Adult Malice and Childhood Savagery in Dizz Tate’s Debut “Brutes” https://ift.tt/kGPRzli
An early scene in Dizz Tate’s debut novel Brutes depicts a birthday party of teenage girls stuffing water balloons inside their shirts:
Leila told us that one girl had stuffed two balloons down the front of her bikini-top, and soon all the girls were running around with large, wobbling breasts. Then they started body-slamming each other to explode them.
The body-slammers are eighth-graders alongside Sammy Liu-Lou, the preacher’s daughter whose sudden disappearance sets the book’s events in motion. She’s quiet but captivating, and she uses this opportunity to debut her new, short hairstyle to a mixed reception. Too bad the eighth-grade boys weren’t invited or else Eddie, the heartthrob of Falls Landing, Florida, might’ve worked his charm.
The narrators of Brutes – the hive mind, first-person plural voice of seventh-graders Jody, Hazel, Isabel, Christian, Leila, and Britney – didn’t get the invite. No trouble, though. They’re curious enough to let Leila climb up a billboard and scope out the event. They’re fascinated with the scene, as they’re fascinated with anything out-of-the-ordinary, whether it’s a beautiful, mysterious teenage boy jumping into a crusty excuse for a pond or posing as sensitive masculine types on the internet to break other teenage girls’ hearts.
They crave any departure, cruel or kind, from the boredom of their suburban adolescence, one that’s spent auditioning for creepy talent agents and making their mothers cry. Their own view of the world is impressionistic, often surreal, conveyed well by another early passage in the book that describes snack time during Sammy’s search party:
We see mouths, mouths, and more mouths, chewing orange chicken, turkey mayonnaise, refrigerated brownie bites. Saliva curls between lips. Seeds burst in simultaneous blasts from rounds of tomatoes. Veins of fat swing loose. Wisps of lettuce hang limp. Mysterious specks burrow between large white teeth.
While Brutes seems to center around the missing persons case of Sammy Liu-Lou, this conflict often takes the backseat to how these seventh-graders wrestle with the fearful horizon of their impending adulthood. More weight is given to how these kids shock their parents, their town, and themselves than to the grief and stress over a missing child, which the seventh-graders may or may not know more about than they’re letting on.
Some of this youthful struggle involves the violent testing of boundaries, and the kids get labeled as the odd ones out because of it. “Brutes,” they say, “is what [our] mothers call us…when they want us to feel bad. It is what they call men they do not like, like our dads.” Their preoccupation with violence – whether it’s feeding baby birds to stray cats or stuffing dead wasps in their mother’s purses – codes them as outsiders, never the center of attention. Their cruelty sets them apart. It gives them a way of understanding the world that is unique and, in its own twisted way, quite poetic.
Other moments concern more general questions of growing up: what does it mean to be a good friend, and when should you even care? The Brutes narrators each try their best to find out, perhaps earlier than is good for them. Of course, children discover themselves by making mistakes and pushing social mores to their limits, and the seventh-graders in Brutes are no different. Their early 2000s childhood may mean they can take their feral experimentation to the internet and stalk their crushes on video blogs, but their story is the classic one of children never understanding their own strength.
In a perfect world, this kind of childhood freedom would see no consequences. All of it, however, is marred by the negligence and maliciousness of adults. The mothers in the book are never named. Instead, they operate as their own anonymous foil to the group voice, piping in with gossip and judgment. Other adults want to prey on their youth and scar them for life. One of the more memorable metaphors of the book compares the soul to a “bowl of still water” that is injected with a syringe full of human waste. The bowl breaks; the water’s contaminated forever, the damage irreparable.
Falls Landing, the Florida development town of questionable dreams and morals, begs to be left behind for greater fame and fortune. However, the price of exit may be more than the group can pay while retaining their innocence. As the book flashes forwards to the children’s adult lives, we get brief glimpses into how these escapes have played out. Some are lukewarm. Some are worse. The now-grown group of children obsesses over mythical lake monsters, failed relationships. They can take their kids to Christian theme parks, but they never fully escape the pain of their past.
It’s possible to see the frame of trauma and catastrophe of Brutes as a little rough around the edges, but Tate’s stylistic boldness and her uncanny portrayal of the blurred lines of childhood make the book an engrossing read.The novel does well in capturing the untamed weirdness of the early years – those embarrassing memories and strange humiliations that continue to haunt us as adults. Its ambition as a Floridian elegy for wild girlhood might miss the mark, but the vision of its writing and the eerie mood of its washed-up suburban setting are enough to carry the novel through a full arc to the finish line.
FICTION Brutes Dizz Tate
Catapult
Published February 7, 2023
Paperback February 13, 2024
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