The Power of a Strong Narrative: A Guest Post by Natasha Brown
A shocking crime leads to a cutting exploration of class and power in this taut tale about news, language and life from the author of Assembly. Read on for an exclusive essay from Natasha Brown on writing Universality.
Hardcover $24.00
Universality: A Novel
Universality: A Novel
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Hardcover $24.00
Remember—words are your weapons, they’re your tools, your currency: a twisty, slippery descent into the rhetoric of power.
Late one night on a Yorkshire farm, in the midst of an illegal rave, a young man is nearly bludgeoned to death with a solid gold bar.
Remember—words are your weapons, they’re your tools, your currency: a twisty, slippery descent into the rhetoric of power.
Late one night on a Yorkshire farm, in the midst of an illegal rave, a young man is nearly bludgeoned to death with a solid gold bar.
When I was in secondary school, my teacher told me to read the broadsheet papers every week. She explained that building such a habit would help me to get into university – and possibly even with my career, afterwards. As a reading material, especially to a teen, these papers were strange and unwieldy things. And I think that’s when I became interested in them as pieces of media: who wrote the newspapers? How were they funded? Who decided what made it in and what was left out?
I wrote Universality to explore some of those questions. The novel begins with a magazine exposé that’s gone viral. It’s written in the “longread” article style – pulpy, fast-paced, scandalous – and it promises to get to ‘The Truth’ of a mysterious act of violence that takes place on an abandoned farm. The rest of the book digs into the messy aftermath of that viral exposé. Each chapter dives into a different perspective from one of the mystery’s key players. There’s an amoral banker, a columnist with secrets, a cult leader with dreams, and a fugitive with nothing to lose…
Narrative non-fiction is a genre, like any other. But it’s rarely satirised. Most of us would be hard-pressed, I think, to define its quirks and cliches. I think that what Janet Malcolm termed ‘the journalistic “I”’ – the enormously credible first-person voice in journalism – is so well-respected that we’re often loath to apply a critical eye to it. Yet, ever since Tom Wolfe’s New Journalism movement, newspaper writing has borrowed very deliberately from the techniques of novelists. That’s why, when writing this book, I wanted to create a clash between what we think of “novelistic” and “journalistic” styles. The enduring influence of Wolfe’s New Journalism, along with the amplifying effect of click-driven online content, has made today’s news read more like pulpy fiction. And I wanted to know: how far has this trend gone? Would “journalism” feel out of place in a novel?
This is a book that’s deeply interested in the ways that people talk and write – and how the lines between truth and fiction, or real life and entertainment, can become blurred. It’s also about a man being bludgeoned with a solid gold bar. I’d say it’s like Knives Out meets Roland Barthes.
But at its core, Universality is all about one woman: Lenny. She’s brash, mean, smart, funny – and deliciously unlikable. What she says might appall you, but how she says it will make you laugh. Most importantly, Lenny understands the power of a strong narrative. And she’s willing to do whatever it takes for a story.