Debut literary star Natasha Brown did everything right. But there was a problem

You too can win those glittering prizes. Work hard – harder than anyone else, be clever, be persuasive but not too pushy, win that executive post and be a beacon to others like you who can also make it if they work as hard as you did. Yes, there are raised eyebrows at your promotion, there is the colleague who – nothing personal – lets off some steam about being sidelined for the sake of diversity. You will rise above it, which will count in your favour. “I will be watched,” says the unnamed narrator in Natasha Brown’s Assembly. “That’s the price of admission.”

Natasha Brown says “other people assume things” about her protagonist in Assembly.

This anonymous heroine’s life ticks a few other boxes. She has an immigrant family she can afford to help out. She has a boyfriend, the scion of British landed gentry, who expects in due course to glide into politics and a position of influence. The story pivots around her visit to the family pile for what promises to be a lavish garden party. And yes, she also has cancer which she is refusing to have treated. That does not tick the right box: her expensive private doctor is aghast. She should fight this thing. I think so too.

“But why should she?” retorts Brown sharply. “There is so much pressure put on her to perform a struggle, almost for our entertainment. I don’t see a justification for why people feel she owes them life and owes them a particular story. This is her story.” Like her protagonist, Brown, a guest of this year’s Melbourne Writers Festival, is black British and, until recently, did something high-flying in a financial institution she doesn’t want to name.

Assembly is a sliver of a book – only a hundred pages, and effectively less than that since it is mostly written in fragments or short essays broken up by a good deal of white space – but it nonetheless became the most sensational debut of the last Frankfurt Book Fair, commanding six-figure sums from British and American publishers. Every one of its few words counts. And yet it is language that is Brown’s real subject – specifically, the inadequacy of the language we have to discuss or even name the problem looming behind Assembly’s slender story.

Brown is now 31. At Cambridge, she read pure mathematics, then took the financial job from which she is now taking a break. She came, however, from a family of “big readers and talkers”, as she told Vogue, and was an early and voracious consumer of fat Victorian novels. After spending her university years on theorems, she decided to make up what she felt was a gap in her knowledge by reading foundation texts on linguistics – Ferdinand de Saussure was her starting point – and semiotics.

“Roland Barthes really resonated with me,” she says. “Talking about the ways language is appropriated to either politicise or de-politicise ideas and history.” But what about ideas for which there was no language? Or for which the language, as we understand it, just didn’t provide the scope for understanding? She wanted to write – however inadequate the tool at her disposal – about that, about “the problem” that cannot be explained and thus has no name.

“But it was: how do I do this? No one is going to publish my non-fiction,” she says. Others were more qualified to opine on the politics of language; she didn’t even have a track record as a writer, having never written so much as a short story. “But I saw a route – and this was it.”

Her way in was autofiction, which she recognised as a publishing fashion. It would appeal to the gatekeepers; it also had a useful flexibility. It was part of autofiction’s style, for example, to swap between styles of writing from one paragraph to the next, allowing for lists and quotes, essay-like digressions and bursts of poetic language – and its definition provided an ostensible reason for writing the story in the first place. “It was a fashion that could be exploited,” says Brown. “And Assembly is more easily than I’d imagined taken as autofiction. Which surprised me.”

The reason it surprised her, given the obvious parallels between her central character’s life and her own, is that her nameless heroine is a virtual blank. Apart from what she does for a living and the fact of her colour, we know nothing about her. She never expresses her feelings. Autofiction is all about the authorial voice, but this woman has no voice. “I thought that would be screaming out!” says Brown, laughing. “I forgot that…” she trails off. She didn’t really forget it. This is “the problem”. It is in the protagonist’s silences. It’s on every page.

‘She’s very passive and doesn’t really change anyone’s actions by whether or not she’s there. That was, to me, her key feature.’

She approached the story, she says, by writing all the secondary characters first. They give us whatever information we have about the narrator through what they say to her and what they do. She moves between them like a puff of smoke. “I wanted absence to be what defined her. She’s very passive and doesn’t really change anyone’s actions by whether or not she’s there. That was, to me, her key feature. Other people assume things about her.” Her class background, for example, or her feelings about her boyfriend; she says nothing about them, so others fill those gaps. “And it’s sort of been interesting seeing the dialogue around the book, because some of those things stick.”

At the same time, readers have been astute in picking up the ideas and allusions to “the problem” inside the fiction. “People decide there’s a problem and decide that the book has a view on that problem so without necessarily naming it, something’s been communicated.” She certainly isn’t going to define it now: people get it. “I don’t think I need to wade in.”

That view comes to us indirectly, as a jigsaw of juxtaposed ideas, descriptions and modes of writing. On one page, there will be a lengthy quotation from feminist writer bell hooks; a few pages on, Brown reproduces the dictionary definitions with multiple uses of the words “black” and “white”. On another page, we are in the territory of the conventional novel, watching the unhappy narrator offer to help her boyfriend’s mother prepare for the party and being refused. It is up to us to piece these things together.

Whether or not this fragmented form is the novel as reconstructed for the internet age, as some critics suggest, it certainly feels hyperlinked. “I think with the internet, we get so much information and we enjoy – well, I certainly enjoy – interacting with what I’m consuming,” says Brown. “When I read something and I come across a word I don’t know, I might click on to the Wikipedia page and see what else it relates to. A person or a book gets referenced, I might end up down the rabbit hole of that. And the idea of providing your own narrative that links information together – that’s my experience interacting with content on the internet. I think that’s what makes me feel that kind of form works.”

Put like this, Assembly sounds more like a conundrum she set herself and managed to solve than a story she needed to tell. She always planned, she says, to take a year out to do something different when she was 30. The fact she has managed to do exactly that, with the help of a London Writers Award – 30 are given out each year to new authors – speaks to a clear sense of purpose. Her purpose was never to become a writer, however. Reading Wuthering Heights as a child didn’t make her want to write stories herself; she laughs at the very idea. Even now, with all the attention Assembly has had – and despite the sheer beauty of her writing, which is formidable – she doesn’t see herself that way.

“I’m looking at this as a break period, basically,” she says. “I don’t know that I would ever want to attempt to earn my income through writing. I didn’t enjoy thinking about how to frame the story in order to get it published; I wouldn’t want to have that pressure.” The thought of writing all the time fills her with dread, she says frankly. “But if it’s something I can do from time to time and do it exactly how I want to do it, that sounds really fun.” She has a day job, after all, that pays. Next year, 2021’s hottest debut writer may well be back at the bank.

Natasha Brown is in conversation with Areej Nur for the Melbourne Writers Festival’s digital program, available from September 6-15 at mwf.com.au. The Age is a festival partner.

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