Vivified by a photo session on the terrace on the roof of its publisher, with its views of the city of London to the east and a launch of Fleet Street stone in the south, Natasha Brown politely asks my permission before changing high heels into more comfortable apartments. It is a gesture familiar to the two of the previous life: like me, she spent a decade going to a job in finance before pivoting the full -time editorial staff.
Brown and I meet a windy afternoon at the binding, the Art Deco building which houses the offices open Swish of Faber. We are hidden in a comfortable conference room to discuss Universality, The long -awaited suite of his first novel Assembly. If AssemblyWhat confused the interiority of a woman when she was preparing for a gardening party, was compared to Virginia Woolf Mrs DallowaySO Universality, An overall novel concerned about social mobility, recalls a modern Jane Austen.
A breaking up among critics and readers, Assembly won a Betty trask prize and was pre -selected for the Folio Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. This also led the 35 -year -old Brown, one of the best British novelists in Granta – a prestigious list of 20 writers under the age of 40 working in the United Kingdom only compiled once by decade. The growing diversity of the list reflects a welcome plurality of perspectives in British letters. Part of the inspiration of the title UniversalityBrown tells me, is “this question of what we consider universal literature”.
Although his parents met by studying abroad at university in the United States, Brown was born and grew up in London. As a child, she delighted with the wide range of books in the house of her grandparents, nursing manuals from her grandmother and knitting books with a “magnificent” volume linked to Shakespeare pieces. A birthday gift from his mother, Pride and prejudices was his first favorite book. Despite being a passionate reader, studying creative writing has never been on the table. Instead, Brown read mathematics in Cambridge.
Her studies have nevertheless informed his writing: “Mathematics really have its own sense of aesthetics, and this idea of very short and very elegant evidence”, she says. It is an economy that shows in prose: it wrote Assembly In Snatchs before his day work, which increases the word of 100-200 words each day until he has enough shape to submit to the London Writers Award, which promotes the writers of under-represented communities.
“There was a strong push for me to double the length,” explains Brown about its 100 -page beginnings. “But I would never want to exceed my welcome.” I emphasize that this is not a risk with Universalitywhich, despite a larger cast, weighs a little more than 150 pages. “It's the test of my books,” she said, laughing: “Can you read it with one hand, crushed on the central line?”
Despite its short length, Assembly has taken great themes, addressing racism and sexism faced with its protagonist as it rises in the ranks of an investment bank. By focusing more on the dynamics of the heroine workplace than the marriage proposal of her rich aristocratic boyfriend, it was also a refreshing change compared to more traditional plots.
In Pride and prejudices“The route of Elizabeth Bennet towards the upper level is marriage, which secures his family in the future,” says Brown. “What does this story look like today?” This story today is likely to study the economy or computer science at the university, then to work for a large company. “STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) offers opportunities” which can offer you security that simply did not exist 20 years ago “.
It considers this development of the quaternary sector of the economy – “Research and technology, one step beyond services” – “similar to the industrial revolution”. However, “there are not many books that engage in the way (they have engaged with the) marriage plot,” she said.
Just as Assembly Make light on the changing face of finance, Universality illuminates the evolution of journalism in the Internet era. It opens with the functioning of PULY magazine by Hannah Nicholson, an ambitious young journalist. The fictitious exhibition, “A Fool's Gold”, was inspired by viral phenomena such as the play in the magazine of the New York Times by Robert Kolker in 2023 “Who is the Bad Art Friend?”, Explains Brown.
Influenced by the literary theorist Roland Barthes of the novel as a space to examine mythologies, Universality Reproduces Hannah's article in its entirety, taking a third of the book, before winning the different perspectives of the characters involved. “If you take this huge omnipotent eye and put it inside a novel,” wonders Brown, “do you suddenly feel the artifice?”
With rates of words that fall for independent journalists, Hannah has a hard time before taking a big break with the SCOOP: an anarchist activist was matraquked with an illegal rave in an Yorkshire farm during locking. His investigation links the points between Richard, the owner of the banker; The author of the crime; And a controversial but charismatic columnist, a woman named Lenny. (If the title of Lenny's book, No Mo 'woke up, seems exaggerated, it should be noted that Piers Morgan Woke is dead should be published later this year.)
Universality is told mainly in a free indirect style, until the first person account of Lenny “bursts” at the end. The point of view moves between the characters while Brown probes “their idea of the truth, how they express what happened”.
After the (apparent) facts presented in journalism, she said: “I really wanted to unravel it from the point of view of fiction. . . Enter the place of a particular character and see how they see the situation. . . What is the impartiality of their point of view. “While we understand more understanding of the motivations of the different characters, the novel is a nesting satire doll that leaves the uncertain readers where their loyalty are.
Like Austen, the use by Brown of the nearby third person allows the narrator to gently make fun of the characters. But while her books take secular themes of literature such as property and class, she hopes to fill the gap with a cannon that is not “entirely intended” to be inclusive.
Posted in the summer of 2021, in the wake of Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the United States, Assembly came out when the breed was at the forefront of public speech. “Admittedly, in the environment in which I published, it was a great conversation and a debate which was happening around my book: which is considered as a universal literature, which belongs to the English cannon, what is niche literature and should be sort of away.”
Once Assembly had “won his place”, Brown felt the freedom to “do something more interesting” and to “push the limits”. She decided to “attack the same questions” around social mobility “but from a really different point of view”. Hannah, from the working class, is moving away from her “vaguely aristocratic” friends once they have exceeded his “bohemian rupture”.
But “winning no longer does not really bring her into the kind of middle class company which she aspires to be part,” explains Brown. “People like to clearly define the class in terms of household income, but this has never been linked to household income,” she adds. Lenny, on the other hand, is “rich in any definition, but it is able to carry out an identity of the working class because these class markers that we consider have nothing to do with your real economic situation.”
Brown hopes that his two books could prove useful to those who, like her, “move into this completely new world, this completely new social sphere, this completely new type of work”. Given her rapid shot to literary celebrity, I am surprised to learn that she is “not invested too much in the writing of another book” and keeps her open options for a return to finance – what she calls “normal life and normal work”. (To this end, it is particularly circumspect to share the details of this part of her life.) Not to see writing as a job forever “removes all the pressure”, she says. “For me, it keeps pleasure and it keeps it free.”
As we finish our conversation, Brown groups and closes at a quick pace, always carrying its apartments. I cannot say in which direction she is heading, but it is with a confident stride.
“Universality” will be published by Faber on March 13
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