Brat
A Novel
-
-
4.0 • 2 Ratings
-
-
- $7.99
Publisher Description
“Brat is a raucous story of the messy, messed-up business of living, dying and having a family.” —Financial Times
“The novel crackles with gothic horror, deadpan humor, and a damning sense of alienation that you won’t soon shake.” —Chicago Review of Books
From a provocative literary talent, a hilarious and haunted novel grappling with grief, inheritance, and the ghosts of his past
We meet our ill-tempered protagonist—the titular “brat”—at a low moment, but not yet at rock bottom. Gabriel is mourning the death of his father as well as a recent breakup and struggling to finish writing his second book. Alone and aimless, he agrees to move back into his parents’ house to clear it out for sale.
In fragments and figments, Gabriel takes us on a surreal journey into the mysteries of the family home, where he finds unfinished manuscripts written by his parents that seem to mutate every time he picks them up and a bizarre home video that hints at long-buried secrets. Strange people and figures emerge—perhaps directly from the novel’s embedded fictions—but despite his compromised state, Gabriel is determined to try to make sense of these hauntings. Part ghost story, part grief story, flirting with the auto-fictional mode while sitting squarely in the tradition of the gothic, Brat crackles with dead-pan humor and delightfully taut prose, heralding the next generation of fiction—formally inventive, influenced by the rhythms of the internet, and infused with a particularly Gen Z sense of alienation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Smith blends autofiction and absurdity in his provocative if underwhelming first novel, which follows a 20-something writer named Gabriel who's tasked by his mother with clearing out his childhood home and putting it up for sale after his father's death. Life is already tough for Gabriel. He's having trouble writing, and is heartbroken after a split from his girlfriend, also a writer, whose work is gaining popularity on the internet. Moreover, the top layer of Gabriel's skin has been peeling off for some unknown reason. Others believe it's only eczema, but he's not convinced ("It looked like a glove of myself"), and he copes by drifting through his days on Xanax. His father was a writer, and after finding manuscripts written by his mother, who lives in a nursing home, Gabriel learns she was one, too. Every time he picks up his mother's manuscripts, they seem to change. And not only that—the characters in his mother's stories come to life and warn him not to sell the house. Unfortunately, the intriguing plot is undercut by pedestrian prose ("I went out of my father's study and took half of one of the pink Xanax bars and lay down on the sofa and waited for my thoughts to turn off"). This doesn't quite match the scale of its ambition.
