The Brooklyn Rail

Natasha Brown’s sophomore novel, Universality, begins with a glossy magazine story. A young man named Jake is on the run after bludgeoning an acquaintance nearly to death during an illegal rave on a farm in northern England. His weapon of choice? A solid gold bar.

The article investigates Jake’s whereabouts and motivations, and introduces a clown car of characters including a shady financier, a newspaper columnist on an anti-woke crusade, and a band of wannabe hippies who call themselves “Universalists.” In the pages that follow, Brown slips into the first-person perspectives of the people at the heart of the mega-viral story, who each have their own version of the truth to tell.

What is the “value” of a solid gold bar in the hands of a fugitive? Its owner allegedly spent more than half a million pounds to display it on the mantle in his farmhouse. But, once stolen, it can’t be easily traded in for cash. It would need to come with proper documentation, and undergo an authentication process (an out-of-pocket cost unto itself). Even if Jake were to clear that hurdle, it would be hard to find a pawnbroker or gold dealer willing to take it off his hands. There isn’t much of a secondary market for such an item, not to mention the “insurance headache” of storing it in the back room. To Jake, the gold bar is effectively worthless.

In Universality, Brown interrogates what exactly makes something, or someone, valuable. It’s a question she’s visited before. Her 2021 debut novel, Assembly, is about a young Black woman climbing the ladder of a London bank (as Brown herself did in a past life). The higher the narrator climbs, the more she finds that others see her as someone unworthy of her position, someone who has benefitted from unfair quotas or affirmative action policies, and who in fact owes England a great debt for her success.

“I pay my taxes, each year,” she thinks, after one particularly ugly encounter with a stranger. “Any money that was spent on me: education, healthcare, what—roads? I’ve paid it all back…. I am what we’ve always been to the empire: pure, fucking profit.”

Where Assembly considers the personal costs of being the scapegoat for all of society’s ills, Universality looks outward to the people and institutions that launder such hateful ideas to make them palatable for polite audiences.

Brown’s characters—a fledgling think-piece writer, a pandering ideas conference organizer, an insufferable “man of letters”—are all painfully aware of their precarious perch in the attention economy. They are forever putting a finger up to the wind to see what professed beliefs they’ll have to abandon (and who they’ll have to throw under the bus) in order to continue profiting for as long as possible. And—stop me if you’ve heard this before—Universality finds the winds shifting against “woke politics” in favor of “hard conversations” about what’s really holding England’s middle class behind. “Ah yes,” the man of letters says while in conversation with another writer, “Class is the new race. Economic inequality is the most pernicious social ill, and so on. We’ve taken that line … too.”

Universality serves up a healthy dose of light and dark comedy to make this poison go down more easily. One character is coaxed out of a rant about the virtues of AGI (automatic genetic intelligence) by his wife who reminds him that he once “read a Harry Potter fan fiction when [he] was a student and it derailed [his] entire life.” By design, none of these characters is worth rooting for. Were the novel longer than 176 pages, that void would become tiresome.

Brown’s most compelling character study is the newspaper columnist, Lenny Leonard, whose stock soars over the course of the novel. She’s engineered a “soft rebrand” of her trademark racist diatribes through the more “accessible” lens of concern for the working man. Her new book, Woke Capitalism: How Corporations Sold Out the Working Class, is heralded by critics as “the secular Bible,” and she is named “a real champion of working-class Brits.”

In the novel’s media ecosystem, Lenny is the most valuable player. But there’s no satisfaction at the top. Instead, she considers (without irony) how small-minded her audience is, and how powerful that “infinite smallness” has become. “I don’t want to see how this all ends,” she thinks.

With Universality, Brown has cemented herself as a writer who separates text from subtext with devastating clarity. I wish that reading this book were like looking into a fun house mirror that exaggerates our society’s worst features for laughs. Instead, as Brown intends, it’s simply a mirror.