On the first page of Dizz Tate .’s debut novel brute forceA 14-year-old girl has gone missing in Falls Landing, Florida, where screams from nearby amusement parks echo through the air and an ominous lake separates the walled development from buildings. Degraded apartment towers.
The missing girl, the daughter of a TV preacher named Sammy Liu-Lou, had been living hidden behind the high white walls of the development, and her disappearance was an instant disaster. to sue. The women who appeared to be “built for the church, wearing pale skorts and sweaters” put on their headlights and dashed into the summer night in search of the girl, avoiding the glittering black lake like an oil slick.
But while “Where is she?” transparent repetition brute force like a spell, this is not a book primarily concerned with finding Sammy. Instead, Tate ignored the missing-girl joke and made the much more compelling choice of focusing his lens on a group of 13-year-old girls accustomed to being in the background. “No one looks at us and this gives us a brute force,” the girls narrate as one. They watched the town campaign from the window of their apartment the night Sammy went missing, binoculars showing them everything. “We always knew where Sammy was,” the girls said, but no one would have thought to ask them.
Much brute force unspools in this enchanting plural first person, in the hive mind of five girls and an odd boy (considered one of them) — Leila, Britney, Jody, Hazel, Isabel, and Christian — the who burned his bare feet while crawling on the “white hot pavement” and uncovering the secrets of the town. They are famous brutes who love to perform malicious stunts to strengthen their relationship. In putting the reader in the collective view of the girls, brute force takes a unique and stylistically ambitious approach to the pressing subject of girls in danger.
Tate perfectly captures the simultaneous impatience and vagaries of girlhood, where you feel as if you’re getting older by the day but still being left behind “small kids with backpacks.” big lot behind, like invisible to them now.” The girls start stalking Sammy out of a desire to step out of their own lives, which makes them uncomfortable and itchy like overly tight restraints. Not only is Sammy richer and a year older, but she’s also got some attention-grabbing moves – shaving off the “curtain” of her dark hair and joining forces with Mia, whose mother runs Star. Search, an expensive show that promises auditions with a Hollywood star. Casting agent. The girls read Sammy and Mia’s tea-leaf color-changing nail polish, hoping to break the code to eventually get noticed and opt into Star Search’s recruiting: “We pressed our faces to our own glass. Our lives. Is this it?… We’ve filled our days with watching them, watching them, waiting to be invited in.”
EQUAL brute force As they progress, Tate alternates gripping chapters of “us” with each girl’s wacky forays into the future, delving into how they are individually haunted by what happened over the summer. when Sammy disappeared. The first chapter in the singular first person spans about a quarter of the novel, jerking the reader out of his dream and revealing that the hive mind has not manifested itself intact. Because the girls don’t grow much as individuals in the “we” chapters – after all, they never want to be alone or disagree – I find myself turning the pages to remind who is Hazel, the first girl to buy for herself. voice. I wonder if the masses are too large for such a split. Ultimately, however, these fast-forwards color the novel’s current action ominously, as the search for Sammy continues, the girls approach Mia, and the dangers and possibilities of girlhood sparkles at the edge.
A predictable move that Tate made brute force? While Mia distributes Star Search business cards to girls she thinks are pretty enough to model, a sleazy photographer named Stone is the real janitor, and the girls win approval. his advantage in his glittering pink house behind the development’s walls. Thankfully, instead of detailing Stone’s misdeeds, Tate focuses her commentary on how the town’s culture has facilitated him. In Falls Landing, swamp rot and decay lurks under every cover.
Much more unusual than Stone, and therefore much more intriguing, is the polluted lake and its mysterious role in Sammy’s disappearance and the girls’ haunting. In its eerie stillness and stench, the lake holds a dark secret of its own. By dyeing brute force With the murky waters of the lake, Tate adds depth and welcomes the eerie to what could have been a more ordinary nightmare.
Kristen Martin is working on a book about orphanage in America for Bold Type Books. Her posts have also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Believer, The Baffler, and other places. She tweets at @kwistent.
