Assembly by Natasha Brown
“Be the best. Work harder, work smarter. Exceed every expectation. But also be invisible, imperceptible. Don’t make anyone uncomfortable. Don’t inconvenience. Exist in the negative only, the space around. Do not insert yourself into the main narrative. Go unnoticed. Become the air.”
Assembly (2021) is the debut novella by British writer Natasha Brown. Told in a highly effective and vibrant, fragmented style, Brown’s writing is stylistically akin to Rachel Cusk and Jenny Offill but offers a much deeper perspective into one woman’s life in the face of Britain’s colonial legacy.
Through dedication to her education and working up the ranks within a prestigious investment bank, our unnamed narrator, a black British woman from a working-class background, has done all the things she was told to do to be ‘successful’ - but finds herself questioning, at what cost?
The novella opens with three flash fiction works, which help set an overall theme for Assembly. Each piece focuses on a different aspect of navigating life, whether as a woman, a black person, or both. The third flash fiction, “After the Digestif, He Gets Going,” offers a fierce level of awareness at being on the receiving end of verbal abuse (presumed racial, but this isn’t clear):
“She understood the anger of a man who himself understood in his flesh and bones and blood and skin that he was meant to be at the head of a great, hulking giant upon whom the sun never set.”
With unfiltered clarity, Brown paces us through an average day in our narrator’s life, pinpointing how every interaction proceeds from assumptions about her skin colour: from conscious bias and abuse from strangers to the covert microaggressions from colleagues who make it clear they believe her success stems from the organisation’s need for diversity. After being offered a joint promotion at work, our narrator observes the people she is surrounded by and ponders:
“Dry, weathered faces; soft, flabby cheeks; grease-shined foreheads. Necks bursting from as-yet unbuttoned collars, all shades of pink, beige, tan. Fingers stabbing at keyboards and meaty fists wrapped around phone receivers.
Is this it - the crescendo of my career?
My life?”
Questions of legitimacy, place and what it has taken her to carve out a possible position for herself in a world that would otherwise deem her invisible or unworthy infiltrate our narrator’s observations as she begins to take stock of her life. On delivering a talk in a local school, she reflects on her collaboration to keep the lie of acceptance going:
“But of course, without the legitimacy of a flashy title at a blue-chip company, I wouldn’t have a platform to say anything at all. Any value my words have in this country is derived from my association with its institutions: universities, banks, government. I can only repeat their words and hope to convey a kind of truth. Perhaps that’s a poor justification for my own complicity.”
We enter the narrator’s life at a tumultuous time. As she is grappling with some recent medical news and her promotion, she is also preparing herself mentally to spend the weekend at her white, wealthy boyfriend’s family home in the countryside for a big family party. She recognises the subconscious symbiotic desirability of her relationship with her boyfriend. The connections and social status it provides her, and the “certain liberal credibility” it gives him - even if he doesn’t seem to be conscious of this dynamic.
It’s her recent medical news and the decisions it leads to that become the catalyst to reassess the way she is living:
“I’m not sure I understood that I could stop, before this. That there was any alternative to survivable. But in my metastasis, I find possibility.”
For 100 pages, there is so much to unpack in this book. Even in compiling this review and dipping back into the pages, I’ve found myself tugged by sentences afresh, and my thoughts and clarity about the narrator changed. At its heart is a strong sense of identity and yearning to uncover who the narrator is beyond the performative way she has found herself having to live to survive.
The question of whether she would still choose to continue to perform when given an out ignites like a match in the first few pages and slowly burns down as we read deeper and deeper into her life:
“Generations of sacrifice; hard work and harder living. So much suffered, so much forfeited, so much – for this opportunity. For my life. And I’ve tried, tried living up to it. But after years of struggling, fighting against the current, I’m ready to slow my arms. Stop kicking. Breathe the water in. I’m exhausted. Perhaps it’s time to end this story.”
This is a precise and intensely self-aware exploration of the entrenched inequalities of our modern societies, exposing that success for one is not the same success for the other. A must-read.
Elaine Mead is a freelance writer and book reviewer, currently residing in Hobart, Tasmania. She is passionate about the ways we can use literature to learn from our experiences to become more authentic versions of ourselves and obsessed with showing you photos of her Dachshund puppy. You can find her online under www.wordswithelaine.com.
