There is something uniquely horrifying about being a thirteen-year-old girl. Everything that was once so benign and safe warps into a monstrous enemy, seemingly overnight. Your parents can’t understand you, your friends are ruthless, boys become strange and mean, and, worst of all, your body has betrayed you and is warping before your eyes. Dizz Tate’s debut novel Brutes deftly captures this transition with so much nauseatingly visceral description that one finds oneself palpably bracing to avoid getting too close.
This is not a wholesome coming of age tale, and the backdrop for Brutes is not a wholesome coming of age town. In Falls Landing, Florida, Tate has excelled in creating a claustrophobic space, where ‘there is a specifically Floridian smell, the stink of America (microwaved plastic, air freshener, hot oil) mixed with…something ancient, rotting, and sweaty, possibly life.’
Brutes recounts the day of Sammy’s disappearance and takes us to the dark underbelly of Falls Landing, residing beneath the still surface of its ominous lake.
Life in this town is seen through the eyes of six thirteen-year-old best friends from the Falls Landing apartments, who possess a symbiotic closeness that is only really possible at that age, where individuality is something to be cursed rather than celebrated. Their narrative perspective perfectly overlaps to become an interchangeable ‘we’: ‘we pretended to cry like girls who weren’t like us’. And like all thirteen-year-old girls, their actions are driven by obsession, from nail varnish and mysterious boys with a penchant for pyromania, to Sammy and Mia, two girls in the year above. ‘We all have our favourite character, Mia or Sammy. Leila does the best Mia. Christian does the best Sammy.’ Brutes recounts the day of Sammy’s disappearance and takes us to the dark underbelly of Falls Landing, residing beneath the still surface of its ominous lake.
The girls are always watching, and their eyes forensically examine Falls Landing; ‘saliva curl(ing) between lips’, ‘smudges in makeup’, the shape of skulls beneath heads, but also secret love affairs, where Sammy is hiding, the fragility of single moms, and Britney’s Dad’s suicide. ‘We squashed our faces against the glass of our own lives’. But thirteen-year-olds are not omniscient; Mia’s mom’s company, Star Search, and the chance to escape Falls Landing, is a blind spot in their vision. Here, Tate navigates child sexual abuse with great acuity; her metaphor of a dirtied bowl is heart-breaking in its sincerity: ‘You recognise the life’s work it will take to wash…it is not fair because it is not you who dirtied it. So you tip the bowl over and it breaks. You pretend it does not exist’. Tate’s interspersing of the girl’s adult lives throughout this reminds us that the monsters of childhood are never fully buried with our youth.
Tate’s narrative style ricochets between deep symbolism and blunt reality. Brutes is not always satisfying but, like the Floridian air, it is repulsively compelling and ‘achingly familiar, like a part of my own body that has been wrenched out and displayed’.
Words: Holly Gash
[Faber]
