The protagonist is keen to pass her wealth to a younger sister, but there’s little on that relationship or the emotional impact her death might wreak. She chooses death, as a way to “transcend”.īrown’s beautifully crafted brevity is stylistically potent, but can feel like an excuse for not fleshing out her story. Her recognition that she will never win against the cancer of racial prejudice that infects every part of her life leads her to decide not to battle the literal cancer taking over her body. Her heroine has done everything she was supposed to do and yet it is still not enough. With distilled clarity, Brown conveys just how relentless and exhausting this feels. No encounter or relationship, no success or failure, is untainted by assumptions based on the colour of her skin. Told in fleeting vignettes, recalling the sparse style of Jenny Offill, Assembly offers a depressing kaleidoscope of the ways racism affects the narrator’s life, from all-out abuse from strangers, via colleagues who believe she has it easy thanks to “diversity”, to recognising how her presence gives her boyfriend a “certain liberal credibility”.
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