Brown on Universality: ‘There was absolutely a lot of cringe’

Midway through Universality, Natasha Brown inducts us into the dinner party from hell. Freelance journalist Hannah has invited three old university friends to her new flat, and it’s clear they’ve only turned up because one of her articles has recently gone viral. Just about every conversational taboo — money, religion, politics – is broached in spectacularly awkward fashion. Eventually, the faux politeness threatens to devolve into an all-out ideological slanging match. This portrayal of how friendships can decay in adulthood, fuelled by mutual resentments about privilege and status, is so acutely observed it’s excruciating. “There was absolutely a lot of cringe,” Brown laughs as she remembers writing this scene from her second novel. She’s speaking from her home in London, the Zoom frame lined with rows of crowded bookshelves, and what feels like the year’s first hint of sun trickling in through the window.

The author, 35, has a sharp, unrelenting eye for the tangled dynamics that simmer underneath the surface of social interactions. Her debut novel Assembly, released in 2021 just as Britain was blearily emerging from back-to-back lockdowns, showed off that scalpel-like precision. In it, an unnamed narrator, a Black British woman who has made a “metric s*** ton” of money in finance, attends a garden party hosted at the country house owned by her white boyfriend’s (ancestrally) wealthy parents. Myths about class, race, meritocracy, and belonging are set up only to be shattered. At the time, Brown said she wanted to explore what a story about someone who “has it all” and still feels dissatisfied might look like from the perspective of a person of colour.

Praise came thick and fast; so too did comparisons to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. British Vogue hailed Assembly as “the debut novel of the summer”, and the book went on to be shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Goldsmiths Prize. Two years later, in 2023, Brown was named on literary magazine Granta’s prestigious Best of Young British Novelists list.

Brown, who grew up in London and studied maths at the University of Cambridge, wrote Assembly in snatches of time she could claim between her nine-to-five job working in financial services. “With the first book, it was really my gym and socialising time that disappeared,” she recalls. Universality was written in an equally piecemeal manner but under very different circumstances, with Brown smack bang in the middle of the promotional circus for Assembly, which took her to Europe and Australia. “This book was really snatched, (written) in little snatched minutes in the hotel, on trains,” she says. “I remember once I really offended some writers I was travelling on the train with in France because they were like, ‘Come on, have a drink’ and I said, ‘I need to make my word count!’” In conversation, Brown is softly spoken and quick to laugh, but her drive and focus are palpable. Her considered replies are laser-focused on the craft of writing and teem with literary references from Roland Barthes to Tom Wolfe to the journalist Janet Malcolm. She doesn’t own a TV, she admits, in order to avoid distraction.

The backdrop may have been different, but her mission statement for book number two is similar. In Assembly, Brown says she tried to “explore the question of neutrality and language” — to get to grips with how words may seem impartial and unbiased, though are often anything but. When the narrator travels to schools to speak to youngsters about her high-flying career, is she inspiring them or is she parroting empty truisms about meritocracy that only perpetuate the status quo? “How many women and girls has she lied to?” she asks herself. With Universality, she wanted to look at similar ideas about language, but this time “from a totally different angle — to step back and explore people who are really powerful when it comes to language and really know how to use words for maximum effect”.

To do that, Brown turned her attention to that very 21st-century phenomenon: the viral long read. You know the kind — the sort of stranger-than-fiction article that captivates certain corners of the internet for a couple of weeks, prompting social media debates, spin-off think pieces and, if the writer is lucky, talk of a lucrative streaming adaptation. Brown wanted to “play around with the contrast between fact and fiction, entertainment and real life”, to explore the uneasy contradictions between “the ultimate omniscient narrator” of a journalistic piece and “the novel’s mainstay, the unreliable narrator”.

So, Universality begins with a magazine article, written by Hannah the freelancer, which sets up an irresistible whodunit mystery: a gold bar is used as a weapon in a vicious attack on a Yorkshire farmer, then stolen. The missing ingot is a “connecting node”, drawing together an anarchist group, a wealthy banker, and an outspoken columnist with elastic beliefs. Hannah attempts to uncover the identity of the attacker, a quest that takes her through post-lockdown Britain; at the same time, she attempts to make a state-of-the-nation diagnosis. But are her conclusions too simple, too easily palatable for the magazine’s readers?

Brown made diagrams and spreadsheets to plot out the central mystery — Assembly also started life in Excel — perhaps a hangover from her previous life in finance — but as the riddle is just about tied up, more pressing, troubling questions seem to arise. For Brown, the gold bar “really is a MacGuffin”, an object that pushes the plot along; the real mystery of the book is how and why this article came to be written in the first place. Can we take its depictions of certain, admittedly unlikeable, characters at face value? Why might we be drawn to side against them? If that all sounds a bit head-scratching, you’re not wrong: Universality is the sort of book that forces you to question yourself.