Readers operate under precedent. What you have read before causes a spin towards what you are reading now. Universality might be what you should read now.
While reading this compact package of linguistic complexity, I recalled two British writers. Not because they were like Natasha Brown but because they were different.
The first is Elizabeth Bowen. I love her short stories. She seems to come from money, or some money anyway. Bowen seems to be most comfortable writing stories about people who own country homes that have names. She’s at ease telling stories about characters that have butlers and gardeners. There’s one of her stories where a niece improbably inherits a country house from her elderly aunt. I suspected that if her character hadn’t inherited that house, then Bowen wouldn’t know what to do with her. Of course, not all of Bowen’s characters are property owners but many are. Bowen seems to be most comfortable with characters who have money.
The other writer is Iris Murdoch, by gosh how I love her! But I thought it was very distinctive that few, if any, of her central characters had jobs where they could be sacked. They are mostly civil servants, academics, students, writers and artists. That’s Murdoch’s world, but it’s a very special world, and not how most Britishers live.
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If you read a book with any insight, you end up reading yourself. I noticed in reading Universality that my most important consideration was how the novel was constructed. Not the characters, not the plot but how the story was built. In my defense, I’d observe that part of the meaning, of contemporary fiction especially, is the question of how it is built. The story is, for me, how it was built.
It’s okay, if you read a story your own way, or better, read it multiple ways at the same time. There are great readers who read more than one book at a time. You can also read a book more than one way at the same time.
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Universality is divided into five named sections. The three central sections are named after regions in Britain. U.K. residents may have to cut me some slack when I get to those sections. I don’t know the U.K., so I had to look up the named regions to learn more about them. Even in novels, location can be everything.
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Universality: Also the novel’s name and key concept. But there’s a subchapter heading that’s different, “A Fool’s Gold”…perhaps a sign that this section was first published separately in Alazon magazine. Also, in all the sections except this one, the first line of text is printed in bold. All the section heads are printed in bold.
In “A Fool’s Gold” it’s 2020. At a West Yorkshire farmhouse, there’s a party taking place of about a hundred young people in defiance of Britain’s lockdown restrictions. Many of the partygoers are squatters who have formed an ad hoc commune at the farmhouse. Only Jake, a member of the commune, had official entrée to the farmhouse. Richard Spencer, the owner and a wealthy investment banker, had given Jake the keys. Spencer prefers his digs in London.
Why was Jake given the house keys? Relationships in Universality are entangling.
While the party is going on, a bizarre act of violence takes place outside. A gold bar, a “Good Delivery” bar, the hard currency standard, is used to bash someone unconscious. The bar belongs to the banker, who left it on his mantelpiece. It’s sort of a trophy of his affluence and is worth a half million dollars. Spencer bought it because he wanted one. Like a child might want a scooter for Christmas.
Yes, Spencer left a gold bar on the farmhouse mantlepiece and then lent the house to a kid. The farmhouse itself is a trophy of affluence. Spencer was forced to separate from his wife and child because he was sleeping around. He bought the farmhouse as an alternate residence but he ended up not liking it. He had spent a great deal of money to upgrade it, including installing solar panels. But like the gold bar, for Spencer, the house is just a toy.
The culprit who committed the assault panics, fearing they have committed murder. It takes awhile before the plot reveals who the assailant and the victim were. Natasha Brown is such a great tease. She doesn’t tell you anything, if you can figure it out for yourself.
The bashing trips the commune into collapse. But the young utopians seem wonderfully inept anyway. They distain capitalism but are glad to make use of the solar power that Richard has installed in his expensive faux farmhouse. One ex-commune member declares that the Occupy Wall Street protests in London showed them “the power of the people”. But we know that movement fizzled into nothing. The kids will continue to blow their utopian bubbles.
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Edmonton: Location reveals class. I read in one description of Edmonton that it was a section of London that was “less expensive to live in”. Brown locates Hannah there.
Hannah is a freelance writer who is reeling towards bankruptcy due to the risks of being a gig economy worker. She takes a job in a health shop when she calculates that the weekly regular salary, a novelty for the freelancer, will just maintain her solvency at a minimum level.
But then she catches a break. She writes an article about a crime with a gold bar that goes viral. Her article will be turned into a television show. Flush again, she buys a house in Edmonton.
And she gets her posh friends back. Influencers. Well connected people. Well dressed and well groomed people. They drifted away from her when she became a shop girl, and was leveled down to a just a worker, a social nothing. Hannah returned to the precarious elite when she became a social and informational asset again.
Hannah celebrates in her kitchen, knocking herself out preparing a slow-roasted oregano chicken with buttered tomatoes for her restored friends. The preparation of a meal for guests also affirms her sense of being mistress of the house, a homeowner.
But can Hannah keep her sleek friends and her house? She can keep her friends only if she can continue to offer social value in exchange. And keep her better life style only if she can write more winning articles. Was her recent success only a fluke,? Hannah is worried.
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Sections Weybridge and Cartmel follow. I’m not going to discuss them. People who know Britain will know the connotations those places have. And if you don’t, it’s easy to look them up if you are curious. Nastasha Brown continues to extend her story lines in those sections like strings of beads. The whole book is handcrafted, only the beads are words. Universality is a hard technical nut of a novel to crack, in the best sense.
The last section, Showtime, really is what it says. It’s a final chapter on rocket fuel. An exuberant coda of rhetorical abandon. As if you were in a debating society gone mad, but then you turned around, looked at yourself, and realized you were the one who was crazy. It doesn’t release but heightens the tension that has been building through the book’s orgy of grievance. Universality shoves the reader to the razor’s edge…and leaves them there.
*****
