Brutes, Total Floridian Immersion: a book review
Dizz Tate’s spectral, debut novel Brutes weighs drowsily on the reader with noxious slugs, drooping boughs of pink bougainvillea, and the ever-present threat of arson. It seized me bodily for three days without releasing its hold until I finished. This hypnotic snapshot of generational trauma swims in the unnameable, murky feelings of childhood. It is a stunning portrait of a struggling community, shaped by language so smooth and sweet, it reads like an overripe lullaby.
A gang of thirteen-ish-year-olds girls (and one boy) tell the story - as a collective, narrative group and as individuals - of the disappearance of an “older” girl whom they worship that goes missing in their stagnant Florida town of Falls Landing. As the eyes and sponges of everything that happens in this small community of spoiled American dreams, the girls know and observe all.
Being allowed into the dark, sacred space of young girls’ most nuanced feelings, the reader lies witness to the ways the powers that be have stuffed certain socio-economic classes with lies made of sugar and then left them to rot. (All of this viewed through a haze of dirty soles, bubble gum, cigarettes, nail polish, and budding bodies.)
The girls want to be destroyed in order to be loved. And they want to destroy. Young adolescence as portrayed in this particular telling is a vulnerable, heart-breaking moment that takes on such a charged beauty, it burns on contact. Tate paints the act of young girls growing their armor against the world as a soft, poetic initiation. She shows us what monsters are really made of, and that they are (poignantly) more digestible when manifested as a mythical creature hiding in the deep.
The search for the local, missing girl circles the town’s toxic lake but never penetrates it. Avoiding the dark truth, the town looks everywhere except the place they know it lies until they’re literally forced to go there. When the lake is finally searched and the fabled creature of the deep is pulled up, we find it to be sad, small - nearly dead - and full of tumors brought on by the chemical fertilizer polluting the untouchable water. This creature is not and has never been the source of the underlying fear in Falls Landing.
The feeling of theater that Tate invokes through the story arc distorts the narrative as if everything is blown up, like you can see it’s not all such a fuss as the characters are making. They’re just kids being kids. Until you realize there should be a big fuss. That it’s actually not big enough.
Brutes is a sharp commentary on what feels like, at first, a million things - motherhood, the patriarchy, the country, the south, childhood, adolescence, addiction - but the single word that keeps floating back to the surface for me is generational trauma. It’s about the inherited rot that remains until bravely confronted and extracted.
The swirling of the beauty and young sweetness of the narrative with the heaviness of content really is stunning. Brutes was an unexpected treasure in my summer reading lineup. I’ll be telling everyone to read it.
Some vibey undertones: The Virgin Suicides, The Heathers, Thirteen, Ghost World, Bunny, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape