The Brooklyn Rail

Smith’s new novel is set in a possible future—one that seems horrifyingly possible in our current world. Told primarily in the voice of the young nonbinary Bri (short for Briar/Brice), the story is one of brutal oppression, state surveillance, but also hope. At the opening of the novel, Bri(ar) and their younger sister are already living on the margins. Their unnamed mother was a corporate whistleblower who refused to allow her children access to smartphones, making them “unverifiable” in a data-driven state. Their mother has taken a menial job at a hotel in another country, covering for her sister who is too ill to work. Her partner Leif takes the children back to their home only to find it’s been outlined in red paint—a state-driven process that effectively “erases” people and places and is reminiscent of the perhaps more subtle unhousing caused by gentrification. Escaping in their camper van, they stay overnight in a parking lot and wake to their van outlined in red. Leif then leaves the two kids alone in an abandoned house with forty-two cans of food. He’s off to retrieve their mother, taking their passports with him.

Once Leif leaves, Bri tries to maintain some sense of order including rationing their food but Rose isn’t interested in following rules. Instead, she befriends a grey horse in a nearby field—part of a group of horses destined for slaughter. Bri attempts to protect their sister from additional loss but Rose’s response signals the importance of the horse as a symbol of differentness and hope that appears throughout the novel and also Rose’s refusal to participate in a society that doesn’t see her as fully human.

Shortly after, Bri witnesses a man in red overalls pushing a machine that’s spreading paint near an old building. A woman is shouting at him: “You can’t bulldoze history.” The man continues his work claiming that he is only “doing my job … What I’m paid to do.” Bri tells us that the machine is called a “Supera Bounder” and looks like “an invention made by an amateur for a joke.” But the purpose of the machine—the red paint it spouts—is no joke. The woman (Oona) pushes back, asking for help but no one in the crowd will help her until Bri moves forward and kicks the machine over. Bri runs and hides and no one gives them away. Oona follows Bri calling them a “little revolutionary” and this interaction eventually leads Bri and Rose to a hidden enclave of resistance housed in an old school. Oona takes them in, allowing the horse (which Rose has named “Gliff”) to stay with them and introducing Bri to the remnants of a library. For a child fascinated with language who has never seen many books before, it’s a place of respite and discovery. It’s hard not to hope that they and their sister can stay in this space.

As the narrative shifts back and forth through Bri’s present (five years later) and past, we get pieces of language that help us better understand Bri and their world. For their mother, life has become a puzzle she cannot solve so Bri suggests they “salve” it instead. Climate disaster, poverty, and oppression are all part of the fabric of this world and their mother sounds terribly similar to adults today: “You’ll make things better, better than we did. You all will. You have to. Somebody has to.” Rose is already pushing back against her world, asking questions that signal the larger questions the novel asks, including how we have allowed a world to evolve where people become “temporary” or perceived as less than human if they are “undocumented.” Rose asserts that “a passport doesn’t prove we’re us … We just are us … Not having a passport doesn’t mean we … disappear.”

About midway through the novel there is a shift to five years in the future and some chapter titles are variants of “Brave new world.” Bri is now a supervisor about to reprimand a “packing belt” worker, Ayesha. Ayesha is missing a hand which she lost as a child worker (apparently common). Although Bri has tried to erase Rose, Ayesha knew her in a place held by rebels and describes her as someone whose “spirit never gutters.” Bri’s carefully constructed reality begins to collapse when Ayesha mentions the word “Gliff.” Bri shifts again to the past where we learn that Rose refuses to understand that a society could create separate categories of people, making some “unverifiable” and therefore non-people. Here Smith spends some time diving into language (as she does) including a meditation on the many meanings of the word “gliff” and Bri’s attempt to understand the Latin motto of the abandoned school, “Words themselves are bargains, agreements, manners. Bargains, agreements, manners themselves are words?”

We learn that eventually the school is bulldozed and turned into a gated estate. Rose disappears and Bri reprogrammed to “successfully” become a day shift supervisor at a pickling plant. But the shock of Ayesha’s mention of Rose dismantles that reprogramming and Bri admits that “in my waking life since then I’ve been a missing person, a person missing self.” We can feel the uplift when they tell us, “But fuck that, and them, because my briar self is back, prickly and twined and opening in me like a bush covered in wild opening blossom.” And we can’t help but cheer when Bri recalls Rose’s simple statement: “We’re the future. It is this simple.” And so Bri moves forward into “Unbelievable believable hope.” As we all must do no matter what. This novel is a deeply prescient tale of a possible future—a brilliant warning that we should all heed.