Another fool’s gold

Part-way through Natasha Brown’s new novel, Universality, Hannah, a struggling freelance journalist who recently managed to climb out of the penurious doldrums of lockdown with a long read that went viral, muses on the fickle unsustainability of her career since then:

The story moved on without her and other journalists swooped in, publishing updates and new takes without even mentioning Hannah’s name. She tried to move on herself, sending out dozens of fresh pitches. But the entire process was chicken-and-egg. No one would talk to her until she had a publication committed, and no publication would accept a pitch without background. Soon enough, she found herself scrapping around for the same old freelance work: five-hundred-word summaries of the latest multicultural dreck passing for contemporary women’s fiction.

Brown’s previous novel, Assembly (2021), was a taut, tense account of an unnamed young Black woman’s existential and physical crisis, notable for its combination of pared-down interiority and dramatic trajectory. The woman’s ascent in Assembly is impressive – she is Cambridge-educated, flying up the corporate ladder, earning a “metric shit ton” of money – but, as she dismayingly discovers in a series of micro-aggressions that culminate in a showdown at a garden party, material success cannot dispel the pernicious effects of race and class in post-Brexit Britain. Accumulating rave reviews (Brandon Taylor described it as “like Thomas Bernhard in the key of Rachel Cusk”) and shortlisted for multiple prizes, the novel earned its author a place on the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list.

There is no less ambition – or edge – to Universality. In a recent interview in the Bookseller (December 13, 2024), Brown stated her intention: “to take a look at people who use words – people who are very good at using words – for profit, to change people’s minds, to create narratives”. And the narratives created here are deliciously nasty and brutish. A self-professed advocate of Tom Wolfe’s social-realist New Journalism school, Brown opens the book with Hannah’s long-form piece, entitled “A Fool’s Gold”. Here the intrepid journalist (anonymous at this point) presents a studiously bland investigation into the fallout from a violent attack on a member of a “self-sustaining” community hosting an illegal rave during lockdown at a West Yorkshire farm. The weapon used in the attack is a solid gold bar, “worth over half a million dollars” and wielded by Jake, an about-to-be-expelled group member, against Pegasus, its de facto leader. Jake and the weapon subsequently disappear, and, as the article confidently states: “the missing gold bar is a connecting node – between an amoral banker, an iconoclastic columnist, and a radical anarchist movement”.

Universality is an uncomfortable, sharp and funny satire on Britain today, including a particularly acute takedown of the media and publishing industries. Yet for all its cleverness, it can seem as hollow and one-dimensional as the characters it derides. Following that beginning, chapters named for different locations highlight its protagonists’ positions on the socioeconomic scale – an insalubrious part of London, the Surrey stockbroker belt and an illustrious literary festival, all connected by that “node”.

Richard Spencer, the philandering “amoral banker”, is fuming at the loss of his gold bar, the squatting of his farm and the subsequent exposure of his private life. Miriam “Lenny” Leonard – the “iconoclastic columnist” – is following up the success of her right-wing manifesto No Mo’ Woke with an equally clickbaitish publication that would not be out of place on the current US government’s anti-DEI agenda. The novel revels in its characters’ outrageous assertions. Is it really unethical to be a billionaire? Should job applicants be selected on the basis of DNA tests? The “anarchists” who make up the “radical” group call themselves the Universalists and preach inclusivity while remaining resolutely “young, middle-class and white”.

What links these characters is money. E. M. Forster’s adage that “the very soul of the world is economic” hovers over everything, and, as in Assembly, Brown is concerned with who earns it, as opposed to who inherits it. Hannah, like Spencer and Lenny, comes from “nothing”. Spencer, the “son of an Essex brickie”, is patronized by his posh, estranged wife and her family; Lenny, a brittle veteran of 1990s journalism, who hasn’t “eaten breakfast since 2005”, gives the “ugly, and stupid” what they want to read and hear. By far Brown’s best creation, she is incredulous when a young intern at the literary festival contemplates entering journalism: “Absurd … grinding out culture war fodder … commodity labour … if I were [her], with a degree under my belt and a long life ahead of me, I’d be getting into tech”.

In what is supposed to be the book’s shocking denouement, Lenny spars on stage with a tyro antagonist who keeps a copy of Martin Amis’s The War Against Cliché in his bicycle bag. As a send-up of the culture wars, Universality succumbs to the very pitfalls Amis warned against.

Catherine Taylor’s memoir, The Stirrings, won the TLS Ackerley prize 2024

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