The Comfort of Memory

Leo Lasdun reviews two debut novels at the end(?) of alt-lit: Gabriel Smith’s “Brat” and Matthew Davis’s “Let Me Try Again.”

By Leo LasdunAugust 29, 2024

• Fiction

IT LOOKS LIKE we’re coming to the end of “alt-lit.” The party’s over. People have had enough affectless prose, enough internet-mediated self-discovery, enough lowercase autofiction to last a lifetime. They’re tired of the style, but more importantly they’re tired of the sceney debutantes who write in it. Honor Levy got it bad (or good, if all press really is good press) in May when her short story collection My First Book dropped. Critics were mostly kind (see my eloquent and even-handed review in The Guardian), but the X (formerly Twitter) masses seemed ready to preside over her figurative execution. The objections to Levy’s internet-speak writing were crowded out by objections to her slightly obsequious profiles in The Cut and Interview. There were a number of Substack “articles” by prominent tweeters detailing how angry both her book and her “It girl” status made them. People are just sick of it.

Unfortunately for them, two debuts, which are being peddled as alt-lit, have just hit the market: Brat by Gabriel Smith, and Let Me Try Again by Matthew Davis. Both deal with crises brought about, in both books, by parental death and romantic desertion, and both gravitate toward (and sometimes suffer from) an unorthodox, indeed “alternative,” style. On the bright side for haters of alt-lit, “alt” is a spectrum, and these books, especially Davis’s, aren’t pushing the experimental envelope too far. Next to something like My First Book, Brat and Let Me Try Again read like Middlemarch. In fact, though Smith and Davis certainly write by their own rules, their novels might represent a little budge in the interests of young writers, away from the anti-traditional traditions of alt-lit and toward a more reverent and literary form.

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There’s something small in how he tells it, but the story in Gabriel Smith’s Brat is big. It is, amazingly, too big to be meaningfully summarized. But for propriety’s sake, here’s a diluted summary anyway: a young writer, also named Gabriel, flush with an advance from a book deal and recently dumped, hits rock bottom while freeloading in his childhood home (which he’s supposed to be preparing for sale) after his father dies and his mother is put in a nursing home. His skin peels off in sheets as he takes drugs, finds enchanted videotapes and morphing manuscripts, parties with the creepy local youth, and spies a deer-man who helps with the gardening. He doesn’t get any writing done.

Underneath the shifty druggy trappings, Brat is a family drama. “I just sat there on my childhood bed awhile staring into nothing,” writes Smith, about one of Gabriel’s many low moments. “It had started raining slightly outside […] I liked the sound it made. I opened the window so I could hear it better and heard the sound of the motorway too, far away.” Smith has a feel for the tense coziness of one’s childhood home—tense, especially, when it’s been totally vacated by one’s childhood. Gabriel is harangued constantly by his brother and his brother’s wife, who just want to get the place sold. But Gabriel isn’t ready yet. He’s still looking for the comfort of memory.

Gabriel is basically unable to communicate. Too sad. This is, of course, a problem—or at least it’s peculiar—in a first-person novel of which he is the narrator. Smith wants us to understand that Gabriel is too strung out to be emotive, or even descriptive. But also, he wants to describe a complex, secretly tender and sentimental story. So he makes a compromise, or really a settlement, one that heavily favors his dreary narrator at the expense of his eerie plot construction.

Smith writes plainly; he’s not stopping to smell any roses, descriptively speaking. There is simply a “disgusting chair” or a “fucked-up garden shed.” He does occasionally poke at mismatching wordplay—the “faraway sound of a nearby motorway,” or “a silent buzzing sound”—but Smith’s ideas and his language largely work against each other: the former baroque and imaginative, the latter dull and sober.

There are parts of Brat that occur outside the novel’s narrative: Gabriel reads a short story by his ex, reprinted in full; Gabriel reads an unfinished manuscript by his mother, reprinted piecemeal, and so forth. Smith writes a bit more suggestively in these episodes, in a voice less slavishly literal. He drops the veneer only when he’s impersonating someone else. “Rebecca looked down at her hands crossed over her bag in her lap as if she might see time growing there, a silky golden fur,” writes Gabriel’s mother. “I made a mouth noise,” writes Gabriel Smith. Again, it makes sense in a very technical way that this is how the bereaved Gabriel would communicate, but it still seems like a bleak proposition for a novel where plot functions almost as an excuse for flat writing.

The flatness might explain why some have, rather crudely, lumped Smith in with the “internet lit” scene (a subset of the hated “alt-lit” world) where flatness is a virtue and a tool used to varying effect. Brat is definitely not internet lit; Gabriel hardly uses the internet and, importantly, events happen in the real world—not online. It is tempting to explain Smith’s stylistic choices with a throwaway label like “internet lit,” but it’s not fair; one of Brat’s biggest credits is how analog it is. Smith’s influences, gestural as they may be, are more gothic than digital—things decay, memories take haunting physical shape—though his language doesn’t exactly call forth the greats (it is difficult, for example, to imagine Poe or Shelley writing “My balls were all up in me”).

In the end, Smith squares form and content in his own way—he is indeed a brat, petulantly refusing to write in the manner that might be expected of him. Fine, I’ll write a book, but I’m not gonna write it good. There is some novelty there, certainly, and up to a point (for me about 50 pages in, your mileage may vary), the narrative (or promise of a narrative) is just bizarre and fun enough to push things along. But by the time we arrive at Smith’s ending, in which Gabriel breaks through his melancholia and, renewed of his joie de vivre, starts writing—spoiler alert—the book we’re reading now, we’re left to wonder, Where is the book that such an energetic breakthrough should produce? Smith’s circular scheme doesn’t really make sense. Or maybe it does, but it’s not quite worth the trouble. Eventually the tank runs out, and you find there are still 250 pages of what, exactly, left?

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Philip Roth is dead. Saul Bellow is dead. The Coen brothers are divorced. Woody Allen is canceled. Curb Your Enthusiasm is over (and hasn't been funny for a few seasons anyway). What are we going to do? Two years ago, Joshua Cohen won the Pulitzer for The Netanyahus (2021), signaling a coming return of the comic Jewish novel, or at least some nostalgia for its heyday. But did anyone else feel like The Netanyahus skimped a little on the “comic” part? Like Cohen’s tongue wasn’t sufficiently stuffed in cheek? Too political? No?

Let Me Try Again, the debut from Matthew Davis, is much, much lighter fare than Cohen’s book, which details a bizarre encounter between a fictionalized Harold Bloom and Benzion Netanyahu at Cornell. But the novels are stitched from the same fabric. Davis’s incorrigible narrator Ross Mathcamp, a neurotic chimera of Jewish protagonists we know and love (or maybe hate), has dumped his great love Lora Liamant, in an ill-considered ploy to get her to stop smoking weed and to take him seriously. Ross is a true product of his epoch: neutered—“cucked,” he would say—by technology and convenience, and hyperaware of his own psychological complexes and physical health (he is constantly knocking back various pills and dietary supplements). As Ross’s Plot Against his Girlfriend unravels, his parents both die in a helicopter crash, leaving him with millions of dollars and custody of his younger sister. Let Me Try Again, beginning in earnest after these events, then takes the form of response to an evergreen prompt: what would you do if you hit the lotto?

For Ross, who can’t seem to get over Lora, the answer is to double down on his love scheme. He directs his funds toward his quest to become, in hopes of winning Lora back once and for all, a sort of Jewish Übermensch: jacked, cosmetically enhanced (but without rhinoplasty!), psychologically fortified—as Ross puts it, an “intimidating representative for my Race.” Like a young Seymour Levov, before all the wife and daughter stuff.

The Jewish novel, like the Jewish film and the Jewish TV show, has always sought to spoof itself, to make a point of self-reference and self-satire. Davis takes this navel-gazing to such an extreme place, writing with such a deft and instinctive sense of irony, that it’s sometimes hard to tell if he’s sending up tradition or just being incredibly reverent. “I am a Shylock drawing. I am sweaty and greedy and I spend every waking moment being terrified about money and women,” Ross complains to his shrink. Parody of Alex Portnoy? Homage to Alex Portnoy? It’s a horseshoe theory of irony: can someone be so ironic that he becomes sincere?

If Davis is coy with his feelings on the Jewish canon, his feelings about the culture shared by Zoomers and millennials, another of Let Me Try Again’s targets, are sharply and hysterically clear. Davis, who spent time blogging about consumer tech curios for The Verge, has a sense of the ridiculous lengths tech companies will go to with their quixotic innovations, and how these gadgets wreak havoc on the dopamine-addicted Zoomer brain. Ross is an absolute subject of tech tyranny. His sister brings home a cat, and Ross, allergic, responds with an army of robotic cleaning devices—“Maybe two thousand a month on air purifiers and robot vacuums? Does that sound like enough to you two?” Ross can’t even sleep without tech help; he needs his “HomePod and Watch” to wake him up, his “Oura Ring” for heart rate monitoring, and his “Dreem 2 headband” to measure sleep-brain activity.

The tech makes literal something intangible about Zoomers and millennials that we cringe at reflexively: an overnurtured helplessness, a grating, too-smiley enthusiasm for meaningless causes and signifiers. Ross is excitedly told by a woman on a date that she has “just published a new info-graphic today. For Pride Month.” Davis’s hopes for his protagonist are shared with those of his Jewish predecessors: to transcend the petty shackles of his modern moment, to fortify his spirit through resistance to an ever-mounting catastrophe—what Bellow called the great “effor[t] to keep the nucleus of being intact.” The trouble is that Davis can’t quite do that himself. Just like Ross, he is withered by modernity, tethered to an unfortunate literary fashion of detachment (see Brat, reviewed above). Bellow struggled similarly in his early works, telling The Paris Review he was “timid” in the face of “the incredible effrontery of announcing myself to the world […] as a writer and an artist.” His first two novels, which are not thought to be very good (although I am remembering a vivid hypnosis scene in Dangling Man), encountered the same problems of voicelessness and capitulation to a style to which their author didn’t really subscribe.

Davis’s writing is timid too. He won’t commit to Ross as a character the way Roth committed to Portnoy or Bellow to Herzog. Novels like these—which follow F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous dictum that “character is plot, plot is character”—serve as Davis’s model. But he doesn’t have a strong-enough sense of who Ross is. His likes (Lora, dietary supplements, etc.) and dislikes (online dating, weed, etc.) are about as far as we get. It’s like a sense of interiority would be embarrassing, would be too unseemly a thing for Davis to offer. Ross’s final moment of self-discovery, the soul-saving climax, feels rushed and removed too. After stalking Lora to a date with her new boyfriend, Ross realizes that he has gone too far. In a few sentences, he gets over Lora and the book is effectively finished. He bids farewell “to this idea of Lora Liamant, the mission of Lora Liamant, Lora Liamant my White Whale, etc, etc.” Davis is aware that his ending disappoints, and so he turns it into a joke: once his very short transcendence is complete, Ross buys a “low-glycemic lemonade,” which, he says, “failed to deliver a satisfying ending … I mean … taste.” It’s funny, and there are many moments like it in Let Me Try Again, where Davis (often quite nimbly) turns the book’s shortcomings into humor, but, just like Brat, it’s a bleak proposition for a novel. Here, character is not plot, plot isn’t character, and we are left wishing for a bit more of both.

Despite all this, and despite how annoying he is, we root for Ross by the end of Let Me Try Again. Similarly, we might find ourselves rooting for Davis, who is observant, willing to offend with his observations, and funnier than the great majority of working novelists. Let Me Try Again, though it suffers from Davis’s self-consciousness, feels auspicious. Bellow threw off his timidity in grand fashion, finally asking, “Why should I force myself to write like an Englishman or a contributor to The New Yorker?” One hopes for, and can easily imagine, such a triumph in Davis’s future.