In Natasha Brown’s latest novel, a viral long-read article takes centre stage, recounting an assault at a rural farm where a gold ingot is used as a weapon. The article takes up the first third of the 150-page novel, offering a succinct parody of the über-popular form of narrative journalism. As is often the case with super viral long reads, it is less the actual events but the people involved who capture the moment. The victim is a climate activist, the son of a notorious reactionary columnist, while the farm’s owner is a boastful investment banker with a vast property portfolio.

Universality follows four years after Brown’s debut novel, Assembly, which catapulted her to overnight success. This time, Brown turns her sharp focus to the journalism industry, particularly in Britain. We spoke with her ahead of the book’s release to discuss her biting satire, her research process, and her famously economical use of language.

Barry Pierce: When I first read the description of Universality, I was immediately excited. The idea of a book satirising contemporary journalism, particularly the rise of long-read narrative articles, seemed to directly address many of the thoughts I’ve had recently as a freelancer in this industry. Why did you decide to tackle this world?
Natasha Brown: I’ve been interested in language and ways of assessing the neutrality of language for a very long time. I think my first book was really exploring that, looking at individual words and one woman’s interpretation of those words. But for the second book, I felt I didn’t want to try and do the same thing again. I’m still interested in the same topic, but if I’m going to broach it, it has to come from a different angle. I thought, what about really looking at the people who are exceptionally good at using words? Who can use words to bring a crowd on side, to whip them up? Who can use words to create narratives, to create realities? These were the kinds of people I wanted to look at.

BP: It’s surprising to me that no one has parodied the long read in the way you do in the novel. A third of the entire book is structured as a long read article, somewhat in the style of writers like Andrew O’Hagan or Sam Knight, and it feels like you really nailed the beats of that style. Did you draw inspiration from any specific long reads or writers while working on it?
NB: I was hugely influenced by Tom Wolfe and his New Journalism style of writing. I felt like this idea that he proposed – of taking novelistic ideas and applying them to non-fiction – is interesting. One of the things I really wanted to look into was how much more successful this style of writing has become online, where things can be shared so easily and stories can become viral. I also felt that there are a lot of quirks in journalism, and I think Janet Malcolm really teased this out in her book The Journalist and the Murderer, where she talks about the journalistic eye and this kind of first-person writing that carries enormous weight. I thought, when you take the weight that we still give to journalism when we read it as well as this idea that its function is to entertain, particularly to entertain using people’s lives as its source of fodder, what happens when you put those two things together? I felt the novel was such an interesting place to explore these ideas.

BP: I really related to Hannah, the young freelance journalist who writes the long read at the heart of the novel, especially her frustrations with the barriers to entering the industry and being broke. Her character contrasts with Lenny, an old-school journalist from the 90s who has become a reactionary columnist. What did your research process look like for tackling the last 30 years of British journalism?
NB: I did a tonne of research, reading books like Andrew Marr’s My Trade, which is all about the industry, and a lot about journalism in the 90s. I remember getting weird looks on a train to Manchester while reading Piers Morgan’s diaries. Maybe I shouldn’t have been reading that in public. [laughs] I read absolutely everything, novels, memoirs, and lots of columns from over the years, to really understand what the industry looked like.
I also went undercover. This type of writing, working to a fast deadline and fitting a publication style, doesn’t come naturally to me, but I accepted a couple of commissions to see the whole process from the inside. As a total outsider, I have to admit, the industry looked totally bizarre. My background is in STEM, where you can prove you can do something and then get the job. But in the literary world, many who succeed do so because of cronyism or nepotism. I wanted to explore what that looked like from the inside, particularly for someone like Hannah, who isn’t a natural fit for this space – how does she navigate it?

“I remember getting weird looks on a train to Manchester while reading Piers Morgan’s diaries. Maybe I shouldn’t have been reading that in public.”

BP: I’m curious about the structure of your novel. It’s a short work like your first, but doesn’t follow a classic narrative. The first third is a long read, then it splits into individual chapters that offer glimpses into the lives of those affected by the article’s success. How did you decide on this structure?
NB: I really felt I wanted to go into it with this cold open of the journalistic style, because I wanted that to set the tone and to also set the record for what was going on in this novel. I wasn’t sure initially if the whole article would be included or just portions, but I wanted to contrast, I suppose, the factual element with the fictional element. I was working through it, writing it, plotting it, and I realised that actually, you really needed to see the whole article. You needed to feel like you’d had the mystery. You know, the sort of thing I’d read while I’m eating my Pret soup and scrolling. [laughs] Then, in the sections after the article, it all spills out and the mystery is, really, what actually happened? Who started this story? My goal was that once you get to the end of the novel, if you read the article again – it reads very differently knowing everything that fed into it.

BP: I’m not sure if you agree with this, but I’ve always found British publishing to be quite wary of shorter novels. One thing that sets it apart from European publishing is that in Europe, there seems to be more openness to publishing very short books. From conversations I’ve had with other writers, it feels like there’s a culture here where novels below a certain word count are seen as harder to sell to publishers. Is that something you can relate to, as the author of two short novels?
NB: One of the things that feels really clear to me, as an outsider, but doesn’t tend to be talked about much within the publishing industry, is the expectation of the 300-page literary fiction novel as an economic expectation. 300 pages is that sweet spot in the sense that it optimises manufacturing costs for how much you can charge for the book. For both books, I really wanted them to be the right length for what they were. For this book, I knew I wanted an ensemble cast and to play around with perspective, so it obviously had to have more space than Assembly. But at the same time, I never want to outstay my welcome. In my first novel, there was a lot of pressure to make it longer, but I have a huge amount of respect for the reader. As a reader, I’ve been the one taking a book on the Central Line, and I don’t want to have a doorstop when I’m smooshed up on the Tube. [laughs]