How Gabriel Smith
Wrote the Book of
the Summer
The first-time novelist on what he talks about with his therapist, the language of his “idiot” protagonist, and editing in Italy.
- By: Paul Thompson
- Photographed by: Adam Powell
Gabriel Smith, the 28-year-old London-based novelist whose Brat is earmarked as one of the literary events of the summer—the summer of brat, if you will—is comfortable letting things bleed. The book, which is published by Penguin in North America and was shaped in part by the late Tyrant Books founder Giancarlo DiTrapano, follows a protagonist—a young novelist named “Gabriel,” naturally—back to the decaying childhood home he’s been tasked with cleaning out for sale. While there, his skin peels off in broad sheets, sores open on his limbs, afternoons dilate or contract until they disappear entirely. The edges of that protagonist’s reality become porous, too: Videotapes and manuscripts left behind by his late father and ailing mother seem to mutate with every new appraisal. Visitors stop by, some metaphysical and others mundane.
There is a prevailing sense throughout Brat that at least some people, and perhaps all of us, have come unstuck in time. With prose that’s spare and epigrammatic (though never to the point of distraction), Smith underlines this suspicion, not only through plot and setting, but with the very shape of the book. “I’m so interested in how samples are used,” he says, referring to the musical technique of repurposing old songs or sounds in new recordings, both “in an echoing-through-time type of way, but also structurally.” The novel flits between the narrative proper, a pair of paper manuscripts, a short story published online, and a screenplay, as well as descriptions of an ever-molting VHS tape. For Smith, this technique evokes “the political reasons, or consequences, or symptoms of living in an age where everything that’s found to be profitable is repeated endlessly. Being haunted at once by the past and the impossibility of alternative futures.”
I spoke with Smith about his debut, an award-winning short story, and the encroaching threats posed by the internet and the natural world.
Photographed by: Adam Powell. Top Image: Author image courtesy of Penguin Press.
Paul Thompson
Gabriel Smith
You and I are speaking about 12 hours after the Charli XCX album came out. Have you listened yet?
Yes, I have. I think it’s wonderful. I’m glad it’s getting great reviews as well. She’s a superstar, man.
When I saw your tweet with the fake email from her, I laughed—it’s funny! What do you make of the people who seemed sincerely upset or defensive about it? Are they just not very bright, or is there something uniquely unsettling about being tricked online?
I think it’s probably a mixture. I would hesitate to call anyone not very bright because we’re all smart in different ways, blah blah blah. But, I think with online stuff, you see something fun and you just want to believe it, right? It was a fun thing to believe is true, maybe. A willful suspension of disbelief would be a generous way to put it, I think.
And the puncturing of that is annoying or upsetting.
Yeah, sure. I mean, if you’re a fucking idiot [laughs]. But you know, with pop music, people like to defend their people on the internet. That’s part of the fun, right?
In an interview with The Millions, you mentioned how in the Drake and Kendrick Lamar beef, gossip is really the currency. Centering themselves in gossip has in many ways overtaken all other forms of promotion for artists. Do you feel pressure to be a provocative public figure?
I think there’s always a pressure to be interesting, and that’s probably always been true—I’d hate to be a bad conversationalist. But that’s true in social settings as well, so maybe that’s not unique to the promotional cycle. I actively enjoy, in a loving way, making fun of things and people and doing little tricks and being annoying. That’s something I actually enjoy—in a very wholesome way. I don’t feel pressure. It’s something I do talk to my therapist about [laughs]. As a way of relating to the world, maybe it’s not that healthy. But I’m sure a lot of people do feel pressure. If it comes from an insincere place, if you’re not just trying to have fun, it doesn’t land. Audiences aren’t stupid, right?
I want to talk about the development of Brat. When a version of a scene from this book was published in Hobart, it said it was an excerpt from a novel. The year prior, in Tyrant, it didn’t say the same. With that earlier piece—were you thinking of it as a finished short story?
It was not part of a long-form project. That was one of the first short stories I ever wrote, the Tyrant one. Do you know Clancy Martin? Really great writer. I’d been sending him fan mail since I was a teenager, reading his stuff in Vice when he was writing for them. I sent that story to him, because I think he had just had a book out with Tyrant? I was like, “Hey Clancy, look what I did!” And he emailed back saying, “This is great, and I could spend a lot more time with those characters.” And so from there, I was like, if Clancy says he could do that, then I should write a book where I fill in some of the blanks that maybe I’m imagining would exist in this story.
At what point did you develop a relationship with Gian and Tyrant?
I’d sent him fan mail once or twice when I was a teenager and I had the parasocial relationship one has with someone who puts out work that you really love. I wrote this book—I didn’t know Gian at this point, I didn’t think it was very Tyrant; it was quite a mannered and English novel. To me, anyway, it didn’t quite fit. I signed with an agent in London, and he was sending it out to more traditional publishers—where I also didn’t really feel it would fit very well. So in August 2020, I emailed it to Gian on the contact email from the Tyrant website. “Hey, I wrote this thing from a story that was in your magazine. I just kind of want your blessing to take it out into the world so I’ll feel better selling it to these publishers I don’t necessarily respect that much.” I didn’t hear anything back for a couple of weeks. Then he started emailing me quotes from the book, and saying, “You’ve got to come out to Italy, we’ve got to edit this together.”
What was it like editing with him in Italy?
I was completely starstruck. Pretty much the only time I’ve been completely starstruck. And it was strange because it was COVID. In Rome, there was a curfew at night, so you couldn’t be out on the street. And then his place is this castelletto halfway between Rome and Napoli. It’s this very beautifully haunted place. And then being with this person I’d admired was utterly bizarre. I was just trying to learn as much as possible from him without annoying him with too many questions, which I’m sure I ended up doing. The actual editing: He was a strange combination of a great line editor and a great vibes editor. We talked a lot; we didn’t go through the text so much. We both liked a lot of the same music, and getting drunk and stuff [laughs]. We became friends very easily; we got distracted very easily as well.
Courtesy of Penguin Press.
When it comes to things haunting and recurring: I read “The Complete” almost immediately before I read Brat. I started distrusting my own memory; the image of a deer, car wrecks, I couldn’t remember where they came from. Do you have fixations that are hard to keep out of whatever you’re working on?
To an extent, definitely. I think every artist is guilty of basically telling the same story over and over again. It’s particularly apparent in “The Complete,” which is the first chapter of the novel I’m working on at the moment, because it was, or is, very much a novel about grieving Gian and grieving this first novel that at the time I didn’t think would ever see the light of day. That was partially a conscious choice, a joke to myself, because that’s a grief story as well, right? It’s much more about Gian specifically and, you know, my own career, which I assumed was never going to be resurrected in any way. That’s why those images specifically recur. But I also find it hard to get away from other things.
In “The Complete” and Brat, writers have trouble finishing projects. How difficult do you find it? What intrudes?
I have terrible ADHD, so I always want to be writing a billion different stories. I find it incredibly hard to stay focused, which is the reason for the embedded and unfinished stuff in both projects. Part of the structural stuff I do is just a consequence of that. I find it very hard to focus on one narrative. I’m pretty good at finishing stuff, actually. I get up every morning and do my words, and I don’t feel good until they’re done. But I’m constantly taunted and tempted by other stuff I could be working on.
Have you found any strategies that keep you locked in?
It’s a constant struggle. I get up every morning and do 500 words; it’s like a muscle which you have to train. If I incorporate stuff, if I find a way to connect the images I’m interested in to whatever I’m working on at that time and not dive into some new stupid thing constantly. The longer the project, the more difficult that is.
In Brat, there is little distinction between decay and growth—skin falls off, walls crumble, plants overgrow, mold proliferates—seemingly opposite processes that both seem to threaten characters’ lives as they understand them. Do you have any strong feelings for or aversion to the natural world?
I was raised vegetarian, so I have a deep love and affection for all living things [sighs] as most people do. But encoded in that love is the terror of seeing everything decay. I felt really bad just now because I brushed a beetle off my shoulder and harmed it slightly. The natural world is horrific. And you’re part of that, which makes it doubly horrific. So at once a love and aversion.
There’s one piece of language I wanted to talk about in specific terms. So many of the narrator’s descriptions are so specific, but you get so much mileage out of “fucked” and “fucked up” as an adjective. I see other writers doing the same thing, but your narrator gets more utility out of it than nearly anyone.
I think the rhythm of that phrase is so great. That’s a big part of it: It just feels good to read. And also, the protagonist, he’s kind of an idiot. Or at least, he’s so grief-stricken that he can’t write. It would have been not just disingenuous but bad writing if his descriptions were more verbose. But it’s also just how I think. I was reading Tao Lin a lot as a teenager, and I’m almost sure I stole that from him.
I’ve read some American critics compare Brat to David Lynch. Which I don’t think is wrong, but that’s such a reflexive thing for us here; the book doesn’t use the sort of dream logic Lynch does. The most upsetting aspect of the book, though, is from dreams: when the brother would disbelieve or wave away the narrator’s experience. Is that feeling—of screaming when nobody can hear you—a core fear of yours?
That’s exactly what I was thinking of, yeah. One of my recurring dreams is I have to care for a litter of kittens or something and people keep almost stepping on them. So, yes, absolutely. It’s always in relation to helping someone else rather than myself, the monster’s never coming to get me specifically, it’s more: Please be careful.
A rich area for therapy.
It is, yes—a very fucking rich area.
Charli XCX attends the Met Gala afterparty on May 2024. Getty / Photography: MEGA/GC Images.
Paul Thompson is a senior editor at The Los Angeles Review of Books. He has written for Rolling Stone, GQ, New York Magazine, Pitchfork, and The Washington Post, among other publications.
- By: Paul Thompson
- Photographed by: Adam Powell
- Getty / Photography: MEGA/GC Images
- Book cover + Author image: Courtesy of Penguin Press
- Date: June 18, 2024
