After it's placement on the Booker Prize longlist this year, Universality has been getting a fair amount of attention, which is frankly impressive for a satire that manages to say almost nothing.
There's certainly satire, the book clearly dislikes the current right-wing obsession with anti-wokeness and anti-DEI; it rips apart the "intellectual dark web" types, race "realists", IQ believers, and the rest of the current alt-right. At the same time, however, it paints left-leaning activists in as much a negative light. Too obsessed with identity and largely just lazy bums who abandon their leftist "principles" as soon as it becomes convenient for them. The book seems to say "Isn't the anti-woke crowd a bunch of grifting racists," while at the same time adding, "But maybe the left is too woke. Maybe DEI is bad after all."
None of the characters are truly sympathetic, but it's telling, perhaps, that the only character portrayed in first-person during the novel is the politically scattered Lenny. She's ostensibly feminist, but not really, believes that racism and sexism aren't real problems, only classism, and scorns the left as being too woke. In other words, she's functionally JK Rowling. While the book goes to great pains to tell you she has no coherent ideology, her ideology is center-right, and while she is critiqued, the book seems to suggest, "She might lie to others, but at least she's honest with herself."
Now, I will say, as a socialist myself, that a class-focused lens is the one I use in politics, but not to the point that I deny the existence of racism, sexism, or other prejudices. Certainly, leftists believe class to be the largest driving force in politics, but the whole point of intersectionality, which in many ways has dominated the 2010s and 2020s, was to show that the combination of identities leads to unique experiences within the social structure.
Brown herself muddies the waters further. I confess, I haven't read her other book, and I've only read a few interviews, but she seems as politically scattered as Lenny, though perhaps not holding all the same beliefs. She, too, seems to find DEI useless, at least from the interviews I've seen. She also finds STEM to be more fruitful than the arts, a common opinion among right and center-right thinkers. She's black, but also spent years in finance, so certainly Lenny's "class first" approach to right-populism fits a certain worldview among people who are marginalized by race, but not class. Do I think she's right-wing? Probably not, although it's hard to say. Certainly, she holds some right-wing views it feels.
All of this would be fine, frankly. A book which disagrees with me politically isn't exactly a scandal, nor does it make the book bad. But I wonder what the point of satire is. In my mind, satire exists to critique, yes, but with purpose. It doesn't just point and say "isn't this dumb," it has an argument about the way the world should be. Universality seems to say that the world should be, more or less, exactly how it is now. That yes there are problems, but the people who claim to want to solve them are just as bad. Yes there are racists and bigots, but they're largely fringe. The end message is one of milquetoast centrism, that things should be as they are and that the biggest divide is one on class, but that those who support a change to the class structure are wrong. In other words, it's exactly the kind of do-nothing political messaging that made it sure to create buzz among the liberal intelligentsia, and thus secure it's Booker longlist.
What do others think? Am I missing the point? Is there a point? Curious about other's thoughts.
by wicketman8