Narratives of social mobility have gained increasing prominence over the last couple of decades in Britain and beyond. In Britain – generally known as a notoriously class-obsessed culture – figures like the scholarship boy have been prominent in the post-war decades. For instance, public working-class and Marxist intellectuals like Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams openly reflected on their conflicted personal educational biographies within the wider context of the British class system. While Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957) contains elements that constitute early examples of autosociobiography, Williams’ novel Border Country (1960) is a working-class Bildungsroman that echoes aspects of the writer’s own biography and anticipates contemporary narratives of social mobility (cf. Hoggart 2009; Williams 2006). More recently, Linsey Hanley has drawn from Hoggart and Williams to come to terms with her own experience as a female first-generation academic and her social mobility in Estates: An Intimate History (a book that simultaneously links questions of class identity to one of the key sites of classed identities in Britain: the council house or housing estate) and Respectable: Crossing the Class Divide (cf. Hanley 2017a; 2017b). Personal accounts of the often challenging psychological, emotional and interpersonal toll that upward social mobility takes have recently gained in popularity in Britain and beyond: French writer Didier Eribon’s books Retours à Reims (2009; English translation Returning to Reims, 2018) and La société comme verdict (2013) and American writer Cynthia Cruz’s book The Melancholia of Class (2021) have similarly explored the repercussions of social mobility.

What all these writers – from Hoggart to Eribon and Cruz – share, is an interest in forms of autotheory, that is, autobiography as a source for more wide-ranging theoretical reflections on culture and society.1 Such autosociobiographies and autotheoretical narratives of social mobility share a focus on interpersonal challenges. They explore the psychological and emotional turmoil associated with the sacrifices and losses that go along with transitioning from one class or social sphere to another; they track changes of consciousness and habitus, including behavioural, linguistic and corporeal patterns (change of sociolect, of dress, demeanour, diet and so on). They also express a sense of uprootedness and not fitting in, often coupled with a keen eye for the very concrete material spaces and places of class.

While these autotheoretical narratives of social mobility focus on social class and to varying degrees its intersections with gender, a comparable strand of autosociobiographical and autotheoretical writings can be found in narratives on the experience of race and racism, especially in the burgeoning field of afropessimism. Frank B. Wilderson III.’s autotheoretical book Afropessimism (2020) is a paradigmatic example. Wilderson defines the field’s keystone concept of social death as giving rise to a Western-dominated global order in which ‘Blacks are not Human subjects, but are instead structurally inert props, implements for the execution of White and non-Black fantasies and sadomasochistic pleasures’ (15, original emphasis).

What is striking about the recent interest in autosociobiography and autotheory is that while many of these texts experiment with narrative and theory, they likewise increasingly inspire writers of fiction to echo similar narratives about class passing. Examples from recent decades include Irvine Welsh’s satirical novel Filth (1998) about an opportunistic Thatcher-adoring police inspector who makes every effort to erase his own working-class upbringing in a mining town, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2004), and Zadie Smith’s NW (2012), the latter two of which also incorporate sexuality- and race-based forms of passing, respectively.2

In our comparative analysis, we want to focus on two representative novels on upward social mobility: Naomi Booth’s Exit Management (2020) and Natasha Brown’s Assembly (2021). Both novels share a focus on ambitious female protagonists who have moved into London’s world of finance and business. Lauren, the protagonist in Exit Management, grew up on a council estate in the North of England and has moved on to a successful career as a ‘hatchet person’ in charge of exit management in human resources. The unnamed narrator of Brown’s Assembly is the descendant of a Jamaican family of the Windrush Generation who has made a career in finance and established a relationship with a wealthy white boyfriend, whose aristocratic, country house owning family has ‘old money’. Both protagonists are representative of prototypical classed identities and their intersections in contemporary Britain: Lauren in Exit Management stands for the regional North-South divide in England, with the post-industrial North commonly associated with a traditional, left-behind working class culture and the South associated with wealth and (especially in the case of London and Brighton) an ideal of cosmopolitan progressiveness. The protagonist of Assembly stands for the continued troubled history of post-war and post-imperial race relations in Britain, with the Windrush Generation and their descendants still struggling for recognition within the national narrative of Britishness.

Both protagonists, then, constitute literary figurations of the intersection of gender, class, race and region in contemporary Britain. The two novels explore their protagonists’ attempts to transcend the limits of these intersections of identity, especially by the means provided and propagated by a society and culture obsessed with the economic and neoliberal conceptions of individualist labour. At the same time, the novels stage the failure of such attempts at transcendence and their underlying ideological narratives. The fantasies invested in by these upwardly mobile characters are ultimately hampered by corporeal and temporal factors: the protagonists’ bodies, inscribed and reinscribed with the markers of classed, gendered and raced identities, ultimately threaten to betray the protagonists both as inhabited material-biological structures and as the embodiments of values and identities. This failure ties in with the temporal aspects of the novels. Both narratives stage a deconstruction of registers of past, present and future that echo the tenets of hauntological philosophy: the protagonists’ bodies are haunted by their personal and familial pasts as well as by the past and failed futural narratives of the British nation. This last aspect culminates in the prominent ramifications of Brexit as a historical frame for the two narratives. The protagonists’ bodies and lives are thus haunted by their personal and by their nation’s past. Their investments in the future, in turn, are dramatically impacted by these hauntings. This temporal dimension also intersects with the spatial dimension of the characters’ identities, and especially with their housing situations as they change throughout the trajectory of their social mobility. In the following analyses, we therefore want to read the two novels with a perspective informed by recent scholarly approaches to class and social mobility that consider the corporeal, spatial and temporal aspects of class and its intersections with gender and race, ranging from Beverley Skeggs’ sociology of bodily inscriptions to Sara Ahmed’s phenomenology, afropessimist philosophy and Cynthia Cruz’ hauntological approach to working-class social mobility.

We contend that both novels incorporate aspects of autotheoretical attempts to focalise extended historical processes or deeply pervasive societal conventions in concrete embodied experiences. This is more pronounced in Assembly, whose protagonist’s identity, biography, and job in finance notably resemble that of its author (Pittel 2021, 90). Reporting on a series of interviews with Naomi Booth, the journalist Cara Lee also ties Exit Management to its author’s regional origin and identity as ‘part of a recent movement to write, or rewrite, the north’. Nevertheless, Exit Management prominently features three characters – Lauren, Callum, and József – whose class, gender, cultural and national identities markedly contrast with one another, and although the author Naomi Booth’s ‘childhood was in Dewsbury, as is Lauren’s’, she states that ‘the characters are “amalgams from different experiences and different aspects of research”’ (Lee 2021). Booth describes her characters as an ‘amalgam’, which resonates with the title of Assembly, alluding to the shared investment of both novels to articulate narratives of identity in post-Brexit, post-colonial, post-industrial Britain while also pointing to patterns of fracture and collapse where stable identities fail to cohere (cf. Pittel 2021, 92–93). Here, it is notable that both novels adopt a heterodiegetic narrator and focalisation is carefully managed to never provide full insight into any protagonist’s thoughts, feelings, or motivations, failing almost by design to permit the reader to construct a complete or coherent image of their identities.

Despite bearing witness to intensely intimate scenes that open up the protagonists’ bodies to an extradiegetic gaze, perhaps precisely because of each protagonist’s intradiegetic isolation and alienation, Exit Management and Assembly both refuse to disclose anything resembling an authentic or complete sense of embodied identity. Where the title Assembly points to the multiplicity of factors that shape the confluence of its main character’s place in the world, the title Exit Management points to the protagonist’s desperate and ultimately doomed attempts to escape from a past that seems to predetermine or preclude certain futures.

More than three years after the 2016 referendum on European Union membership, the United Kingdom officially withdrew from the EU on 31 January 2020, finalising the consequential and highly controversial sociopolitical process commonly known as Brexit. Published later that year, Naomi Booth’s novel Exit Management takes place in the period between referendum and withdrawal. Though mentioned as a news item on the very first page of the novel (‘Countdown to Brexit: what happens next’), the narrator counts it among other ‘minor calamities’ that also include ‘Why Kate can wear a tiara but Meghan can’t’ (Booth 2020, 3). In another passage, Lauren characterises Brexit as one of ‘these problems, which are nothing to do with her, which she can do nothing about, rushing right up to her’, accumulating into an ‘[a]nxious, anxious feeling’ (Booth 2020, 85). We read the peripheral role of the actual political process of Brexit in the narrative, appearing as an indistinct and impersonal entity that nevertheless manifests as a heavy and foreboding presence, as meaningful and deliberate. It is precisely the clear distinctions between centre and periphery, internal and external, familiarity and estrangement that the novel problematises. The withdrawal negotiations extended over a multi-year period in part because such questions as the Irish border, the residency rights of EU citizens in the UK and vice versa, the retention or abolition of EU legislation, and the flow of goods and people had not been seriously considered prior to the 2016 referendum and proved how closely the EU and the UK had become entangled since the latter had joined the European Community in 1972.

Both its title and core themes therefore characterise Exit Management as a piece of Brexit literature. More precisely, it can be classified as the particular type of post-Brexit narrative Kristian Shaw describes as occupied with ‘identifying the social divisions affecting the nation, and engaging in a struggle with British society and its prevailing political climate’, works of fiction that ‘espouse an outward-looking cosmopolitan engagement as a form of resistance to an increasingly nationalistic and inward-looking cultural landscape’ (Shaw 2018, 28).

Exit Management can be interpreted as an attempt to illustrate that the United Kingdom as an entity autonomous from its European neighbour(s) is as much a simplified fiction as the notion of an autonomous English identity unadulterated by foreign influence.3 Instead, the novel impressively traces multiple processes of transnational and intercultural exchange that form the material basis for Englishness. It does so by animating movements of transition, exchange, and internalisation in three key ways we will analyse in detail below.

First, Exit Management decentres this contingent Englishness by highlighting the material goods, social and cultural capital that physically cross the border into the United Kingdom to make up the highly exclusive, upper-class and culturally dominant cosmopolitanism of central London that Lauren in particular aspires to. For instance, Lauren muses that her friend ‘Mina is always going on about a Spanish bar near Kings Cross: the centre of the London sherry revival’ (Booth 2020, 192). Similarly, traditionally lower-class and locally sourced foods are elevated into continentally inspired haute cuisine: ‘Snail porridge. Salmon with liquorice gel. […] two cucumber gazpacho and two duck with blood pudding’ (Booth 2020, 47). Even where locally sourced ingredients seem to underpin the local character of English cosmopolitanism, they are reassembled until they appear unfamiliar and even exotic.

Second, Exit Management problematises the notion of a secure or autonomous English cultural identity by selecting keystones of Englishness and depicting them as indelibly inscribed with the hybridising effect of multiculturalism and the homogenising force of global corporate brands. For instance, when Callum ‘walks up and down Wardour Street’ he enumerates a diverse assemblage of establishments and objects: ‘Jamaican Grillhouse, Starbucks Open as Usual, Wasabi, Strip Intimate Waxing, high-vis jackets, white vans, Deliveroo, Delicious Edit’ (Booth 2020, 233). Despite their individually disparate origins, these objects cohere into a list that could authentically characterise inner-city streets not only all across London, but all over the UK.

This resonates with what Ian Baucom characterises, in his analysis of Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, as ‘forcing the city to disclose itself, not simply as multiform, but as a hybrid whose various branches have been grafted from cuts of an imperial tree’ (Baucom 1999, 207). Baucom and others have identified persistent post-imperial attempts to define ‘Englishness as something that exists apart from, and utterly fails to coincide with, the lost empire’ (1999, 15) – a tendency subtly observable in Exit Management as well. In another scene, Callum betrays his compromised, lower-class Englishness by ordering a ‘Red Stripe’ at an upmarket bar, rebuffed by the barman who informs him that they have ‘a selection of craft beers and a number of guest Belgian lambics’ (Booth 2020, 109). Not only is Callum confronted with the commodified traditionalism of ‘craft beer’ as a marker of distinguished taste, the novel also hints at the implicit conditions of Englishness that link it with Belgian beer instead of the ostensibly more English heritage of his preferred drink: Red Stripe, though a well-established brand in the UK, was originally brewed and marketed in Jamaica, and the company’s own website continues to define it as ‘synonymous with all things Jamaican’ (www.redstripebeer.com/heritage). Hence, the upmarket bar’s menu both represents and caters to a clientele much more comfortably aligned with a pan-European whiteness than a mixed-race English heritage.

Baucom argues that the racialisation of Englishness to purify and isolate national identity from the second half of the twentieth century onwards ‘could survive intact only by refusing to admit that the imperial beyond was, in fact, party to the national within’ (Baucom 1999, 6). In this way, he goes on, ‘Englishness, consequently, emerges as at once an embrace and a repudiation of the imperial beyond’ (Baucom 1999, 7). However, as our analysis will substantiate, consolidating Englishness as white to effectively lock out post-imperial British subjects or nationals on the basis of race presents a problematic and fragile border in the Brexit context since whiteness has also been serving as a common denominator for a distinctly European and supranational European Union identity. Rosi Braidotti, developing the concept of nomadic citizenship, observes that ‘[a] range of new, alternative subjectivities has indeed emerged in the shifting landscapes of advanced capitalism and its global diasporas’, all of which constitute ‘contested, multilayered, and internally contradictory subject positions’ (2011, 244). This, she argues, ‘has challenged the claim to an alleged cultural homogeneity of European nation-states and of the struggling European Union’. Eva Aldea picks up nomadic citizenship in her discussion of the ramifications of the Brexit referendum, defining ‘nomadic subjects’ as ‘affected and influenced by their journey, physical or not’, without being ‘defined by a particular place’ (2018, 152). Aldea qualifies Braidotti’s initially optimistic arguments by noting that ‘[i]t has been obvious that the British imaginary space has never been fully aligned with the continent’ (152), and that the EU is not as post-nationalist as it may initially seem: ‘You cannot gain European citizenship without gaining citizenship of a member state. You belong to a nation first’ (154). Nevertheless, as the characters of Mina (Estonian) and Jószef (Hungarian) and their deep integration into a quintessentially English value system based on cultural and financial capital demonstrate, the illusion of a clean political and economic divorce from the European Union is underpinned by the impossibility of a neat cultural separation, too. Unintentionally, nationalist attempts to isolate and re-focus Englishness geographically hence operate in a space where certain cross-border movements dissolve part of the unambiguous logic of national belonging. Illuminating these cross-border movements is a key structural thread throughout Exit Management.

Lastly, the novel focuses on the physical transitions of objects into, out of, and between bodies. How Exit Management traces the trajectories of food, bodily fluids and ‘single-use objects that never go away’ (Booth 2020, 4) is a particularly productive point of access for an analysis of how the novel enacts transitional movements that disrupt and deconstruct clearly articulable boundaries. Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology offers a useful framework to describe these movements. Ahmed notes that

The following analysis consequently does not conceive of bodies as fully formed prior to interacting with their environment, or clearly separable from it. Instead, bodies serve as the present conjuncture of various sedimented trajectories, always open for (re)inscription and exchange by and with the environments they traverse. In Exit Management, this model comes in useful when encountering moments where objects external to the body promise to modify it once consumed. When Lauren approaches József’s house, she is full of ‘[a]nticipation of all sorts of good things fluttering inside her: Red wine. Bloody meat. Silk against her skin. Heritage wallpaper. Designer glassware. Ivory lace. A baby, a silent, eyes-closed baby, tucked into sleep in the upstairs room’ (Booth 2020, 143). These observations are similarly useful when the body seems to spill out into the environment, as when Lauren ‘learns to recognise that the colour of the sunset above the M1 is the same colour as blood in your urine’ (Booth 2020, 81).

Throughout the novel, lower-class identity and culture are associated with permanent contamination in strikingly visceral images. At one point, Callum stands inside one of the high-valued houses he manages for wealthy temporary residents and thinks that he

After spending the night with Lauren at József’s house, Callum guiltily observes that ‘[t]hey’ve left the kind of traces that only crime scene luminol could show in a beautiful, ghastly gleaming blue’ (Booth 2020, 64). Even after Callum has inherited the house, when Lauren is ‘[w]alking slowly along in front of the calm and tasteful facades of Elgin Mews’, she takes ‘[a]ntibacterial gel from her handbag, rubbing, rubbing over her hands’, almost as if to cleanse herself before entering (163). Lauren is obsessed with stripping off any sign of her past, expressed most memorably in her recurring concerns about a condom used during intercourse at home that never emerged again: ‘Nothing stays inert. Christ, that fucking condom from outside Roxy’s. Where is it? What happened to it? Is it there now, degrading into her cervix? Toxic shock. Endometrial spill’ (193). There are similarly uncomfortable memories about highly processed, store-bought British working-class consumables in childhood ‘living room picnics at teatime with chewy Fruit Salads and Irn-Bru’ (69). When remembering her grandmother, Lauren recalls ‘her clothes beneath the little white coat always smelling of the Chanel No.5 she bought herself at Christmas’ – but even this cannot erase the underlying smell ‘of crunch creams’ from the factory where she worked (87).

We can read Lauren’s anxiety about how these unsavoury products have accumulated in her body as a literal fear of bodily harm, cognate with wider cultural anxieties about the long-term health effects of microplastics and carcinogenic substances, but also as an allegorical device to illustrate the protagonists’ reluctant awareness that their embodied histories have sedimented inside their bodies and continue to inescapably determine their futures.

Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology offers some other useful concepts to draw on here. She proposes a phenomenological framework that ‘helps us to explore how bodies are shaped by histories, which they perform in their comportment, their posture, and their gestures’ (2006, 56). She points to how theorists from Merleau-Ponty to Butler have thought about these histories as ‘bodily sedimentation’. Ahmed’s work is deeply concerned with embodiment, mobilising and disrupting boundaries between inside and outside in ways remarkably compatible with how Exit Management constructs and disrupts bodily coherence. Ahmed’s description of ‘one’s own body as a congealed history of past approaches’ calls to mind Lauren’s concerns about ‘[t]he things that you try to get rid of’ and ‘that won’t ever truly disappear’, which feel like a ‘thick knot in her stomach’ (Ahmed 2006, 91; Booth 2020, 192). Before these embodied memories overwhelm Lauren, she tries to calm herself by physically identifying with the clean, expensive house she inhabits:

Elsewhere, Lauren also takes comfort in “the calm and tasteful facades of Elgin Mews”, before taking some “[a]ntibacterial gel from her handbag [and] rubbing, rubbing over her hands” (Booth 2020, 163). Lauren is obsessed with maintaining a surface impression of upper-class, clean, cosmopolitan Englishness, constantly fighting that, as Ahmed puts it, ‘past histories […] surface as impressions on the skin’ (2006, 2).

There are two sites where Exit Management even serves to extend Ahmed’s theory into new contexts. First, Ahmed focuses predominantly on sexual orientation and race, leaving class largely unexplored. Nevertheless, in a section on race and class mobility, she proposes that ‘[m]oving “up” requires inhabiting such a [white, bourgeois] body, or at least approximating its style, while your capacity to inhabit such a body depends upon what is behind you’ (2006, 138). Though it in turn treats race as rather peripheral, Exit Management explores palpably what inhabiting such an imperfectly classed white body feels like and how style – expressed, for instance, via the avenues of dialect and sociocultural sophistication – sediments into embodied feeling. Second, Ahmed’s interest in ‘how the surfaces of bodies […] are shaped by histories of contact’ often flattens interiority by treating it as (deep) superficiality (2006, 151). In Exit Management, Lauren’s body in particular becomes weighed down by deposits from her undesirable past, preserving visceral interiority as a deeply personal and intimate experience even as it constantly threatens to spill out. Having failed to calm herself by extending her body into the sanitary surfaces of the house, Lauren worries about the condom that never emerged and about the long-term effects of growing up near a landfill that is still ‘leaching out volatile metals and chemicals and methane, a giant liquefaction of dangerous, lively matter’ (Booth 2020, 193). Lauren experiences this structural feeling as anything but environmental, but as a “chill through the extremities of her body: a cold pulse in her fingertips and her nipples. Nausea back again: nausea for weeks now” (192).

Lauren’s specifically gendered experience is significant, too. Though Lauren and Callum have a similar class background, and she has in theory climbed higher on the social ladder than he has, the novel describes her embodiment as a woman in much more visceral and volatile terms:

The traditional patrilineal implications of Callum inheriting the house from Jószef are exacerbated by Lauren’s unplanned pregnancy. Unintentionally, both characters slip into compromised matrimonial roles. Callum’s absence and Lauren’s stillbirth and domestic isolation in the latter part of the novel reproduce long-established patriarchal structures that transfix both characters in archetypally gendered estrangement. This is mirrored by Lauren freezing the aborted foetal matter in a state of non-living but artificially preserved suspension. Eventually, Exit Management sketches breakdown – decomposition – as the only actual form of resolution: ‘[t]he house must go. Everything in it must be dispersed. The money must go back into the world. All of this is fallen matter’ (Booth 2020, 279).

Natasha Brown’s novel Assembly styles itself as a deconstructive, metafictional text that disrupts narrative linearity and is interspersed with overt theoretical and philosophical reflections. Much in the style of recent autotheoretical texts like Wilderson’s Afropessimism, Assembly’s unnamed narrator connects her life experience to theoretical arguments by scholars of race like bell hooks:

Through these references, the novel’s text assumes a palimpsestic, intertextual quality that also impacts the narrative delivery. The protagonist, due to her professional success, gender and race, has become her company’s diversity liaison and tours British schools to give motivational speeches to young girls. By the time the novel starts, however, the protagonist has already grown disillusioned with the way her own biography of social mobility has been instrumentalised and exploited by her company and herself for symbolic and financial capital. Her disillusionment does not merely stem from the ‘message’ of such a narrative, but from the very inherent structure of the narrative itself, or, rather, that her life and her professional career have become a story in the first place: ‘It’s a story. There are challenges. There’s hard work, pulling up laces, rolling up shirtsleeves, and forcing yourself. Up. Overcoming, transcending, et cetera. It’s not my life […] I recite my old lines like new secrets’ (Brown 2022, 9).

The story whose protagonist and author she is supposed to be, at least for the purpose of her company’s diversity campaign, is an arrangement of platitudes of meritocracy and individualism – a story which, as the protagonist’s wilful deconstruction of her narrative suggests, is ultimately devoid of substance.

Her disillusioned attitude towards this narrative is evident in her revealing observations about the merits of her own upward mobility. A key indicator of the protagonist’s social mobility is the ability to buy her own home, a ‘top floor of a Georgian conversion in an up-and-coming area’ (Brown 2022, 12). In a time when the British ideal of homeownership has become increasingly unattainable, particularly in metropolitan areas like London, the protagonist’s acquisition can indeed be interpreted as a form of fully becoming a British subject in terms of economic and symbolic capital. But even this accomplishment is scrutinised by the narrator as yet another empty signifier of a language of success she did not author herself. She compares her attitude towards her newly obtained property to two other extremes: first, her neighbours – two ‘youngish, anxious couples’ who can only afford to rent their apartments (Brown 2022, 12), which, it is implied, is of course the source of their anxiety, considering the precarious housing situation in contemporary London. Second, she observes her ‘small, spoilt, energetic’ friend Rach who ‘waves away her own home in a leafy West London suburb. Says she wants a bigger house, a better boyfriend, more money!’ (Brown 2022, 13). The protagonist is shocked at the lack of ‘shame and subtlety’ with which her (white) friend, accustomed to privilege, demands these things while she herself thinks of her flat ‘as parents must pine when they see their kids’ smiling faces framed and propped up amongst the papers and cups on their desks’ (Brown 2022, 13). Her ambivalence towards the two extreme poles between which she finds herself – anxious renting, barely able to make ends meet on the one end, and an unending appetite and sense of entitlement on the other – are indicative of her own sense of shame about her professional and material accomplishments. What is more, she can no longer relate to her friend’s appetite, wondering,

As the conclusion to her observations about homeownership and escaping the precarious rent market and as a conclusion to the narrator’s musings about the meaningfulness of her success story and its marketability, this paragraph is remarkable. Coming fairly early at the beginning of the novel, it becomes, as it were, the mission statement of the novel’s poetics. The narrator’s desire to ‘end this story’ is not only the desire to deconstruct the ideological narrative of diversity and empowerment through meritocracy, but it is also quite literally a suicidal and defeatist statement. When she is diagnosed with breast cancer, the narrator ponders refusing treatment and succumbing to her illness to be able to both put an end to her story as a statement against the values of the post-imperial nation for which she will never be quite enough as a Black woman. Her nihilist rejection of ‘the story’, then, is also a rejection of the promises of upward social mobility which, in her case, is complicated by her race and her family history that is inevitably tangled up with British imperialism. It is because of this intersectional dimension that Assembly is not only a deconstructive intervention into the genre of autosociobiography per se – it is also a fundamentally afropessimist take on such narratives. The afropessimist notion of social death – an ontological condition in which Black citizens of post-slavery societies like the US or the UK are assumed to find themselves in – seems to reverberate in Natasha Brown’s novel. Social death, in afropessimist theorising, describes the in-between state of Black bodies who are no longer officially slaves (and therefore objects) but not yet enjoying the same subject status as white people. This afropessimist interpretation of the novel can first be connected to Cynthia Cruz’s argument about the ‘undead’ status of the working class (2021, 120), and especially of those working-class citizens who are socially mobile and find themselves in the ambiguous space between classes, and between two different experiences of their classed bodies: no longer able to fully embody their working-classness, and at the same time attempting to perform as middle-class:

Cruz’s hauntological approach to the working-class subject’s struggle with social mobility renders classed identity as a spectral and liminal mode of existence. While the theoretical premises of afropessimism’s social death thesis and Cruz’ hauntological perspective on class might differ, they nevertheless share a focus on this notion of the liminal. In Cruz’s descriptions, this liminality is expressed and experienced at the complex intersection of the mental, the corporeal and phenomenological. The working-class subject’s experience of passing, then, becomes an experience of uprooting and fragmentation – the subject loses any sense of biographical, psychic, corporeal and spatial coherence. Comparing this observation to afropessimism’s concept of social death, it could be argued that the passing working-class subject and the Black subject experience a similar sense of liminality and fragmentation. Brown’s novel emulates this sense of liminality and fragmentation in its textually and narratively fragmented form. Assembly can thus be read as a reflection on forms of life writing that grapple with the impossibility of conceiving a coherent and spatially rooted sense of self.4

Secondly, an afropessimist interpretation of the novel can be supported with Julia Siccardi’s observation that the novel’s deconstructive strategies expose ‘the echoes of the past, of other stories’ and ‘creates parallel narratives that reveal discrepancies between the stories’ to ‘make cracks in the official discourse visible, thus highlighting the impossibility to create a “we” on a social level’ (2024, 5). This impossibility of collectivity, or to appeal to a collective, shared experience, can on the one hand said to be integral to working-class people’s experience of upward social mobility. Accounts like the ones by Lynsey Hanley and Didier Eribon, for instance, testify to a profound sense of loneliness upon leaving one’s class behind and never quite feeling at home in the new one. At the same time, the kind of ruthlessly individualised meritocracy scrutinised by Brown’s narrator is already the source of a profound atomisation and erosion of society and collective solidarity. On the other hand, in Assembly, this impossibility is also the product of the inscriptions of imperial history into the narrator’s family history and her own body. Reminiscing about her mother, a member of the Windrush Generation, makes the narrator realise that she, unlike her mother, cannot even lay claim to any connective lived experience with her mother’s home country – a place that many of her white contemporaries believe she essentially is rooted in, and that maybe she should eventually ‘return’ to:

The family history, her genealogy as a narrative source of identity, then, fails her and thus complicates any illusion about narrative linearity or coherence in her own biography.

It is here that the lived inscriptions of class, gender and race become important. As the sociologist Beverley Skeggs has pointed out,

For Skeggs, who draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of inscription as much as from Foucault’s theory of power and Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, inscriptions of class and other identity markers are a complex interplay of symbolic and quite material, corporeal forms of shaping the subject and how it is perceived and decoded by others. Inscriptions also impact the degree to which subjects are in charge of their own inscriptions and therefore able to perform their identity and move through socio-cultural spaces – or not. Some inscriptions essentialise and render the subject static, some render it mobile. The narrator in Assembly experiences different and often conflicting forms of inscription – and despite her command of her own performance as a well-off young professional which often allows her to author her own inscriptions, she ultimately finds herself the product of other forms of inscription beyond her control. In a manner that echoes sociological analyses like Bourdieu’s or Skeggs’, she points out how

These forms of altered inscriptions indicate the possibility of ‘transcendence’ – a notion that the protagonist’s empowering diversity narrative is supposed to propagate: the ‘transcendence’ of the limitations put on raced, classed and gendered bodies and subjects as if it was merely the subject’s responsibility to defy the limits that someone else set for them: ‘Transcends race, they say of exceptional, dead black people. As if that relentless overcoming, when taken to the limit, as time stretches on to infinity, itself overcomes even limits, even infinity, even this place’ (Brown 2022, 49). At the same time, she is constantly reminded that this transcendence is never fully achievable. No matter how savvy she is at playing the game of meritocracy, there will always be history and its haunting returns. Commenting on Britain’s Black History Month, she remarks

Like the nonlinear, fragmented and palimpsestic narrative of the novel, British colonial history will always come back to haunt every effort at individual identity and transhistorical transcendence. Ultimately, the demand to excel and transcend is coupled with an impossible, often unspoken demand: ‘Be the best. Work harder, work smarter. Exceed every expectation. But also, be invisible, imperceptible. […] Exist in the negative only, the space around. Do not insert yourself into the main narrative’ (Brown 2022, 58, emph. in orig.).

Realising that, ultimately, ‘[s]urviving makes me a participant in their narrative’ (Brown 2022, 96), the narrator reinterprets her cancer – perversely, a quite literal mark of mortality and the flawed corporeal vessel of inscriptions – offers her an actual chance to author a future to transcend the suffocating temporality of eternal haunting returns: ‘I’m excited, yes, for the future […] in my metastasis, I find possibility. I must engage the question seriously: why live? Why subject myself further to their reductive gaze?’ (Brown 2022, 95). The narrator’s contemplation to refuse treatment and succumb to the cancer figuratively echoes Cruz’s view of the working-class body as a liminal body between two deaths. In her interpretation of working-class musical artists like Amy Winehouse and Ian Curtis, the singer of the band Joy Division, Cruz reads the tormented bodies of these ill-fated artists as expressions of a paradoxical libidinal intensity. Suffering from depression and auto-aggressive tendencies, these working-class artists, in the way they depleted their bodies (bodies that could only fail at attempting to perform or pass as bodies inscribed with another class), seemed to refuse desire: ‘And yet, the act of refusing desire, or rather, the act of refusing the world in order to create a space for one’s yet unfulfilled desire, is indeed a libidinal act’ (Cruz 2021, 110). We can see a similar tendency in Assembly’s narrator’s paradoxical and morbid excitement about the ‘possibility’ of her metastasis. Yielding to destruction offers ways to channel libido and desire for social, historical and metaphysical transcendence while trapped in the social inscriptions of one’s body. In that, the bodies of the two former working-class women at the heart of Exit Management and Assembly are strikingly similar: Lauren’s compulsion to control her body and rid it of its tainted and intoxicating inscriptions is powered by the same self-destructive libido as the unnamed narrator’s.

A comparative analysis of both novels proves productive by locating them at the intersection of a concrete articulation of sociopolitical circumstances that predominantly characterise the 2010s (e.g. Brexit and the Windrush scandal) but are influenced and informed by processes that reach back into the 20th century and beyond. Exit Management, with its cast of white English and European protagonists, predominantly negotiates Britain as a formation distinct from but in constant exchange with Europe from 1945 onwards, while Assembly negotiates Britain as a formation distinct from but in constant exchange with the British Empire in the same period. Both novels deconstruct an ostensibly stable present by collapsing it into an assembly of distinct pasts that continue to haunt characters even in their attempt to escape from their own flawed, undesirable, or disempowering histories marked by racialisation, sexism, and classism. Key to these attempts to escape is the persistent and quintessentially British narrative of upward mobility encapsulated in the metaphor of ‘getting on the housing ladder’.

In Assembly, the unnamed protagonist succeeds in accumulating enough capital to purchase property, but still faces the ineluctable whiteness of the landed aristocracy and their disproportionate influence over what it means to be ‘properly’ British, closely tied to the physical control the upper class continues to exert over land and real estate. In both novels, ownership of highly exclusive real estate – the house in Elgin Mews and Assembly’s unnamed protagonist’s fiancé’s family estate in the countryside – is tied to legal contracts that reiterate the past in the form of heritage and inheritance.

In Assembly, the unnamed protagonist faces the reality of marrying into and therefore continuing a bloodline whose wealth derives from the racialisation and disempowerment of her ancestors. The spectre of Empire exerts a double haunting: first, in the form of her own embodied identity as a Black British woman with a personal history of upward social mobility indelibly marked and exasperated by racism, and second, in attempts by her fiancé’s family to sanitise their own history and contribute to the illusion of a post-racial society, resembling what Paul Gilroy has described as ‘postcolonial melancholia’ (2005).

In Exit Management, Lauren is haunted by the persistent revenant of her undesirable Northern past – most upsettingly when her sister Amy physically shows up in London, covering the geographical distance that also allegorises the North-South class and cultural divide. More interestingly, Exit Management constructs a 21^st-century haunted house narrative. Both Callum’s failure to provide the assisted dying stipulated as the condition for his inheritance and Lauren’s largely selfish act of killing the old man ramify into an inherently distressed domesticity. The couple’s success in becoming property owners is always already disrupted by the series of deceptions that led up to their ownership, disturbing any secure or permanent sense of belonging. It is only at the end of the novel that Lauren’s decision to bury the aborted foetus combines with Callum’s decision to sell the house, creating a notion of a genuine escape via decomposition and dispersal. This is mirrored in the unnamed protagonist’s resignation to death instead of her cancer treatment.

Both Exit Management and Assembly negotiate class mobility as it intersects with other means of passage, often related to physical bodily movements such as displacement, migration, and relocation. These novels also trace how the bodies of their protagonists are shaped in the process of accumulating, internalising, and discharging other objects. Here, the conventional progress narratives of class mobility contrast with a number of themes that resonate with Cynthia Cruz’ observations on working class melancholia as being transfixed between two deaths. In the two novels, this contrastive immobilisation extends from the concept of (social) death and bodies being weighed down by their material pasts to themes of decomposition and artificial plastic bodies that never disintegrate, constructing a haunting atmosphere in which passing on from one state to the next is always already compromised.