NATASHA BROWN’S lacerating meditation on black British identity plays out in London’s cut-throat financial sector, where the author worked for a decade. The non-linear, stream-of-consciousness narrative takes readers into the mind of a nameless, burnt-out young banker who has invested everything in “transcending” her colour, class and gender, only to experience an awakening.
The novel’s tone and themes—privilege, ambition, conformity—echo those of Raven Leilani’s bestselling “Luster” and, though those books portray capitalism differently. “Assembly” also shares a setting with “Industry”, a recent television drama about a competitive internship scheme at an investment bank in London. All these narratives pit twenty-something women of colour against rigid power structures, in which assimilation and striving are sold as the way to overcome social boundaries.
As the enlightened face of banking, Ms Brown’s protagonist is often dispatched to school assembly halls where she delivers inspirational soundbites to recruit future intakes. She endures daily “micro-aggressions”—digs about quotas, her boss’s ego trips—but tells herself that she is fine. She feels pressure to make good on her “opportunity”, given the personal and economic sacrifices of her forebears, but she’s weary of the ascent up the ladder.
A boyfriend is another asset, a chance to optimise “social capital” . Where she confers liberal credentials on her white partner, who harbours political aspirations, he gives her establishment cachet. Yet a party at his parents’ country estate only highlights the limits of her hard-earned social mobility.
Ms Brown evokes, but does not merely imitate, the ironic language typical of millennial literary fiction: her sentences are sharp and rhythmic and she uses suffocating imagery to create a sense of dread. The novel blends “autofiction” with critical argument, referring to Claudia Rankine’s long poem “Citizen” and bell hooks’s essay “Postmodern Blackness”.