mOne of the tough cores of the characters at the heart of Natasha Brown’s great second novel, Lenny, aka Leonard, will probably dislike universality very much. Then again, she might love it. Because the unpredictability of opinions is her inventory of trade. Recently, from the Telegraph Comment Page to the Observer Comment Page, they have not recognized that the injustice of class, race, gender, economy and later diversity, equity and inclusion programs are not frequently retained. Keeping it moving is a trick.
Rennie has earned a fist of survival than many people around her, and is a very neat formula for pleading with readers, including lighting up news stories and making “highly comparables.” Indeed, she is better than the embarrassing banker Richard, who was kicked out of his home with the Sally stockbroker belt after a long read he read enthusiastically. Hanna, a freelance journalist who authors this work, is temporarily promoted by his approach to professional respect, but finds himself as Crick Flewu goes on. And neither of them wants to trade place for Jake, Lenny’s hopeless, and Neil de Well’s son (“wild hair, shambolic clothes, a mass of lifelong accountability.”
A sharp exploration of the power dynamics of storytelling.
Hannah’s work, the work of the Fool, forms the first section of universality, its tone, vocabulary and outlines, and is quickly familiar to anyone who has read newspapers and magazines in the past decade or so. Clearly a quirky tale – in this case, the blockade at farmers ends with a stove of gold sticks on others’ heads, but it turns into a movement of journalistic detection and deductions that introduces the writer’s ingenuity, suggesting a broader sociopolitical theme. The touch of personal involvement “can’t beat the warm, bubbly taste of warm, bubbly milk in a supermarket. You can’t beat anything fresh from a milking bucket,” Hanna writes Hannah of idyllic upbringing, now adjacent to a quarantined farm. It’s not so much spoiler to reveal that her memory has been invented in full.
But the fool’s money takes facts and more important freedom to the extent important in the course of subsequent sections of the novel. In this section, you encounter a broken Richard, crying at the suburban gateway, meet Hanna’s friends at a truly horrifying dinner party in Edmonton, and follow Renee to a literary festival from the Marczars’ festival of self-appearances. Brown is certainly a talented satirist, and her commitment to modern detail is impressive whether she sketches the self-conditioned informality of shepherd’s pie and dusty Malbeck bottles in a middle-class kitchen, or the closed high streets of London’s less fashionable margins.
Within these circumstances, there are many major topics of the eralist: the obsolescence of political tribalism, the superficiality of turbulent media landscapes, and the rebranding of once environmental theories of genetic inheritance in scientific names. To ensure that Hannah doesn’t humiliate chicken for her horrifying friends (Alison Roman’s recipe, a book note in itself, says that it’s funny considering the much-shared Roman recipe), John Breezy speaks of “meatspace integrity” as he basks in his own intellectual advantage: “Of course, the reactionary fuss acknowledged the information of others, embracing science, even if it was, and even if the final outcome was awakened.
Brown’s debut assembly is similarly compact and equally capacity, earning it a place in 2023 on Grant’s list of best British novelists. that. As a reader, you probably won’t trust any of them.
