This March, British author Natasha Brown publishes Universality via Random House, a fiction that dares to take on the feat of a modern-day social commentary—and pulls it off. Brown is snappy and clever, tying together a complex narrative of flawed characters trying to make it in an exploitative world. Somehow, her prose is sympathetic in its objectivity. Readers might find themselves staring off into a distant corner, brows furrowed, wondering why they’re so inclined to understand or to even like her most disreputable characters.

In Universality, a nearly out-of-work journalist writes a long-form news article that chronicles the investigation of a man almost bludgeoned to death with a golden bar. The assault takes place on a semi-abandoned farm property owned by a London stockbroker, where Marxist squatters are hosting an illegal rave to welcome new members to their commune. The ensuing chapters follow those involved in the investigation in the year after the article’s release. Each chapter illuminates the innermost desires of these characters, exploring how these desires exist against a progressively polarizing, clicks-and-engagement dependent world, in which the differences between digital and real consequences begin to blur.

Brown is no stranger to writing about introspective, individual experiences painted against a present-day reality. In 2021, she released her debut novel Assembly, which chronicles the spiraling thoughts of a Black woman getting ready to attend her white boyfriend’s family party. Upon its release, British Vogue compared her to Emily Brontë, while The Guardian and The Masters Review drew similarities between her and Virginia Woolf. Assembly was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Fiction, The Goldsmith Prize, and the Folio Prize, amongst landing upon several “Best of 2021” lists, and earning her a late-night appearance with Seth Meyers. 

Perhaps one of the more compelling aspects of her success was that Brown wasn’t working in any writing field, graduated from no scene-saturated writing shops, but had a decade of financial services under her belt, writing her debut in her spare time. “If I felt that writing was my day job, and I was doing this to provide for me in an ongoing way, it would just become very stressful,” she ponders. “I think I also wouldn’t feel confident that I could take the kind of risks that I want to take in my writing if I depended on income from it. I think treating this as a break from my regular career, where I get this incredible opportunity to do this cool thing and experience so many things I never imagined I would…It feels nice, and it feels like I can take risks, even if they don’t pay off, and then go back to my regular life.”

Interestingly, Brown’s attitude towards writing is a detached one. In the process of working on Universality, she says, “I felt like writing this book is a luxury, and I don’t expect to be a writer forever, so I couldn’t waste the time.” She continues, “The process for this book was really strange because I was writing it over the last three or so years. This book was written a minute here and there. I didn’t have a set schedule for it. What made it possible to come back to and keep track was the very boring, non-creative part of it: having a plan, having a spreadsheet where I kept track of what I was working on and what I needed to do, almost like a project. This book was written in a lot of stolen pockets of time.” 

Some of the main players of Universality include: a man-child billionaire, a self-important culture writer, a disillusioned young adult cheated out of his right to success (because of woke), and a ruthless, “tells it like it is” columnist who makes a living out of fueling socioeconomic political discourse. Each are archetypes of the real, inescapable figures that live on our internet and seep into our dinner conversations, our art, our workplaces, and our policies. 

Furthermore, Universality explores our inclination to turn tragedy and pop-politics into spectacle. Brown considers: “As a global society, we have to really ask ourselves, how comfortable do we feel with entertainment and factual information becoming blurred in the way that it has? A lot of us now are much more media savvy than people perhaps were 50 years ago. But there’s a real expectation that if you pull refresh on your phone, it might be fiction, it might be news, but it’s all just there to entertain us.” 

With an immediate mass of real-life news-turned-performance examples to pull from (anything true crime, a steady stream of miniseries based on charismatic serial killers), Brown says she wasn’t inspired by any one event or person. Instead, she investigates the qualities of the people we listen to when we don’t know where to turn, or what to think. Enter Universality’s antagonist, Lenny, our columnist, the oldest character in this story, and the one who not only recognizes her power with words, but understands how to weaponize that power. She understands the difference between a person and a persona, knows when to be herself and when to be her brand. 

“For me, I felt [the inspiration] was less about specific people, but more about creating this woman, Lenny, who just understands how to connect to people, and understands how to speak to people in a way that resonates,” says Brown. “I wanted Lenny to be the kind of person that whether or not you agree with her, perhaps against your better interests, you find her quite likable, and she seems like the sort of person it would be fun to have a drink with…I was interested in the meta aspect of someone who understands how narrative works, how language works, and how to take advantage of the media, which, at the moment, is such a gaping void that needs content—someone who understands how to fill that. I was fascinated about how you could bring her to life on the page, and how you could explore the disconnect between what she says, how she says it, and what she thinks.” 

Universality’s revealing of the meticulously choreographed dance between our news versus our leisure, our politics versus our pop culture, and our true self versus the self we show to the world, does not answer itself when it asks: when is this all going to implode? And what does the world look like beyond that implosion?

Photographed by Elliott Wilcox

Styled by Rachel Davis at One Represents

Written by Franchesca Baratta

Hair: Zateesha Barbour at LMC Worldwide

Makeup: Lucy Thomas

Location: The Laslett Hotel

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