“What does it mean to subvert expectations?” she asks. But Assembly is far too subtle and elegant to pander to our desire for quick fixes. It’s tempting to draw conclusions about how literature might solve seemingly intractable problems, such as racism or misogyny, where conventional politics has failed. At Cambridge, she was fascinated by how the same concepts translated between disparate branches of mathematics, the solution to a problem emerging with crystalline precision, all depending on the angle you looked at it. Her arrival brings with it an exciting new point of view. “I wouldn’t go as far as anything concrete about it.” As unlikely as it seems, she doesn’t rule out returning to her old job. “I’ve been playing around with sentences,” she says. The experience of debuting a book in a pandemic isn’t “too bad,” she smiles, and she’s already picked up her notepad again. Brown worked on the novel on a notepad, the same way she once puzzled out theorems. The plan was always to take a career break at 30 – a sabbatical that became the proving ground for Assembly. She is characteristically mild-toned about her experience of being a Black woman in these notoriously white and posh spaces: “I felt it was a really interesting opportunity to just observe people – I suppose that sounds a bit creepy – but to understand how language varies how confidence varies and how different people’s experiences and upbringings, when they’re all in the same situation, pans out.” She claims Assembly isn’t autobiographical – she was more likely to pinch details from her loved ones’ lives (“one of my friends recognised her baby’s high chair”). “I think there’s kind of a generic, big-corp experience that you can kind of evoke on the page.” “It’s kind of hard to describe because it was the only place I really worked,” she says of life at a firm she’d rather not name, adding that she deliberately kept the details sparse in Assembly so more people could relate to it.
She ended up in a city job with all its typical issues. Her parents met at college in America (“we’re all big readers and talkers”), and her father encouraged her to take up the subject at university, where she was particularly delighted by pure mathematics, thought to be one of the hardest fields of human knowledge, and which Brown, with typical understatement, describes as “not having much of a real-world application”.īrown and her friends graduated in the “post-2008 world – you didn’t feel like you could be all that fussy”. She joins a select group of authors – David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon among them – to have studied mathematics. Brown grew up in London and was a big reader as a child, spending summers at her grandparents’ and dawdling over their huge bookshelf.
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