A review by girlpdf
Brutes by Dizz Tate

1.0

narcisistically obsessed with its own incomprehensible, paradoxical images, brutes amounts to a series of shallow aesthetic choices. the novel is exemplified by its snatches of conversation where every piece of dialogue, if it is not a mere four words long, is cut off preemptively before it can get to its subject. packed with clumsy sentences, naked statements of character intent — "we felt X", "we thought Y" — and inexplicable interactions that were empty of whatever weight they allegedly should have held (when leila kissed mia i let out a huff of unconvinced laughter; when gum exchanged mouths for the twelfth time i felt something akin to agony), brutes is an exercise in utter pretension. LOL!

the experience of reading this novel (which i did in one sitting) amounted to a disorienting show of nothingness. alone, this statement is not condemnatory; it is possible to write beautifully about listlessness, ennui, hollowness, the desperation to leave the emptiness of your life behind. on top of that, truly good writing often disorients its reader. but i cannot orient myself in brutes not because of an influx of information which requires my attention, but because reading it feels like a viewmaster clicking, clicking, clicking at such a speed that i grow apathetic. it is a disorientation that comes not from failing to understand, but from not being asked to understand a damn thing in the first place! it is an emptiness that is not about emptiness — it is just itself. reading brutes i felt as if my head was swaddled in gauze, as if there was a thin film over my eyes preventing me from seeing, from feeling.

the idea of emptiness, the image of emptiness — even these feel like generous descriptions of this book. there is no heart. the girls tell you the emotions they feel — anger, shame, jealousy — and these emotions are flavourless, invisible, inconsequential, floating about without impact, only labels. that they tell us they feel these emotions is the only evidence we have of them in the text. the novel fluctuates between reality and fantasy artlessly, its allegories and metaphors weak, uninspired. 

i'm astounded at the comparisons this novel has drawn. the florida project, with its detailed, saturated exploration of the humanity of those living in poverty — their meanness, their generosity, their wicked humour, their deep love, their irresponsibility and their dignity. the virgin suicides, an ambitious and powerfully reflexive consideration of what it means to look and to write and to exhibit, of what it is to steal girls and turn them into fantasies, of the marks those girls in turn leave on their viewers — of how looking transforms you. brutes' exploration of poverty’s citizens consists of a hollow stencil-girl, replicated over and over again without variation. i am being completely honest when i say i struggle to differentiate any of the characters, any of them, in a meaningful way (beyond age or gender). worse, its consideration of voyeurism ends in a shrug and a convoluted, graceless attempt to confront sexual violence.

 

(major aside BUT david lynch died the day i read this… i'll never forget the living, horrific, fleshy reality with which he told a story about sexual violence, about being closely watched and therefore unprotected, about the girlish war between the grotesque and the pretty and the desperation of a child who wants only to be in control of her own life. to read this book on the day he died really brought into stunning clarity tate's total failure. LOL 2! miss you forever mr lynch.)

another thought: the virgin suicides worked because it was about the lisbon sisters, who were the subject of the collective narration’s gaze. of course, through their obsessive watch of the sisters alongside the odd act of reflection, the gang of boys revealed themselves, their wants, their failures. brutes is about the watching brutes, with cursory glances outwards but none of that sharp clarity of the virgin suicides. it tries to do too much; it stuffs itself with narrative and allegory and a gaze that oscillates wildly both broadly outward and shallowly inward. this is its biggest failure, and the source of that disorienting emptiness.

combine all of this with some of the clumsiest, ugliest prose i've encountered recently — i mean, "the mall parking lot looks spectacular, vast and white-tipped, like an ocean that we are not afraid of because we know exactly what it is" — and this book brought me despair. pretentious in the truest, truest sense of the word. what dismay i feel at this shallow image of girlhood — the only feeling this clumsy, irritating, vacuous novel managed to wrestle out of me.