The New Yorker:

New works by the Zoomer and young millennial writers Gabriel Smith, Frankie Barnet, and Honor Levy share gonzo premises, bizarre imagery, exuberantly “unlikable” characters, and an eye-rolling contempt for the status quo.

By Katy Waldman

Goodbye forever, brat summer. Thanks to you, slime green has joined the viral-color pantheon alongside minion yellow and millennial pink. When our fairy bratmother, the pop star Charli XCX, named her sixth album “brat,” she inaugurated a season of performative abandon and luxe, hedonistic trashiness. “Seeming a little immature, a little selfish, a little nasty, has taken on an air of glamor,” the critic Spencer Kornhaber observed in June. Charli XCX characterized the vibe as “a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter, and a strappy white top with no bra.”

In literature, the brat spirit still courses through new works by the Zoomer and young millennial writers Gabriel Smith, Frankie Barnet, and Honor Levy. Smith and Levy, both of whose protagonists identify as “brats,” are protégés of the downtown New York impresario Giancarlo DiTrapano, whose imprint, Tyrant Press, originally acquired their respective débuts, “Brat,” and “My First Book.” Barnet—at thirty-four, the oldest of the three—lives in Montreal and shares Smith and Levy’s interest in sad, extremely online twentysomethings. The books have in common gonzo premises, bizarre imagery, exuberantly “unlikable” characters, and an eye-rolling contempt for the status quo. Smith’s title character wears vomit-stained tees and jokes about killing his mother; in his Xanny dreams he hangs out with a deer-person wielding rusty shears. “My First Book” is a rainbow grenade of based waifus and raw-milk-chugging looksmaxxers, of parables about cancellation, of seemingly unedited reflections on status, social media, and how “reality is what we make it.” “Mood Swings,” by Barnet, features animal uprisings and venture capitalists investing in time travel. One protagonist “chews with her mouth open and has no ambitions,” while another sets fire to his girlfriend’s apartment so that they can move in together—details that do nothing to dispel the impression that, somewhere in brat-lit headquarters, gleeful scientists are growing terrible new types of antihero. The authors can feel like digitally supercharged heirs to the original literary Brat Pack: writers like Jay McInerney, Donna Tartt, Bret Easton Ellis, and Tama Janowitz, who wrote jittery, minimalistic prose full of glamour and anomie. Here, though, there’s an even stronger implication that all of the characters exist in a place where identity has come unmoored, where everything is performance. One might be tempted to call this place the Internet, but, more accurately it’s the lifeworld that the Internet has created and is a part of.

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