Universality for All
2025/11/22
Universality by Natasha Brown
Forget Tiktok or generative AI. For my money the biggest challenge that has long face the novel is the rise of long form non-fiction. Do we need another Philip Roth when we have articles like “Who is the Bad Art Friend?” (reported by Robert Kolker in the New York Times Magazine). There are characters, plot, intrigue, and the merciless manipulation of the author, withholding and revealing the twists and turns, redirecting our sympathies with cool control. But most of all, real life grants that rare license for a kind of salacious melodrama we rarely see in the serious novels that are often preoccupied with confrontations of a far slighter variety.
It might seem like a logical step for a novel to appropriate the form, as Universality, by Natasha Brown, does in the first of its five chapters. The central event that the novel ostensibly concerns is delivered to us as a piece of long form journalism “Fool’s Gold” in the fictional UK magazine Alazon. There has been a crime: a young man lies in a coma after being hit across the head. But there are salacious details. He was hit across the with a gold bar, with a market value of half a million dollars. This gold bar was left lying around, forgotten about, by the wealthy financier Richard Spenser. A gold bar left lying around in his second home, a farm in Yorkshire that was overtaken by politically radical squatters, set on finding a better way to live by growing their own vegetables. It was the leader of this anti-capitalist group who suffered the cranial trauma from the bar of raw capital, which very much ticks the box for melodramatic details that you could never make up. But the most salacious detail of all in this plot, was that the assailant in this metaphorically burdened act, was the wastrel son of a prominent UK reactionary opinion writer. (Oh, and it happened during covid.)
The following four sections return to the familiar territory of the novel: the perspectives and interior lives of the various characters. We are introduced to Hannah, the journalist who wrote Fool’s Gold. She is a struggling journalist whose working class background held her back from making journalism into a career, and when covid hit she started working in a store to make ends meet. The article has been a singular professional success, bringing her some fame and fortune, but failed to provide the lasting profile or career break she was really craving. We then meet Richard Spencer, who was treated quite unfairly by the article that led to him being vilified in the public square. Then there is Miraim “Lenny” Leonard – the reactionary opinion writer of a type easily recognizable in the cursed pantheon of UK newspapers columnists. If the novel is truly interested in any of its characters, it is her. She is the mastermind behind the entire scandal – not the actaul assault itself, but rather in the subsequent furor. It was Lenny who fed the details of the story to Hannah in order to raise her own profile, just as she was transitioning to a more upmarket brand of newspaper and adjusting her political platform. Finally we meet Martin, a successful culture writer with the career that Hannah could only wish to have, who interviews Lenny onstage at Hay-like literary festival at the novel’s climax, hoping to achieve some kind of gotcha moment.
Unfortunately, Universality fails to deliver on its own literary devices, and suffers from its own contradictions. The opening section of faux-longform is a pale shadow of genuine long form journalism. The bar has been set very high – by the Americans, it has to be said. And as even Martin observes within the of the novel itself, Fool’s Gold isn’t a particularly good article. Are we to believe that Hannah has failed to succeed as a journalist because she is working class or because she is just bad at the job? She is certainly bad at the job, but then the novel leads us to believe that her more successful friends, Martin in particular, are little better. In this world, prestige jobs are sinecures held by the rich.
Universality is keen to make points about class in the UK, and very keen to be a novel about class. It is bewildering then how superficial its treatment of class in the UK is. The second chapter combines a dinner party hosted by Hannah, with flashbacks of Hannah’s life during lockdown. The passages that see Hannah abandoning her desperately held “cultural capital” as a journalist, and instead zoning out to Spotify at the end of the day after a shift at the store are the most interesting in the book, but the dinner party is a literary shambles, devoid of literary device, and falling back on characters regurgitating reactionary politics and barely constructed arguments. Judging by this novel, being upper class is now a mysterious thing that simply means you are wealthier, and have a far easier time finding work. It is true that class signifiers have become obscured, as Brown does observe, but there is a lot more to observe than the fact that some people go on expensive holidays. I found myself yearning for The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst’s 2004 Booker prize winner, an astoundingly well observed novel that captured a very particular era in English life.
It is one of the more tiresome features of modern intellectual life that we have to pay attention to the opinions fermenting in that bag of rotten apples that is the right wing. There is no avoiding the “intellectual dark web”, if we are going to understand the information and political landscape we are now navigating. It’s really terrible that this is the case because their ideas are bad and dangerous, but to top it off they are tedious as fuck. That, I think, Natasha Brown would be in agreement with me on. But the affection Brown finds for her antihero Lenny that at least earns her the final word feels bewilderingly unearned. The opinions are no less tedious and repulsive when Brown renders them. Then final confrontation, has Lenny expounding her tiresome politics, posturing cynically to a literary festival audience – who are inexplicably eating it up – as Martin makes desperate and pathetic attempts as her interviewer to skewer her.
Once again we are left with the challenge that the novel now faces to be relevant, and to deliver something that non-fiction cannot. If the novel’s climax had been recorded and put on youtube, I wouldn’t have even bothered watching it. I’m honestly asking myself what Brown thinks her own novel had amounted to by that point.
Perfectionish
2025/11/01
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico
In 2016 an Australian newspaper columnist complained that Millennials were spending too much money on Avocado toast and not setting enough aside for their mortgage. A great deal of angry discourse followed, and now, depending on you perspective, Avocado Toast is either shorthand for profligate Millennials or Boomers misunderstanding their economic privilege. An entire generation was aching to be better observed. Fortunately, relief has finally arrived and we have Millennial novelists who are putting their own generation under far more astute scrutiny.
Perfection is one of the finer novels. At the very least, it understands that specificity is more powerful than generalization. Our subjects are Anna and Tom, a pair of young graphic designers living and working in Berlin. And maybe they do eat avocado toast, but that would barely even touch all that defines them. Originally from an unspecified southern European country (read Italy), they never went to college, but made their way professionally making websites, riding the wave of opportunity to German capital. They believed it was in Berlin that they would find what they aspired to: the life they had seen lived on their social media feeds. And they find this life and it works out for them until it doesn’t, and the gap between the perfection glimpsed online and the reality they live widens to a chasm.
There is an almost insufferably snide edge to the novel. It is soaked in a covid lockdown pessimism, even if the novel’s timeline stops short of 2020. Anna and Tom are given a superficial and de-localized politics that is both recognizable and bluntly unfair. The very construction of each sentence disdains them with its habitual “would”: “They would get worked up about silly fights between strangers. They would show a fervent interest in the affairs of people they would never meet.” And so on. Though they are our protagonists, they aren’t dignified with the narrative trappings such characters are usually afforded. Anna and Tom are merely part of a milieu; their behavior is merely typical. Anna and Tom have have let social media shape their their desires: as consumers, creatives, romantic partners, and citizens. They aspire for their life to match the aesthetic they are themselves manufacturing for their own clients’ websites. Their desires are what is called “mimetic” in the language of theory, and if you are Girard all desire is like this. What could be less authentic than being incapable of shaping your own wants and tastes?
But I do not subscribe to the theories of Girard, and I am less cynical about my own generation. I think that Millennials are probably the generation most aware of the issues surrounding social media. And those who read the Guardian are unusually well informed, actually. The self-lacerating tone seems like a joke when you consider the nature grim politics that currently threaten Europe.
(There is a trend among Millennials for starting book clubs, and I am part of it. We read Perfection a few months ago, and as usual I was gifted with the keen insight of my friends. I already knew that Perfection was heavily indebted to George Perec’s “Things: A Story of the Sixties”, but one of my readers went away and read it – in the original French! It turns out Perfection is more than a little indebted to Perec, and hews very closely to his plot, tone, characterization, and pacing. My friend was left more than a little unsettled reading one after the other. Here is a voice of the Millennial generation, and they are just repackaging the literature of the sixties for us. Which is its own indictment, I suppose.)
But for all that, the novel remains undeniably brilliant. It couldn’t have been any other city than Berlin, not even New York. The depiction of Berlin, its expat community and creative class, and how it has changed over the last decade and a half is rendered wonderfully in all its dispiriting detail. Reading about Latronico, it is clear he was skewering himself as much as anyone else. He lived in Berlin for 13 years, and began to be suspicious of the life he had curated for himself resembling the lives of everyone he found on Instagram. The biggest issue the novel has might be how well it will survives the future. I suspect that astute observations about Millennials may begin to feel a little quaint once we have really come to terms with Zoomers. Avocado toast has nothing on the Gen Z stare.
Absolutely, Batman
2025/10/18
Absolute Batman: Vol1 The Zoo (Writer: Scott Snyder, Artist: Nick Dragotta)
Almost all comic book artists operate a side hustle doing spec commissions from fans, and those commissions are overwhelmingly for pictures of Batman. So tiresome and predictable are these requests, that I have heard that artists will often give discounts for anyone requesting anything novel that the artist might enjoy drawing. But comic book artists have to hustle, and so they continue to churn out those Batman commissions.
One person who never had to hustle was Bruce Wayne, the boy orphaned into incredible wealth and a deep personality complex that has captured our imagination. Or at least that is the character as is traditional told. DC comics’ Absolute series latest attempt to reboot and reimagine their traditional stable of superheroes, with a generous, but maybe not too generous, license to reinterpret. Absolute Batman is the flagship title, and from what I sense of the buzz, the response has been positive.
Absolute Batman has hustle. Maybe grindset, but I’d say something more than grindset. His father was a public school teacher, gunned down on a school field trip – the class including his own son – to the zoo. Bruce and the rest of his class took shelter in the bat house. So it all begins. All the pieces rearranged, inverted, and reconstructed. I enjoyed the notion that the World’s Greatest Detective developed his intellect by taking a thorough liberal arts education. It was actually kind of touching to see Bruce Wayne grow his power base by going into government and getting involved in public works. Bruce Wayne doesn’t have a the grindset. You don’t become Batman by having the grindset. Bruce Wayne became Batman by being a striver.
But some of the rearrangements seemed less inspired. Alfred Pennyworth is now a cynical special forces agent, roaming Gotham city on the orders of unknown parties. It is beyond a cliche to reinvent a character by giving them a special forces background – it’s more like a joke. It is a joke because everyone is a badass now. Batman was already the ultimate badass, but not an absolute badass it seems. There is an amped up brutality to his fighting. There is a lot more impaling, stabbing, and dismembering. His bat symbol, one of many homages to Frank Millar’s Dark Knight, is now an axe head, ready to be wielded against Batman’s foes.
The most telling reinvention, maybe the best and the worst, is what has happened to Batman physically. This is Batman who did not miss leg day. Someone realized that Batman’s bodybuilder biceps were ridiculous and fixed it by jacking out his thighs and calves. Superhero comics have always exploited the teenage preoccupation with the adult physique - most obviously the female physique, but more so the male physique. This Batman’s physique is not there to impress women, it is to intrigue men. It is as if the artist has observed the growing body dysmorphia among young men fueled by steroid abusing superhero actors and fitness influencers, and just pushed it all to its logical conclusion.
Who are Batman’s foes? A faceless gang “The Party Animals” causing sociopathic violence across Gotham. They are a rotten bunch, and that is about all there is too them. They are literally faceless baddies, committing their terrible deeds while wearing an assortment of masks. The more familiar rogues gallery of characters have become Wayne’s poker buddies from school, awaiting their own personal developments, or lurking almost out of sight, for future story arcs. This in part seems to be by design. If there was a goal in this first arc, it was surely to make the Absolute Batman more interesting than his villains.
For all that I would note that this comic is eminently readable. There is some truly execrable visual story telling in the superhero comics world. There are convoluted continuities and artists working desperately around their own limitations. But shorn of its baggage, this batman comic moves along at a brisk pace, ready to surprise you every couple of pages with some novel take on the familiar material.
For now at least, comic books artists have a new and interesting way to draw Batman for the fans.