death remains the irreducible, unsolvable mystery. There’s nothing to find out; that’s what’s so horrible about it. Part of the struggle in its aftermath is to stop hunting for answers and relinquish the need to remember everything. “People want their memory to be the real one,” his grandmother says, but “history is the opposite of memory.” The lack of payoff means that some of Smith’s efforts at manufacturing suspense molder in vibey territory, but Gabriel’s personal evolution is entirely rewarding. 

The book’s title comes from a T-shirt that Gabriel’s ex left behind, perhaps on purpose. At the end, the ex calls and tells him to grow up, and he kind of does. He gives most of his advance to his brother’s family and begins writing his book—incidentally, the very book the reader has just finished. In a satisfying move, it ends by repeating its first line; the story-within-a-story structure is complete. Of course this prompted me to circle right back to the start of the book. Had I arrived prejudicial or had the text really been repellant? Well, I did find the opening prose as juvenile as I had the first time, yet this time I read it with admiration and anticipation. Smith has pulled off a peculiar bildungsomething, in which the book grows up with the character.

Elvia Wilk is the author of the novel Oval (2019) and the essay collection Death by Landscape (2022; both Soft Skull Press).