A book in which not much happens on the surface: a lecture, a promotion, a diagnosis and a visit to the country. A protagonist who remains nameless and is outlined with few biographical key data: a young British woman whose parents immigrated from the Caribbean before she was born and who has achieved a brilliant career in finance. Because of her success, she lectures on diversity in schools for her employer.
The gathering that gives the novel its title takes place at a London school, where she talks about the opportunities for upward mobility in her bank: “It’s a story. It’s about challenges. About hard work. Pulling yourself together. Rolled up Shirt sleeves… I recite my old phrases like new wisdom. Click to the next slide. Behind me, huge diverse faces in gray suits smile, point at graphics, shake hands and wave.” In this situation, of course, with her biography she guarantees the meritocratic promise of social advancement through individual performance.
Is the protagonist lying to her young audience? That’s not an easy question to answer: actually, being employed in the City of London has allowed her to fight her way from the lower class to the middle class. Success manifests itself in a smart wardrobe, a stylish condominium in a townhouse. She can now afford private health insurance, which allows her to visit luxurious medical practices. She has her assets managed by a consultant and also makes contact with the British upper class. Her boyfriend comes from an aristocratic family.
Natascha Brown: Meeting. Novel. Translated from English by Jackie Thomae. Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2022. 113 pages, 20 euros.
All of this takes place in the novel by debut British author Natasha Brown, who studied at Cambridge and herself worked in the London financial sector for many years. In short sentences and on just over 100 pages, a series of atmospherically dense vignettes that artfully interlace observation and reflection, sketches everyday scenes from the life of the social climber: Colleagues who are aggressive and then protest that nothing really happened; men who pretend only women can operate coffee machines; People who assume she must come from Africa.
Even more than these vignettes about the experiences of exclusion in everyday life, the reaction of the successful woman is shocking when reading it: she patiently accepts the discriminatory transgressions. From the first insults on the playground to being harassed at work, she had to train herself not to let it show. Why don’t you want to attract attention? Probably because the prevailing feeling is that they don’t really belong to present-day Britain.
The delivery vans with “Go Home” written in large letters that drove through London in 2013 as part of a campaign against illegal immigration for the British Home Office also play a role in Brown’s novel, as they fuel the doubt in the protagonist that she is only a British citizen to be revocable. This doubt is also articulated in the veritable need to justify that they owe nothing to British society: “I pay my taxes, every year. Everything that was spent on me: education, health care, what else – roads? I paid everything back. And more. It’s all profit from now on. I’m what we’ve always been to the Empire: pure bullshit profit.” But can one ever feel at home where one is not valued as a citizen but merely as a taxpayer?
Stories about Jamaica do not help to formulate a possible self-image
But where could a homeland be found? It is here in particular that “Getting Together” differs from other novels that have recently addressed social advancement and have focused on the return to the family place of origin of the protagonists. “Getting together” forbids a narrative model that finds its own truth in personal origins – and devotes little more to the origin of the protagonist’s family than a distancing sentence: “I only know Jamaica from stories.” Stories about one’s own origins do not offer a secure anchor for a possible self-image.
The notion of a free introspection that can be exposed under all social constraints is also rejected: “When I’m alone for an evening in this tasteful home I’ve furnished, I shed the clothes of the day. Peel off layers, Fabrics from my skin until there is nothing underneath. But nothing else is revealed, no hidden self, no nudity.”
The end of the day does not reveal an unadulterated self under the costume. And even her own love relationship seems compromised. As the protagonist cynically remarks, the rich son of the upper class is aiming for a political career and would like to gain “a certain liberal credibility” through the liaison with her – of course, a modern aristocrat has to present himself as a bridge builder “between cultures”.
The narrator lacks the imagination to even imagine another life
In “Getting Together” there are no reserves of the right life and no escapes from the wrong one. The “uncompromising striving” for academic and professional success has completely socialized the protagonist into a false life to which there now seems to be no alternative. And where should another life plan come from, after all, she worked around the clock on her social advancement.
The lack of alternatives to her situation is evident in nothing as clearly as in the complete lack of imagination: The only alternative that the protagonist can think of to her careerist way of life is her own death. When she receives a cancer diagnosis almost at the same time as another promotion, she considers forgoing treatment. The illness suddenly confronts her as the only chance to “end the endless ascent”. The constant pursuit of social success has destroyed the ability to imagine the world just a little differently.
“Getting Together” was rightly praised for the fact that it told in an impressively concentrated way about diverse intertwined experiences of discrimination and that the powerful fairy tale of beneficial social mobility was rejected. Such readings are obvious, but overlook the subtle irony that flashes throughout the narrative. The protagonist sees with increasing concern how well she manages to spread the story of her advancement, which arouses false expectations, in schools. So should she come clean with the next generation and castigate the illusory character of meritocracy with harsh words?
What characterizes the novel is that it remains skeptical about its own form
Her boyfriend, who occasionally works as a political speechwriter, advises against it: she should better wrap her socially critical concerns in a story, preferably one that can be connected to her personal fate – that seems even more authentic. An ironic punchline that hits the narrative model of “Getting Together” itself: the political problems are also fitted into a “narrative arc” in Brown’s novel; he, too, follows the fate of a heroine who, in the end, might still emancipate herself from social impositions and decide in favor of life.
So, is “Rendezvous” just another episode in the grand narrative of social advancement? What distinguishes this novel is that it remains skeptical of its own form; that he keeps it open until the end as to whether his story is far enough from the usual storytelling has removed, which the climber practices so virtuously in her school performances.