28-year-old Gabriel Smith’s haunting debut novel Brat is both terrifying and, at turns, laugh-out-loud funny. PETER DAVIS meets the literary world’s newest star in New York.
Author Gabriel Smith
The word “BRAT” is ominously taped on author Jon-Jon Goulian’s front-hall wall in electric-blue gaffer’s tape. Nearby, “DON’T SELL THE HOUSE,” in bold, block letters, reads like a ransom note. Goulian, his head shaved and sinewy body well-tatted, has set the stage in his duplex Greenwich Village apartment for a book party honoring 28-year-old British novelist Gabriel Smith’s literary debut, titled, well, Brat.
Downstairs, piles of Brat are arranged on a coffee table with herds of miniature toy deer seemingly guarding the tomes. Smith, tall and bullish, holds court among friends and fans—hip, young writerly types who crowd an open window puffing cigarettes and vapes. Nearby, a table is stocked with more toy deer and glass bowls of candy: gummy worms, sour rainbow strips, and morsels of milk chocolate. In the alley kitchen, boxes of Manischewitz matzo crackers and Sanka instant coffee jars flank the open shelves like a weird Pop Art project.
“My parents are writers and I tried really hard not to be in the family business as a rebellion type thing.”
Gabriel Smith
Brat, a modern gothic tale Smith finished in January 2020—when he was 24—has made the first-time author the toast of the literary world in London and now New York. Smith’s novel was originally published as a short story called “Some Cliffs, Which Overlooked Some Sea” in 2018 in the online literary magazine New York Tyrant. “It was the first story I ever wrote,” Smith tells me when he visits the Avenue office. He’s scruffy and affable. A stag-head pin (deer play a big role in the book) is fastened to the narrow lapel of his loose-fitting blazer. “My parents are writers and I tried really hard not to be in the family business as a rebellion-type thing,” he says, noting that stepping away from, rather than into, a creative future is, “the opposite of how people usually rebel.”
Still, Smith got the writing bug. “Something just broke in my brain,” he explains with a smirk. He quit his job in marketing at a London tech company and sent the story to writer Jordan Castro, who was the editor of Tyrant until 2021. “My parents were so happy. It was funny because they’re meant to be cross when someone quits their job to pursue a creative endeavor, but they were like, ‘Thank God!’” Smith then emailed the story to the Canadian novelist and philosopher Clancy Martin, who he had been sending fan mail to for years. Martin immediately wrote back and told Smith that he could spend more time with the characters in the story. “If Clancy says that, then I better write a book of it,” Smith remembers.
In a nod to autofiction, the novel’s deadpan protagonist is named Gabriel. He’s the “brat” of the story—a 20-something writer struggling with a recent breakup, the death of his father, and an inability to finish his second novel, for which he’s received a sizable advance. Emotionally lost and physically unmoored from his previous life, Gabriel vacates his London flat and moves into his family’s hulking, crumbling house in the country. It is filled with unfinished manuscripts from Gabriel’s parents, who are also writers. The home starts to break apart—floors feel “soft” as Gabriel shuffles down halls, the flora outside grows rapidly, enveloping the house like poisonous vines. Mold starts appearing everywhere.
At the same time, Gabriel’s skin starts peeling off his body—the skin on his hand molts away in an almost perfect sheet. “It didn’t hurt. I looked at it. It looked like a glove of myself,” Smith writes. His sarcastic, somewhat bullying older brother blows off the creepy condition as simple eczema (a running joke throughout the novel) and tells Gabriel to see a dermatologist and get a cream to make it all go away. “I remember thinking about the face mask scene in the movie American Psycho,” Smith says. “The girl I was dating at the time was using a lot of face masks. It just felt horrific. And the house peels away as well. I always work in doubles. It’s important in stories to mirror things as much as possible. Readers get off on that.”
Gabriel’s brother just wants him to get the house ready to sell, but Gabriel has zero motivation to put his childhood home on the market. The house is the only thing that seems to keep him alive. Instead, he oversleeps and boozes, smokes pot and pops Xanax, sometimes with the two strange teenagers he meets at a local convenience store who oddly appear in the kitchen like unexpectedly welcome visitors. He also gets into fights, which his grandmother, the one reliably reasonable character, notices when he visits her, as he’s beaten black and blue. To make everything spookier, Gabriel becomes consumed with the haunting suspicion that he is being watched by a man in a deer mask who lurks in the foliage at the edge of the property like a malicious spirit.
“Do you know about dybbuk?” Smith asks. “It’s a Jewish ghost, a wandering spirit. They have to stay on earth because their funeral rights were interrupted when they died. That felt like a good analogy for the grieving process where you’re trying to exorcize something, but you can’t.”
Stories within stories break up the novel and are presented in parts or in full. Gabriel discovers his mum Rebecca’s manuscript, about a woman who dies in a car accident (Smith’s real-life mother is also named Rebecca); his father’s script about friends who watch a videotape of a sitcom whose plot mysteriously changes with each viewing; and his ex-girlfriend Kei’s published short stories (one stars a Russian oligarch who likes to buy then masturbate on the faces in famous paintings). Many of these mini books could sprout into novels of their own. “I have all these ideas for books I want to write,” Smith says. “But I have terrible ADHD. I have a terrible time staying on topic. One of Henry James’ rules was don’t start something new until you’ve finished what you’re doing.”
To finish Brat, Smith rented Airbnb’s in the cheapest European locales he could find on a map. “Post-industrial shipping towns where there used to be a lot of work, then there wasn’t,” he explains. “I like the haunted quality of that. I wanted the book to not be political, but to have elements of critiquing the systems that led to that stuff. That’s the kind of town that the protagonist is living nearby, and I grew up in a town like that.” Smith spent some time writing in Athens, in a neighborhood that had seen better days. “I’d just go for a month on my own. I didn’t know anyone so I couldn’t have fun and get distracted by friends—just shut out from socializing. It was productive.”
“I have all these ideas for books I want to write. But I have terrible ADHD. I have a terrible time staying on topic. One of Henry James’ rules was don’t start something new until you’ve finished what you’re doing.”
Gabriel Smith
When Smith completed Brat, he worked with New York Tyrant editor Giancarlo DiTrapano. “He was my hero since I was 16,” Smith says. His eyes dart upward toward the ceiling as if looking for something. “The stuff Gian published was the first time I’d ever been like, oh, books can be cool. When I signed with an agent in London, I sent it to Gian just to be like, ‘Can I get your blessing?’ A couple of days passed, and he started emailing me quotes from it.” DiTrapano told Smith to fly to Italy to work on Brat together.
Smith went to Naples, and they worked on the manuscript side by side. “It was the first and only time I’ve been starstruck by someone. We became quite close. We worked on it for six months afterward online.” DiTrapano planned to publish the novel with Tyrant Books but died in New York at age 47 in March 2021. “I’d be sad had I never met him,” Smith says. His eyes well up. “It was my only literary aspiration to have something out with Tyrant or edited by him. I was not very sober for about six months after that happened. My friends were very kind to me. A blessing is you don’t realize how kind people will be to you if something bad happens. I’ve got a lot of very good friends, it turns out.”
As Brat takes the world by storm, Smith, who recently got engaged to a fashion model, is finishing up his next novel The Complete, based on his O. Henry Prize-winning short story of the same name. “It’s monstrous,” he says of his second book. “It’s like a million fucking pages. At the moment, it’s a history of fascism. I wanted to create a structure to jump to Moscow or Japan and the Second World War or anywhere you want. It’s completely nonlinear.”
Without revealing too much, Brat ends where it begins—a shapeshifting, often-terrifying, yet comical trek through Gabriel’s disconnected, chaotic life in the house he refuses to let go of. Just as Gabriel’s epidermis peels, Smith’s novel sheds part of Gabriel’s pain-stricken past, revealing a future that, while not perfect, is hopeful as the darkness gives way to light.
