Is it the summer of the brat?

What’s the deal with brats this summer? June has brought us Brat the novel, Brat the album, and Brats the documentary . We at Lit Hub have decided this cannot be a coincidence. And to understand this phenomenon, we must consider the word’s cultural freight. So what is a brat, exactly? Some free association, towards a unifying theory: the word ‘brat’ makes me think of a peripatetic existence — because, military. That same affiliation casts a lightly noble light on the word. Following this tip, might we locate a brat in the collision of the nomadic and the dutiful. Is one definition, ‘the lone reed who speaks unpopular truth to power?’ Was Bartleby a brat ? Or Sethe? Cassandra? Of course, this doesn’t quite get at the word’s negative associations. My colleague Molly Odintz has another theory: that the word ‘brat’ is a dark minion of The System, i.e., an oppressive tool designed to quash rebellious spirits — particularly if these spirits emanate from femme people. She claims that in literature, the brat is in cahoots with the bildungsroman, where its rhetorical function is to staple rebellion to coming-of-age. This narrative has evil effects because it lets our overlords write all resistance off as a nuisance. Childish folly from dumb hormone bags. Under this umbrella, we might define brat as a naysayer who plays poorly with others, to his or her social detriment. See Holden Caulfield, screaming “phony” all over New York. Or really, any bildungsroman with an unruly protagonist. Which brings us to England’s it-book of the summer: a Gen Z “spin on modern ennui” from the debut novelist Gabriel Smith. Note: I have not read this book. But in a scathing review for The Baffler , Rhian Sasseen took Brat to task for its affect. “Too many moments in the novel come off as a self-aware thumbing of the nose,” she wrote. And elsewhere, in a wonderfully withering line, “It mistakes provocation as inherently substantive.” It struck me that this diagnosis could describe a lot of literary youths — though it would contradict my first definition. Is […]

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