At 10:35 on an early summer's morning, John Lanchester sat down at his study desk, switched on his new Dell computer, opened up the word processing programme that the computer had come with and began

http://artswrap.co.uk/sites/default/files/imagecache/event_image_full/John%20Lanchester.jpg

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_TFBp8yq9lN0/TVADjVtkD-I/AAAAAAAAK1c/jmebtc7mrkw/s1600/pj-harvey-let-england-shake.jpg

Because I didn't want to clutter up the What Are You Reading thread with the way this book perpetually perks its folly in my face.

On a rainy morning in early December, an 82-year-old woman sat in her front room at 42 Pepys Road, looking out at the street through a lace curtain. Her name was Petunia Howe...

Don't be absurd! Also, reader wonders whether she is distantly or even closely related to Geoffrey.

The proprietor of 51 Pepys Road, the house across the road from Petunia Howe's, was at work in the City of London. Roger Yount sat at his office desk at his bank, Pinker Lloyd, doing sums.

I hope you're already getting a sense of fatigue at the toiling rhythm and progress of his sentences, the way he leaves nothing to chance.

It was late afternoon. Roger sat on one of the sofas in his office,

Stop telling me the time of day.

Ahmed Kamal, who owned the shop (sorry thomp) at the end of Pepys Road, number 68, came awake 3.59 in the morning, one minute before his alarm was set to go off.

Please stop telling me the time of day. Also - came awake?

Shahid Kamal, who was due to work a shift at the family shop between eight o'clock in the morning and six o'clock in the evening, walked down the street at a brisk clip.

ffs

At number 51 Pepys Road, Mrs Arabella Yount...

At ten o'clock Shahid was stacking...

Two weeks before Christmas, Petunia sat...

I've reached Part 2. Things are going to start happening!

You can't buy this sort of publicity. Will read (this thread).

Didn't bring the book with me today, of course.

I was on the verge of ordering this yesterday, will hold off on that one then.

Can tell you the characters of course.

You just have to insert ffs or 'oh god' after each one:

Petunia Howe - an octogenarian lady who notices how young people like doctors are etc.

Roger and Arabella Yount - a wealthy banker and his wife who likes shopping and spas and says 'dahling'.

Quentina Mkfesi BSc MSc - a Zimbabwean refugee (escaping political death squads), who can't be deported, and who has a job as a traffic warden.

'Bogdan' Zbigniew (can't remember his surname) - a Polish builder who is saving up money to give to his father back in Poland. He saves this money up by playing the stock market (??).

Ahmed, Usman, and Shahid. Brothers who collectively run a corner shop. Shahid has dabbled in terrorism, and a shady terrorist friend from his past has just appeared on the scene. Goes to a militant mosque in Brixton. Can't remember what Usman does.

Freddy Kamo(!) - Young African footballer with lanky legs (Lanchester is an Arsenal fan right?) who plays for a thinly disguised Chelsea. Always smiling. Stern father.

Smitty - a 'concept' artist, who leaves anonymous graffiti around the place, and who Lanchester somehow manages to get talking in a faux faux-Cockney/Mockney.

All of these behave exactly as you'd imagine they'd behave if you a) had no imagination b) got all your information from Sunday Supplements/daytime tv? apart from 'surprising' gestures towards 'civilised' or nuanced (ie white male) thinking.

read you talking about this in the reading thread and am glad this hilarious spin-off exists

Why isn't there a racist taxi driver? I demand a racist taxi driver.

further comments from here, Matt. Just couldn't be bothered to cnp them all in.

Ah, with Lanchester the 'racist taxi driver' would in fact be a surprisingly tolerant racist taxi driver who has a copy of the Economist on the front shelf of his taximetered cabriolet.

Q. Is the problem with "state of the nation" novels usually that they are written by people far removed from most of the nation?

Q. I though Lanchester's steez was a kind of sub-Banville aestheticism. Wtf was he thinking?

A little surprised there are no media types, unless that's Smitty's role of course. There should also be a harassed woman juggling kids with running some sort of poorly-funded third-sector body.

Must have fancied it after everyone loved Whoops!, I guess. Once you're thinking 'I get bankers, I've talked to a lot of bankers', and you've written abt London property, it must be p much irresistible to write a 'city of do-you-see contrasts' novel.

Also - came awake?

It's when someone has a nocturnal emission so violent that it wakes them up.
The cover of this book annoys me the way the cover of 'Cloud Atlas' does.

Is there any detailed exposition of what bankers actually do, other than having three computer screens? Ian McEwan, even if being tedious, would always have some of this to redeem it.

xpost to NV.

thomp p much nailed The Debt to Pleasure on the what are you reading thread - 'debt to pleasure' = would maybe have like to have been nabokov when it grew up, narrator has poisoned some dudes, envies his brother's career as chef, is self-described gourmand, presents memoir of dudes he has poisoned as a series of menus. it's aight i guess.

Problems with this state of the nation novel, with a star by problems that I think are possibly generic pitfalls:

The characters attempt to be 'representative' and of course are pure ciphers and representative of nothing.*

Lanchester isn't very good, in fact is very very bad at filling his book with material.

The need to fill your book with situations that, again, are representative, makes it feel like satireless satire.*(unless its actual satire)

Capital is extraordinarily badly written on a sentence by toiling sentence basis, which makes me wonder whether he's even capable of doing the sub-Banville aestheticism, on any level.

Insights of daily life barely merit the name insight, apart from a couple of occasions where I said to myself 'yeah, I guess that's just about a thing'.

The interior monologues of the characters are utterly utterly dreadful, full of truly mundane material that should never be in a book. 'So and so looked at the Prius and its leather seats, he wished he could afford a Prius but in the meantime would continue to take the tubefghk;lsfb;hadfjghvflk;sxnhjnhj'

It is a book whose messages come as a clearly attached post-it at the beginning of each chapter. *(I guess - message novels have to stay on message, rather than let the imagination of the writer take them in places that are interesting or entertaining. You just feel like you're being shown things that you've read a thousand times before in longer-form journalism.)

What it reminds me of most is The Information by Martin Amis, which isn't an amazing book, but is world's classics status compared to Capital. Amis wouldn't call a bar 'Uprising' but he might do something similar, better, but similar. Likewise there are the shady figures, the underclasses, the outsider figures, presaging doom for the main power characters.

But MA was probably the best recent State of the Nation novelist? He was funny and he was a very good writer, which helped. Still easy to come a cropper, with the all CAPS text messaging in Yellow Dog for instance. And everything from The Information onwards has been increasingly flawed, and is probably a continuation of the things that made London Fields weaker than Money?

Any other candidates for good recent State of the Nation novelists? (Or any time - would George Eliot have counted? Probably?)]

xp

His dad was some kind of banker iirc, & he does seem to have actual friends in the city, so you think it'd be his strong suit.

Feel like this is going to be a MAJOR NEW DRAMA on BBC1 at some point.

What a Carve Up? I remember it being good, but don't trust 90s me as a judge tbh. It also doesn't quite take the cross-section of society route iirc.

Amis also had a couple of Zbigniews in I think London Fields.

McEwan's Saturday is clunky-as-hell but basically alright.

Is there any detailed exposition of what bankers actually do, other than having three computer screens? Ian McEwan, even if being tedious, would always have some of this to redeem it.

― Ismael Klata, Friday, 9 March 2012 12:19 (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

There isn't, perhaps surprisingly. There's some rather awkward handwaving towards types of trading, and bankery things, to indicate he knows what he's talking about (which he does), but it's kept at a minimum, I suspect because Lanchester feared (prob rightly) that going too much into it would a)be disproportionate b)reveal that he knows rather less about the working detail of everyone else.

I think a fictional account of a banker by Lanchester, or a group of bankers, would have been far more interesting than this 'terrorist', 'immigrant', 'old lady', 'young artist' media stereotype bollocks.

Things where you can tell Lanchester feels more comfortable:

Talking about football (this isn't good, but it doesn't feel RONG).
Bringing up small children (this isn't funny, but " " " ")

er 'of a banker or a group of bankers by Lanchester' not 'by Lanchester or group of bankers' obv.

xp

aesthetic saturday objections aside, I think a state-of-the-nation has to be significantly longer than that, 400pp minimum.

Heh, I like the idea of a group of bankers writing as Luther Blisset.

is Hensher's Northern Clemency in this vein? Anyone read that?

Wasn't Amis' new book originally going to be called The State Of England? A better title than Lionel Asbo, anyway.

I enjoyed Theo Tait putting the boot into Ali Smith's last, vaguely S-o-E book: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n02/theo-tait/the-absolute-end - doesn't happen often enough, presumably because of the very small world of London publishing. Read the kindle sample of the Lanchester and couldn't believe how slack it was, yet I haven't read a bad, or even mixed, review yet.

Have the feeling this is going to belong on this thread soon:

http://fivedials.com/images/672.jpg

private eye gave captial a stinky review, fwiw

x-post

― Ward Fowler, Thursday, 8 March 2012 14:25 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I am actually looking forward to Lionel Asbo.

xp

I also saw a mixed somewhere serious, but can't remember where.

How about a state-of-the-nation novel not set in London? Is there such a thing?

oh, theo tait again, Guardian.

If the Northern Clemency is that sort of thing, it seems to be Sheffield-based. But I think most SoN-type novels would try to do London a bit maybe? At least have one character moving/working there?

Actually, I may be imagining it, but is there something of Adam Curtis's faux-humdrum tone to some of those opening sentences up top? Like how all his BBC blogs begin with sentences like "One September night in 1945 three British mathematicians and astronomers went to see a new film at a cinema in Cambridge". I can almost hear Curtis reading the one about Petunia Howe.

i was a fan of What a Carve Up when i read it but when i've flicked through it since i thing i was mostly wrong, and the clumsiness i excused as Dickensian at the time just reads like clumsiness to me now.

interesting to think of Middlemarch as a state-of-the-nation novel because of course it's addressing "middle England" before the fact, at a time when it was far from central to English notions of England maybe?

iirc Lanchester has too many friends in the journalism trade to get many bad reviews?

Wasn't Amis' new book originally going to be called The State Of England? A better title than Lionel Asbo, anyway

Should have just gone the whole hog with 'I Hate The Fucking Proles'.

don't think he realises his dad was sometimes joking

I quite enjoyed that Ali Smith book as I was reading it but some of its sympathetic characters are more annoying than its unsympathetic characters and it descends into caricature rather a lot. Also it doesn't really go anywhere.

oh, theo tait again, Guardian.

― woof, Friday, 9 March 2012 13:07 (31 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"Actually it was a good sandwich," runs a typical sentence

Good job the review has forewarned me of this particular sentence, otherwise I might have hurled the book across the room.

That review is spot on about the 'drone' of the prose. Also:

And there's a lot of slightly lazy repetition: "Parker, the boy she had been going out with ever since they kissed at a sixth-form dance on a hot June night back at sixth-form college."

This! Who on earth let this sort of thing through? It's like the weird repetition of the business about the skips and builders in the first chapter and the 'Transport for London card charging device'.

There was an interview I skimmed through that did say L's dad was banker. But so what? Isn't part of the 'story' how the system almost took on a life of its own and no one really has any control/understanding?

Part of the reason why I never got round to Whoops! anyway was that all of a sudden this novelist that is never on your radar acquires an interest over these topical matters - except that in this case, as I've said, my impression is that even the so-called experts are no experts when it comes to the financial system, so what chance does this guy have? The other reason is that unemployed/laid-off bankers started writing a mountain of these so cynicism set in.

Related but separate thing is you have other novelists I think I'd hate - Geoff Dyer and Adam Mars-Jones writing bks on things I really like: on Stalker and Late Spring, whereas I would like to see these being written by film writers that would bring wider knowledge on Japanese and Russian cinema instead of what I think it would be (= too many boring personal reflections...its for the fans you know). Its depressing that this might be the only way for bks to get published on really interesting films/topics and this seems like the only way to get any shelf-space/coverage.

I guess they've done their 'research', ffs.

'the system' took control -- this is SF material of course, fuck 'station of the nation' bullshit.

otm.

iirc Lanchester has too many friends in the journalism trade to get many bad reviews?

yes, I get the impression he's well-liked; also bad reviews aren't really done that much anymore (there was some fuss about this recently, maybe centred around that hatchet-job award?). The notable thing is how much attention it's getting - I got the impression that Lanchester was slipping into the terminal midlist zone before this, releasing also-reviewed, diminishing-returns novels every few years. Now he's a hit! I guess that's partly Whoops!, partly a canny topic, partly a very quiet literary spring in the uk, partly book-page need to have some literary middle-aged men to take seriously.

Actually, I may be imagining it, but is there something of Adam Curtis's faux-humdrum tone to some of those opening sentences up top? Like how all his BBC blogs begin with sentences like "One September night in 1945 three British mathematicians and astronomers went to see a new film at a cinema in Cambridge". I can almost hear Curtis reading the one about Petunia Howe.

― Stevie T, Friday, 9 March 2012 13:13 (56 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there is a little bit. But I think the thing that annoys me about these specific sentences is the way he smuggles in other information. The 'brisk clip', and another one where after the usual time and season bollocks, Lanchester puts in a 'slightly out of breath'. I wouldn't mind so much if it was as formulaic as Adam Curtis' 'I'm going to tell you the story of x. It's a remarkable story that involves x,y,z,π and ك'.'

Idk, should this be changed into a 'State of the Nation' novel thread? Change title one of these maybe?

'Actually it was a good sandwich' - State of the Nation novels and what is in them

'fuck 'station of the nation' bullshit'

'I am actually looking forward to Lionel Asbo'

'Why isn't there a racist taxi driver? I demand a racist taxi driver'

'I also saw a mixed somewhere serious'

'i'm assuming the copies i saw in waterstones were some britain-wide conspiracy'

'wonky textspeak'

' I guess it looks like what broadsheet journalism likes to believe novels are'

ah, 'I also saw a mixed review somewhere serious'.

I dunno, enjoying the title as it stands, above all "that the computer had come with"

yeah, tangential is good.

first rule of a station-of-the-nation novel shd be "try not to look like you're writing a state-of-the-nation novel"

if it says 'state of the nation' it might derail into Franzen discussion or something equally disheartening. I think Lanchester liveblogging + digression works.

this is kinda like Steig Larsson's style iirc

Even the bad broadsheet review is kind of depressing in what it gives away. "Lanchester has a decent stab at describing what it must be like to run a corner shop," says the Guardian. "What it must be like," oh come on.

I am kind of disappointed how many people doing postgrad literature degrees at Oxford lack the basic interpretive skills to recognise that Freedom is a bad novel, I want to try them on this one

xpost haha franzen oops

The differences between the American and British contexts for this are halfway instructive, I don't know.

'John Lanchester came into existence because there was a novelist-shaped vacancy below the fold in one of the pull-out sections in the Sunday Telegraph'

Actually, the start of Capital reminded me a bit of the start of Fortress of Solitude, and how much better Lethem did the whole history of gentrification.

Are 'State Of The Nation' and 'The Great American Novel' the same thing? I've often wondered what the latter actually means.

less class isolation in American novelists perhaps?

great american novel had a specific coinage and critical freight at one time, i want to say fiedler but i suspect that is wrong

okay no, though fiedler does complain about 'our endemic fantasy of writing the G.A.N.' in 'love and death...' ; it made more sense when american fiction was a young and new thing, and the idea was that at some point there'd be american men of letters the equal of their european antecedents, or some other, new, interesting thing

now that english-language fiction basically is american fiction the term's usefulness is limited by comparison

State of the Nation ancestor is maybe Condition of England novel?

yeah but Lanchester is no Gaskell

The only author I've read who suceeds at the 'state of the nation' thing is Thomas Bernhard: his novels are ultimately about Austria (they may include Glenn Gould fan or Wittgenstein or whatever), but it only works if you are prepared to believe they are all closet Nazi types. That's him showing he is always at war and in opposition when he's writing...

But it tries to map a psyche onto a people...tries to give a sense of what a specific place might be really like. If that's what 'state of the nation' aims for, that is, don't think he would ever conciously attempt this bcz I reckon he'd think its bullshit literary claptrap.

All his novels are no more than 200 pages. However it is the same thing over and over again - all adds up. xxp

I suppose David Peace's GB sequence adds up to some kind of state of the nation novel? Peace is probably the anti-Lanchester really.

whatabout whatsername. elfride jelinek.

i think a lot of people have an ouevre that, when you look back on it all in a kind of retrospective arrangement, emerges as doing this, or appearing to do this

i don't think there's anything wrong with the ambition to write the Big Novel, to be honest. i don't know that that's the lanchester's failings - don't know in that i haven't read it, obviously, but also i mean: the flaws we're talking about could exist as easily in a novel that wasn't About Big Things; they'd just be markedly less bathetic

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/book/literary-treats-for-2012-7304502.html

John Lanchester publishes a 630-page whopper of a novel, Capital (March), which locates itself in one south London street where the properties have risen to more than £1million in value. It describes what it is to be a Londoner now, on a broad canvas that takes in a greedy banker with a greedier wife, a young African footballer, an edgy young artist, an illegal immigrant parking warden and a family of Muslim shopkeepers. The ambition is nothing less than Dickensian.

In September, Zadie Smith publishes her first fiction for seven years. Called NW, it is, as the postcode title suggests, set in her old patch of Brent. All she has disclosed about it so far is that it is about class, as it affects "a few people in north-west London" and that it's a "very, very small book".

Martin Amis looks to be playing to his strengths with his new novel Lionel Asbo (July), a satire on the scummy state of Britain. His anti-hero is a skinhead crim who wins £90million on the lottery while in prison, and spends it grossly. Other characters include a Katie Price lookalike called Threnody

In Skagboys (April), Irvine Welsh has written a prequel to his 1993 debut, Trainspotting, showing how Mark Renton et al first descended into heroin addiction in the Eighties. Even more keenly awaited will be Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel's sequel to her Tudor masterpiece, Wolf Hall, due in the autumn. It continues the story of Thomas Cromwell, focusing this time on the fall of Anne Boleyn.

Lionel Shriver's work in progress, said to be an assault on the culture of obesity in the States, is much anticipated.

fucking kill me.

Spring ILB bk club is set! :-)

I dunno, enjoying the title as it stands, above all "that the computer had come with"

― woof, Friday, March 9, 2012 9:53 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'd like to try that word processing programme!

I didn't much like On Beauty, but the London bits were much better than the rest iirc, so I can imagine NW working. Does she live here nowadays?

Lionel Shriver's work in progress, said to be an assault on the culture of obesity in the States, is much anticipated.

outright lies.

South of the River by Blake Morrison. There's another SoN novel I'd forgotten about. People just love writing these fuckers.

what is lionel shriver's work actually like, i feel like i ought to read her just to, you know, keep my finger on the pulse of the corpse, sort of thing

I am really curious about the one that followed We Need to Talk, where it's a sliding-doors double narrative about a sophisticated middle-class woman having/not having an affair with a professional snooker player and being drawn/not being drawn into the world of the pro snooker circuit.

People just love writing these fuckers

all the way through this thread i've been thinking - does anybody not associated with the lit mafia actually want to READ these books??

oh i'm all for a good social problem novel

can you suggest some examples of that, nv ('modern' ones, i mean)?

xp that guardian review of Capital seems to think Faulks did well with his version of a banker, a footballer, an asian, but ikwym, we're not listing smash hits here mostly.

lol modern ones i have a problem with. Money is probably the modern-est thing I like in this ilk. 2666's long central catalogue of the disappeared? most of my reading is at the very very least stuff from 20 plus years ago.

Houellebecq is doing a deranged-masquerading-as-clearsighted version of this too, i guess. can't think of Englishes. sort of like Peace but think he's over-rated in some quarters not least of which is maybe his own.

I was just thinking about how lit-world often acts as though there's a kind of social explanatory force that people want from novels, when it looks on the tube like people actually want sexy vampires (STILL!), game of thrones and thrillers in which women are tortured or in danger of torture, but I am abandoning this line of thought because I think a sexy vampire state of the nation novel might be a goer and I need to get plotting & think about how a 2nd generation Bangladeshi immigrant vampire who runs a corner shop would actually think, actually feel.

sexy obese vampire state of the nation novel featuring romance with 2nd gen south asian corner shop manager = winner

twist: the sexy obese vampire is wall street

dunno if Dhabihah wd make being a vampire easier or harder tbh

xps (lol)

I struggle to think of Englishes too. Don't know much about this, but Scotland seems better at The Social Aspect of The Novel.

a greedy banker with a greedier wife, a young African footballer, an edgy young artist, an illegal immigrant parking warden and a family of Muslim shopkeepers. The ambition is nothing less than Dickensian.

fuck off

picked to live in a house

to find out what happens

when people stop being polite

and start getting real

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/book/literary-treats-for-2012-7304502.html

John Lanchester publishes a 630-page whopper of a novel, Capital (March), which locates itself in one south London street where the properties have risen to more than £1million in value. It describes what it is to be a Londoner now, on a broad canvas that takes in a greedy banker with a greedier wife, a young African footballer, an edgy young artist, an illegal immigrant parking warden and a family of Muslim shopkeepers. The ambition is nothing less than Dickensian.

In September, Zadie Smith publishes her first fiction for seven years. Called NW, it is, as the postcode title suggests, set in her old patch of Brent. All she has disclosed about it so far is that it is about class, as it affects "a few people in north-west London" and that it's a "very, very small book".

Martin Amis looks to be playing to his strengths with his new novel Lionel Asbo (July), a satire on the scummy state of Britain. His anti-hero is a skinhead crim who wins £90million on the lottery while in prison, and spends it grossly. Other characters include a Katie Price lookalike called Threnody

In Skagboys (April), Irvine Welsh has written a prequel to his 1993 debut, Trainspotting, showing how Mark Renton et al first descended into heroin addiction in the Eighties. Even more keenly awaited will be Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel's sequel to her Tudor masterpiece, Wolf Hall, due in the autumn. It continues the story of Thomas Cromwell, focusing this time on the fall of Anne Boleyn.

Lionel Shriver's work in progress, said to be an assault on the culture of obesity in the States, is much anticipated.

fucking kill me.

― desperado, rough rider (thomp), Friday, March 9, 2012 3:21 PM (3 hours ago)

the first few posts of this thread caused me to look up the names & led to that ES article & i copied the same four paragraphs ready to post itt

not the shriver line tho

Kinda think China Miéville believes he is writing sexie 2nd gen bangladeshi vampire state of nation novels and he is practically as bad as Lanchester :(

harsh!

I was thinking that lit eco-niche must be filled, couldn't think who it would be.

whatabout whatsername. elfride jelinek.

More about the failures of feminism bcz-capitalism-gets-in-the-way-of -anything-progressive thing, I think. She does hate Austria but still stays there, like Bernhard, but not as pathological.

lol modern ones i have a problem with. Money is probably the modern-est thing I like in this ilk. 2666's long central catalogue of the disappeared? most of my reading is at the very very least stuff from 20 plus years ago.

― Nultified Ancients of Man U (Noodle Vague), Friday, 9 March 2012 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Not sure: you get one section that I guess can be looked at (esp in light of what is happening in Mexico these days) as state of the nation but there is much more to that bk. Guess I'm doing the 'this author in retrospect is about this' that thomp describes.

Sorta of a point I'm arriving at is you can't be state of the nation and be any good. Most authors I like will have a specific field of things they talk about (which is why when an author publishes a study on jazz or whatever, etc.) but they'll find room for manoeuvre around that.

But they are narrow-minded. Its good to be like that.

i agree that 2666 isn't a SotN book, i singled out that section because i was floundering for contemporary novels i like that might fall into the category.

i'm all for a novel having tight focus but i wdn't want to say it has to be the case, i have a lot of time for the rambling and capacious and picaresque but feel like for some reason those things aren't being done well, now.

I kind of feel it should be possible, and in a way inevitable, just by having a set of characters with varied interests. You'll not get anything comprehensive, but that's okay because neither author nor reader is ever socially omniscient.

What you shouldn't consciously do is aim for it, because then you end up with ciphers instead of characters.

I dunno, maybe I'm not getting at the same thing - but to me 'state of the nation' shouldn't just mean 'what you find in the Home section of a broadsheet'.

Random thughts

broadly speaking I'm with xyzzz, & think this is unlikely to work here and now – one of the reasons it's irresistable I suppose is that the part of lit London with eng lit degrees all know that this sort of thing is backbone of the English novl's victorian heyday.

feel like there's almost inevitably going to be some patrician ventriloquism as member of literary class decides to 'do' a struggling single mother or whatever (oh, 'an illegal immigrant parking warden'. I see); I mean I know 'doing' people is part of the point of The Novel, but the odds just seem so against you pulling it off or multiple voices if you're stalwart of literary london.

'home section' is right, i think - It's a v. journalistic conception of the novel - like it's muddled up with hack 'first draft of history' pomp (eg The Blake Morrison one mentioned upthread is set around the 97 election), and an elevated conception of what novel can/should do.

When is Capital set, Fizzles? I mean apart from while Flouressa Glunt is polishing her sideboard at 11.15 on a Wednesday morning in mid-May etc. Is it 'The Eve Of The Crash' 07/08 or anything?

Alternative/additional genealogy: Feel like Bonfire of the Vanities is nearest american equiv of this form, and might be directly to blame for a good few of the British versions of the last 25 years.

Definitely right re Bonfire. I had a go at it myself recently and was appalled. Wolfe writes amusingly, but not with the care or sympathy a novel demands. The number of times I read the phrase 'aquiline nose'.

has tom wolfe been, like, rehabilitated while i wasn't looking

nah, nothing like, but there's a literary journalist sort who's never quite let go of Bonfire of the Vanities.

maybe we build and knock down stereotypes so quickly now that by the time novelists come to explore them they're stale? I'm not sure. I do remember liking Mr Phillips very much but I think that was due to the affectionate portrait rather than the cultural references.

I enjoyed this book from a few years ago, more in the Peace vein than anything else. It's not 100% successful (he can't really write female characters) but it works pretty well, maybe because its focus is less State of the Nation and more State of Post-Industrial Midlands.

i suddenly remembered Matt Thorne's Eight Minutes Idle which I enjoyed when it was published and is at least partly addressed to a section of "modern life". turns out it's been turned into a movie, i'm not sure how that'll work.

xps the difficulty in getting near 9/11 etc as a thing-for-fiction - there have been attempts, but mostly clunky - suggests that maybe instead we're looking for novelists to move too quickly, if anything

I'd agree with that, there's too much noise around massive events like that as it is, and we don't yet understand where they fit in a historical context - probably more the case with the economic crisis than 9/11 at this juncture, although we're still a bit too close to 9/11 as well. Someone like Roth is usually writing at a distance of at least a couple of decades when he's putting on his Serious Historical Face.

Also the problem I find with modern British state-of-nation fiction is that it usually feels like the author is thinly laying the viewpoints of three or four newspapers up against one another.

agree, and if good novels use fiction to reveal truth, then with 9/11 that's a difficult space to move in while all the conspiracy theories are still circulating. Out of interest, is there a decent novel around the Kennedy assassination, even now?

Libra by Don DeLillo is incredible, I haven't read any others. I doubt I'll need to.

American Tabloid by James Ellroy is a p gd kennedy assassination nov told mainly from the crim's POV

haven't read either but will on those recommendations. they were 25 and 32 years after the event respectively, perhaps the good 9/11 novels will be published after 2026?

according to geoffrey hill culture will unquestionably be vanquished by 2032, so they're going to have to be p quick off the mark

I was going to mention Libra actually, it's excellent, whereas his DeLillo's 9/11 novel Falling Man is ropey as hell. Also Libra's *all about* history from viewed distance vs history as it happens, it encourages you to build up your conspiracy theories and then knocks them down.

never mind all that - I think there's a chance that Lanchester might actually write the thread title at some point:

Mill took his desktop PC out of sleep and navigated to the web page.

Mill is a policeman. Another new character. The first line of his chapter is "Shit flows downhill". A cynical, common-sense policeman? No, wait.

Mill was not, demographically or psychologically, a typical policeman. He was a Classics graduate from Oxford

ffffff... Any advantage you might think this might afford Lanchester, not so far showing conspicuous flair for the indirect free speech of his culturally diverse range of characters, he neatly sidesteps by having him think? in the same neutered, maimed prose, expressive of the same slightly sub-normal fascination with the arbitrary mundane, as everyone else.

The chapter ends with this enigma:

As for the main issue, which was what this whole thing was, Mill's conclusion for the moment was that he didn't have a clue.

Navigated!

There's a very bad bit about the office Mill works in as well but I'm ion a bus at the moment.

That bit about the PC and the webpage reads like a technophobe author doing research via a "for Dummies" book.

<i>Mill took his desktop PC out of sleep and navigated to the web page.</i>

There is some perverse anti-poetry about this now. It's like Lanchester is a white-knuckle, recovering Nabokovian, determinedly sweating out the most awkwardly banal sentences, afraid that at any moment he might freak out into some psychedelic alchemy of the word.

Think you deserve public commendation for your sterling work liveblogging this, Fizzles.

Maybe the introduction of Mills will turn this into a Morse whodunnit? for the remainder.

There is some perverse anti-poetry about this now. It's like Lanchester is a white-knuckle, recovering Nabokovian, determinedly sweating out the most awkwardly banal sentences, afraid that at any moment he might freak out into some psychedelic alchemy of the word.

I genuinely think there's something in that, Stevie. I mean, I think he thinks he's doing something. Take this sentence:

She put the pot of tea, which had now steeped for four minutes, onto the tray, then picked up the tray, then put it down again.

I think he may think that he's detailing the essential details of our daily lives and thought processes. The things that no one else catalogues. I think that is potentially a good idea, really pushed to some sort of avant-garde obsessive level. Unfortunately the tedium of content is matched by the tedium of style, of insight, and character. More importantly, as I say, it's arbitrary, often bizarre, and as a consequence more revelatory of what is in his head when he looks at the world, which unfortunately, to come back to the beginning, is a load of very very boring stuff.

Take this description of the office:

Two dozen Met officers were in constant motion, most of them also talking, joshing, making off-colour jokes, often while simultaneously keying data into computers, or flicking through files, or dialling phone numbers, or eating muffins, or lobbing crumpled paper into the bin, or carrying piles of forms from one end of the office to the other.

He forgot about people chewing the ends of their pens, leaning back on their chairs, holding doors open for people, pinning charts on a cork board...

Then you get into the detail (because you've had to ignore the detail to get through the sentence). I break down the absurd bits in this sentence something like this:

1. "Two dozen Met officers were in constant motion" (something about this makes me want to snigger - suggestive of people sitting at desks flailing their arms about, or running from one end of the office to the other)

2. "Most of them also talking" But not all of them. Some of them, a smaller number, are not talking.

3. "making off-colour jokes" Off-colour jokes! Maybe he is Petunia Howe in disguise.

4. "often while simultaneously keying data into computers". This actually deserves to be broken down into three, as it does the individuals-as-collective absurdity of (1), the strangely diverting non-specific non-detail of (2) ('often while'), and his more general habit of sounding like he's just arrived from an alien planet ('keying data into computers').

3. "eating muffins". 24 policemen in constant motion eating muffins. It's like a mnemonic.

4. "lobbing crumpled paper into a bin" oh come off it, this off the tv or an ad. I mean yes, it happens, but it's the suggestion that somehow it's a telling quotidian detail that drives me nuts (like with the fucking teapot earlier)

5. "or carrying piles of forms from one end of the office to another" Reminds me of the bit in Watt is it? with the milkman on the station platform moving the milk churns from one end of the platform to the other and back?

The proprietor of 51 Pepys Road, the house across the road from Petunia Howe's, was at work in the City of London. Roger Yount sat at his office desk at his bank, Pinker Lloyd, doing sums.

I still love this. Apparently he knows bankers in real life? You wouldn't have thought so. "Hmmm, what would a banker be doing while sitting at their desk? Sums, yes, of course". Presumably followed by writing down what he did at at the weekend and then a butterfly painting.

I think he may think that he's detailing the essential details of our daily lives and thought processes. The things that no one else catalogues. I think that is potentially a good idea, really pushed to some sort of avant-garde obsessive level.

That would be Nicholson Baker territory, but (iirc, it's been a while) Baker manages to find the exceptional within the everyday, he has a kind of autist's eye for the interesting detail that is normally overlooked. Lanchester seems (from these extracts) to focus on the things that are overlooked precisely because they are devoid of such detail and intrinsically banal.

Yes Baker is a whole different moulinex of mackerel.

The use of "sums" suggests there is some kind of irony going on in Lanchester's narrative voice - iirc Peppa Pig goes to visit her Daddy Pig's office in one episode and finds out that he too does "sums" all day (actually I think he tells here he works out "load-bearing tangents") - but... it seems like a very feeble gesture? It's like the opposite of the mock-heroic of Fielding. Mock-banal.

That 'sums' one was slightly unfair of me, because they turn out to be him working out his bonus, so there's a sort of (v lame) joke there.

When is Capital set, Fizzles? I mean apart from while Flouressa Glunt is polishing her sideboard at 11.15 on a Wednesday morning in mid-May etc. Is it 'The Eve Of The Crash' 07/08 or anything?

Yes, exactly then.

Alternative/additional genealogy: Feel like Bonfire of the Vanities is nearest american equiv of this form, and might be directly to blame for a good few of the British versions of the last 25 years.

Along with a feeling of badly impersonated M Amis (which naturally brings to mind Money although I guess it's more London Fields he'd be thinking about) Bonfire of the Vanities is the clearest model, certainly for the banker parts.

Just wrt the state of the nation novel generally, I think I'd agree with the suspicion that it's just a bad idea as a subject and driving force. The sensibilities of an age are embedded in the culture that age produces and to approach them journalistically, as Lanchester does, in a work of the imagination, a creative work, is to betray the very point of an imaginative work. The point here being that if you DO approach your State of the Nation novel journalistically, then it's not really going to succeed as a novel (imagination not allowed to work on the subject) and if you don't, then in some ways it's not going to look like a State of the Nation novel!

I was reading a John Dickson Carr novel over the weekend - as I often do! it's become a bad habit and is pure comfort reading - and there were some sections in the opening chapter that reminded me of how much a period can be observed in works that don't have the requirement of social evaluation as their reason for existence:

On his left, as he stood at the corner of Romilly Street, was the east wall of St. Anne's Church. The grey wall, with its big round-arched window, stood up almost intact. But there was no glass in the window, and nothing beyond except a grey-white tower seen through it. Where high explosive had ripped along Dean Street, making chaos of matchboard houses and spilling strings of garlic into the road along with broken glass and mortar-dust, they had now built a neat static-water tank - with barbed wire so that the children shouldn't fall in and get drowned. But the scars remained, under whispering rain. On the east wall of St. Anne's, just under that gaping window, was an old plaque commemorating the sacrifice of those who died in the last war.

Unreal!

No, Miles Hammond said to himself, it was no good calling this feeling morbid or fanciful or a product of war-nerves. His whole life now, good fortune as well as bad, was unreal.

This is already much better than anything Lanchester has written! For a start Lanchester very rarely describes any physical spaces with any interest or accuracy. Secondly, Lanchester isn't at all interested in creating atmosphere, doesn't even consider it. Atmosphere is a big thing in non-realist novels, more important than author's 'voice' or tone usually, I think it's probably a good thing in realist, or lit novels as well, but it doesn't seem to me to be worked on very often.

Then, gasping out to the end like a gauleiter swallowing poison, the war is over. You come out of hospital - a little shakily, your discharge papers in your pocket - into a London still pinched by shortages; a London of long queues, erratic buses, dry pubs; a London where they turn on the street-lights, and immediately turn them off again to save fuel; but a place free at last from the interminable weight of threats.

People didn't celebrate that victory hysterically, as for some reason or other the newspapers liked to make out. What the news-reels showed was only a bubble on the huge surface of the town. Like himself, Miles Hammond thought, most people were a little apathetic because they could not yet think of it as real.

But something awoke, deep down inside human beings' hearts, when the cricket results crept back into the papers and the bunks began to disappear from the Underground. Even peace-time institutions like the Murder Club...

I realise the end of World War II was more epochal, the transitions more obvious, there's a feeling of well-picked detail - those cricket results! Also, tellingly, even in this brief opening to a brief crime and detection novel, the newspaper version of events, the public version, is contradicted. You immediately get a sense of character and of the outside world, something JL hasn't managed in however many bloody pages I'm in. Just in the brief excerpt there's a sense of an independent person (not a cipher) and objects and events that differ from the public record, not it fulfil it: it's not just colouring in the newspaper version of events.

Of course, this book is in no way a SoN novel - it doesn't have the capaciousness NV was talking about, or the social spread (although crime novels do tend to include a wider variety of social backgrounds than a lot of lit fic) - but it seemed to me a decent example of how the sensibilities of the age being congenitally embedded in the culture may be expressed, and more importantly for 'literature', analysed in a work that isn't setting out to do so.

I wouldn't want to say the SoN novel as a genre piece is impossible! Got Lee Perry in my ear 'all things are possible, nothing is impossible', and my mind keeps on getting drawn towards thoughts about The Canterbury Tales - social spread + multiple voices - and Pickwick Papers - great SoN stuff like the hustings, but as has been pointed out several times, the SoN work as we see it today is very much a post-Victorian lit-page thing, so these aren't relevant specifically to the genre, apart from THIS IS HOW YOU DO IT.

But if you are going to do such things, you need a first class ear (Kingsley Amis was always very particular about new speech patterns and sounds in his novels) and a good eye + excellent observation - the Petunia Howe bits of this novel look painfully inadequate next to the remarkable novel about ageing Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor. Maybe it helps to have a philosophical centre as well, and I'm not sure if Lanchester does. I was just thinking about the mid 20th C French political novels, which vary in their success as novels I guess, but which nevertheless have a strong motive force for presenting events and people in a certain way. Ciphers of a different sort perhaps though.

Christ, rambling.

I mean, there are plenty of better examples than JDC (the way the short stories of Julian McClaren-Ross encapsulate an age, and a national state for example) but I just happened to be reading it. And i know it's all a bit melodramatic - it's still much better than anything Lanchester has written.

top post xp

This thread has whetted my appetite right enough - I've just ordered that John Dickson Carr novel

He Who Whispers? I hope you enjoy it! I'm always v wary of recommending him, well i'm not, but I feel that I turn a blind eye to quite a few demerits when I'm reading him. (Keep leaving Capital at work, by accident I suppose, hence this JDC interlude).

i've only read 'the hollow man'. for entirely predictable reasons. d'you happen to know if his conan doyle bio is any good?

No I don't. The only non-detective story stuff I've read by him is his account of the sensational Victorian society Murder at the Priory case. It's perfectly adequate as a piece of true crime, but nothing spectacularly fascinating.

Yes, He Who Whispers. I'd like to get into genre fiction a bit more & he seems a good place to start for mysteries. He certainly gets praised enough. I liked the passage you quoted.

Mostly out-of-print though, how can that be?

Bit of a thread derail - but well, even Lanchester nods after all. Answer, not sure. Biggish appetite for the avatars of Golden Age detective fiction obviously - A Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, + Margery Allingham? - partly TV driven for the first two. JDC not as well known. Over-production was a problem at the time, less so now surely. (Was a problem to the point that he also wrote under the pseudonym Carter Dickson - I know, I know - his original suggestion was Carr Dickson tho). I think his very technical solutions to the problems are probably quite off-putting. Basically his principle is to set up something that looks totally impossible and work out how it could have been done/have happened. It doesn't always work, even now I'm more interested in the atmosphere I cited above, than working it out/the technical ingenuity (the solution to a very good novel of his The Ten Teacups is absurd - i'm still not sure I fully understand it), well to a certain extent - that technical ingenuity is like the formal constrain of a verse form, it forces JDC into his pyrotechnics. He confronts this problem in a reasonably famous section of The Hollow Man usually referred to as The Locked Room Lecture.

He's absolutely right to say that often the criticism of his work is similar to the criticism of a magician showing how his trick is done. That there is always disappointment in the revelation. At the same time that is the nature of the detective story, the Golden Age detective story, so i think he's being somewhat disingenuous. He's a very good writer in all sorts of unexpected ways tho - to take one example, although his characters are always distinctive (as they have to be in a novel of this sort with several suspects) no two are alike. That takes some doing.

Genre fiction generally is great at tangential state of the nation stuff! Thrillers and crime fiction usually incorporate a wide range of society, as I've already said, and the nature of how and why we kill seems like a good barometer of the SoN (like the economic basket of goods). Likewise supernatural stuff - what is it we are supposed to be finding frightening? what is our credulity? our crypto-religious belief/fear system? - and science fiction will often take elements of the now and use them to create a future which is automatically a critique, a non-satiric distortion, of our current state.

Two problems, the titanic intellectual ability of George Eliot, say, tends to be misplaced in genre fiction - they are generally page turners at bottom - and so any analysis or critique tends to be implicit. Second:... ahhhhh, someone just texted to see whether i wanted to pop to the pub and I've completely forgotten what I was going to write. Can't have been that often genre stuff isn't very good? Surely not!

To answer the question a bit more directly - not popular enough to publish while still in copyright?

can't even

it's like a boring party emulator. where are you from? then chatting about house prices.

have you...

http://storythings.com/

"In 31 years you've gone from London to London. That's a distance of 0 miles."

"If you own a house, that's worth £0 more, too"

Average annual income in London - £80, 358 (?!).

I suspect someone hasn't thought this through.

The aim of Pepys Road was to get people reading John Lanchester’s brilliant book, so the behaviour we wanted to base the project around was reading

oh, y'think?

Do you feel as if you’ve travelled further?

In 107 years, you've gone from Hairy Arm to Fan y Big.

OFFICIAL STATISTICS

Hairy Arm Fan y Big

Average house price:
£0 v £303,223
Average life expectancy:
( ) v ( )
Average annual income:
( ) v ( )

Over 10 days, we send 10 emails asking questions about your attitudes to things like health policy, immigration, travel and culture, and send you to 10 new mini-stories written by John Lanchester,

It's like an incredibly tedious Choose Your Own Adventure!

ah shit I know one of the ppl behind it & he's ok.

ah, these things happen. I wonder what the mini-stories are like... no, I mustn't.

In fairness this is only day one, it's possible you only see the full, splendid effect once it gets onto incorporating health care or immigration.

Fizzles, EAST COAST TRAINS have just told me it's LAST CHANCE again to get one of those £25 tickets to Scotland, if you're interested.

Thanks, pf!

Leafed through this in a bookshop, read the start of a chapter where one of the cornershop fellows is walking along observing western society in all its filthy lasciviousness: a poster with a women bending over and looking between her legs - advertising tampons!; a woman pushing a pram and her jogging bottoms exposing more than half of her bum! Lesbians walking dogs! Idk maybe he was aiming for a "world through someone else's eyes" effect but all the examples were so obvious, and crude, and implausible.

not that lesbians don't walk dogs.

maybe he was aiming for a "world through someone else's eyes" effect but all the examples were so obvious, and crude, and implausible

this book in a nutshell. it's that obviousness + implausibility that gets me on every page (I had a break over the weekend, back to it this evening I think), in every sentence really, on most innocuous level, like the muslim's description of his cycle ride to the mosque. You just think, congratulations you have made a dull everyday process sound totally implausible. Not in a good way.

congratulations you have made a dull everyday process sound totally implausible. Not in a good way.

If it were implausible in a good way, then it would have been entertaining. Note the subjunctive.

I've picked this up again. First sentence I read:

Mary liked change, movement, colour, walking, sex (with her husband), Ikea, going out to the pub with friends for Sunday lunch, being well-off in a pretty part of the country, being married to a man who had done well for himself (he owned a string of garages).

Yet Lanchester mauls the idea of free indirect speech like a dog a rubber ball, before dragging its useless remnants some distant to the sentence conclusion. Boring and laborious, posing inutile questions of the reader (does she prefer colour or Sunday lunch with her friends? walking to movement? change to sex with people other than her husband? ), exuding that implausibility ledge mentioned, and generally being an extraordinarily unpleasing sentence to read, and what the fuck is going on with those thoughts in parenthesis.

Yet again Lanchester mauls.

Shd probably lay off Lanchester's sentence structure if I'm going to write posts like that.

Incidentally, I don't really feel anything for any of the characters, even the nasty ones, but I do feel sorry for all of them, for being ceaselessly patronised every chapter, and for being trapped in this mindless lit fic playmobil world. I have no mouth and I must scream.

This was what Roger's deputy was thinking as he rode the train, clunketa clunketa, out to his parents' house in Godalming

Sometimes when I'm reading this book I feel I'm at the edge of sanity.

Okay, what's that aiming for? Nobody would write that except deliberately.

...working for a boss who, in Mark's considered view, was a throwback or hangover from how things used to be, a pointlessly tall, contentlessly smooth public-school twat

contentlessly.

contentlessly contentlessly contentlessly.

v good question, IK. one that I spent about five minutes considering.

a gesture towards a sort of internal joycean monologue?

a desire to vary the style a bit, mix certain background elements up?

is it actually intended to evoke, as it immediately did, a mother reading aloud to a toddler?

is this saying something not otherwise apparent from the context about the character's state of mind?

Yet it's Lanchester doing this. what's going on in that head of his?

is it a joke I'm missing? a witticism on the silliness of his journey?

tears idle tears I know not what they mean....

ty for this thread fiz

Some of the sentences make me feel slightly frightened.

and a bowl of dal, one of Rohinka's specialities, something she cooked nearly every day and never twice to exactly the same recipe.

He doesn't actually mean that I hope. I think he means it tastes a bit different each time she makes it, and the small differences in flavouring and seasoning are apparent because of the frequency with which it is cooked, so that it is never the same twice.

Or does he actually mean that she's cooked it nearly every day for however long and used a different recipe each time?

It's like being on acid or something, apparently mundane observations, objects and processes appear freakish or alarming. Otherwise graspable concepts unravel at the slightest tug and suddenly you find yourself questioning eveything about the assumptions apparently implicit in your "normal" world view. The fact it also looks like just a normal sentence is disconcerting. Maybe I am going mad, you think.

That's ok a hoy hoy - if just one person who might otherwise have read Capital decides not to as a result of this thread etc.

ye gods

Ahmed thought he could .. put out of his mind for as much as five minutes at a time the thought Hashim running up incorrect amounts on the till, taking orders for expensive part-works without getting the customer's full details, selling alcohol to fifteen-year-olds, and forgetting how to operate the lottery machine and the Oyster top-ups

how to operate the Oyster top-ups. How does one operate the oyster top-up. Gotta do your oyster top-ups innit.

Also another fucking LIST of just stuff.

otoh he can just make you snort with amusement. Rohinka is bringing food (including her wacky dal) to the table where her husband and his two brothers are sitting.

The men made varying murmurs and groans of appreciation

lol r they zombies.

Sometimes I fear I'm just attacking normal sentences, but I know now that they're all totally ersatz. Every one. Come behind the partition folks! You can see out of John Lanchester's *eyes*.

I was having a go at a dialogue this morning, and think I was being unconsciously influenced by this thread in how I approached the non-speaky parts. I tried the internal monologue thing, writing without thinking and hoping to catch my character in his banalities.

The thing is, I found it impossible to write anything like Lanchester's come up with - my character's talking to his wife while she's putting on make up, and within a couple of lines he's imagining punching her in the stomach. (apologies to Lanchester if the bits you're not copying are all like that)

no I think you're safe IK. One thing that is very noticeable about this book is that people very rarely talk to each other. certainly not without explanatory text between each line of dialogue.

Also Lanchester seems to have v peculiar form of bad writing going. It looks very much like the bad writing of someone totally inexperienced in writing. But that is not John Lanchester. How on earth did he end up here?

Sad.

I loved 'Whoops!' and was looking forward to him tackling it fictionally. Glad I didn't preorder the book, though, having read this convincing demolition

Still really dig 'The Debt to Pleasure'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2012/mar/19/fabrice-muamba-sir-dave-richards

I have discovered a Malcolm Bradbury volume of 1987 entitled CUTS. It appears to be the progenitor of this book.

"It was the weekly board lunch, and Lord Mellow, the board chairman, sat at the head of the long table, in his familiar bow-tie. Most of the board members, from old Lord Lenticule to the Bishop of Whiddicupthwaite, who was Eldorado's religious advisor, had struggled in, in their chauffeur-driven cars."

Fuck me.

in, in

Quite an innie, eh?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2012/mar/29/john-lanchester-london-video

"it was the peak of a bubble"

"I can't look half a century into the future of London"

I started browsing this in the bookstore and it would be my contention that he's going for a sustained note of deliberate banality. The sentence I opened it to was something like 'Zdanislaw was not of the sort to get up in arms about being paid to spend time taking down work he had just done, unlike other builders he had known.'

I think that's true. Unfortunately, it is also actually banal to read. I need to find... there were a couple of sentences, utterly innocuous in themselves, that represented the acme of reading boredom. I also think there's something incredibly patronising about the whole 'this is what normal lives look like and how normal people think'. In fact it's at the bottom of why the book is so bad.

At 11:35 the following Monday morning Trevor Banner looked out from his glass office window high above London's City area. Trevor was one of the 'Masters of the Universe', a class of men (and occasionally, but not often, women) who through their power over the banking world had gained power over the government, the city, the whole country - in fact the whole world, or even (as the term suggested) the Universe. Not that it always felt this way to Trevor, though.
'Joanne!' he shouted, impatiently. 'Where's that *coffee*?'.
Joanne was Trevor's secretary, or 'PA' (personal assistant), to use the more contemporary term that was now often used in the City.

I also think there's something incredibly patronising about the whole 'this is what normal lives look like and how normal people think'. In fact it's at the bottom of why the book is so bad.

This attitude in the author seems to say implicitly, 'I may be banging on at great length about what you already know better than I can tell you, but I am not writing a document for my own time, but for a distant posterity, who will appreciate my labors on their behalf'.

is the banality meant to be an accurate representation of anything, though? i wonder if maybe this is some grand flaubertian exercise which has been dutifully misread by the broadsheets to a marvellous degree

tbf it's not like i'm going to read the fucker to prove this

He writes enough journalism, you'd have thought he could have said somewhere 'I am writing the epic of the banality of contemporary capitalism'.

it's weird because i am sure i have read the odd author who can turn the mundane - banal is such a loaded word - into thrilling prose. not saying Lanchester is a snob. just saying.

http://gentlyread.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/166997.jpg

banal is a bad word, agreed. and an examination of the minuscule events and chores that make up so much of our (my?) daily existence would be v interesting (tho Ulysses? and many others). Like anything else it wd need to be done well of course.

I'm finding myself wanting to play, well not Devil's advocate, heaven's advocate maybe on this book, at least wrt the mundanity and childlike delivery. Take the following sentence (please!):

Either way, the floor looked permanently dirty; it looked clean only in the immediate aftermath of being washed. So Mary set out to wash it. She got out the mops and brushes and ran a bucket of warm water and set to. The water turned grey and so did the linoleum, as it always did at first. It looked cleaner when it was wiped down and began to dry.

I hated spending any time reading this. I found it extraordinarily onorous. But the subject matter and childlike writing style ("and, and, and", the equal length sentences that make this such a fucker to read) are clearly deliberate.

So yeah, why? Is he saying that the mental and physical impedimenta of daily life make us supine and imbecile before large scale systemic catastrophe? That there is a nexus of culpability, that our childlike ignorance is no proof against?

Actually I think the answer is no. And even if it isn't no the attempt is so poorly managed that it fails. Everyone sounds too similar, it's too badly written from a technical point, the insights, whether in terms of detail or a wider understanding of that detail, are not insightful, interesting or amusing/witty. Lanchester feels too limited for the book he has attempted. Haven't had a chance to watch the interview yet, but thanks for posting it pinefox.

on phone at the moment and at work, so will try to be more coherent later + actually carrying on reading this thing.

Joyce was, as usual, exactly what i was thinking about. I can believe that Lanchester is deliberately writing this ugly prose, but i can't imagine any good purpose that its ugliness serves. at times it reminds me of Douglas Adams' comic distancing, without the comedy.

either Lanchester is trying to make a systemic point, in which case there really is no need for any examination of the characters' inner lives, or he is trying to portray "people as they are" in which case he's displaying the most banal - necessary use here! - misanthropy, without spirit or indignation or insight, a dinner party disdain for the hoi polloi that is plenty common but a terrible look for a novelist. for a human being, tbh.

our experience of the mundane isn't usually mundane in itself, if you approach it with genuine vision. to reduce mechanical bodily processes to mechanical experiential processes is a failure of imagination.

agree, the mundane is not that mundane, it's full of fascination

surely after Joyce Nicholson Baker is key

so i hear but i've read the wrong Nicholson Bakers :)

Updike is another author who revels in this.

Right - I've got a lot of train travelling to do over the next few days: let's finish this fucker.

http://s1063.photobucket.com/albums/t516/diasyrmus/?action=view¤t=463ea74b.jpg&evt=user_media_share

Piotr came in, looked over, saw what he was drinking, made a sign with two fingers pointing up in curls at the sides of his head - their private gesture for bison, therefore bison-grass vodka.

Not a gesture. Not private. More like a reasonably obvious metonym for the thing in question and totally unlikely to be a casual and familiar sign of communication between two grown men. Yet another example of how his prose walks like human, but talks like robot.

+ You've already said he's drinking bison grass vodka. Reckon I could have done the math. Still best not leave anything to chance, John.

I remember when I first saw this book mentioned the piece included the description "Dickensian". Which reminds me to say how underpopulated this book is. Very far from Dickens' "why have a family of three when you can have a family of twenty" profusion.

Despite the considerable number of narrative voices (all very john lanchester of course) the rest of the world and the people in it is v sparse. Another aspect of the book's curiously lenten feel.

"And yet there was a femininity to her too; her clothes were always slightly too tight, as if her womanliness wanted to burst out, to contradict the rest of her persona"

eeeee. it's at this point you start to look round and see if there's anyone else you can talk to at the party.

also - womanliness... there's something that's very bad about this word, and I can't work out whether it's a conceptual thing, or a word thing, or both, maybe the way it throws you forward into "manliness" when you say it.

This sentence works only if you conceive of 'womanliness' as being the same as subcutaneous fat, and the rest of her persona as being 'someone who does not burst out of her clothes'.

there was a stretch where the writing seemed to me unexceptionably exceptionable - where there was a monotony rather than a continual response of "No he didn't. No it wasn't. No it isn't. Come off it, no they DIDN'T."

But this might also have been me becoming slightly desensitised to the style as the stretch also included an art exhibition in a warehouse in Clapton with... well, I'll let him do it

The party was called Politics of the Dream, which was why there were sword-swallowers and fire-eaters by the warehouse door as people came in, and also why the waiters were dwarfs.

Writing that reminds me that all these "Smitty" sections are apparently intended to be mildly satiric of the art world btw.

unfortunately the satire rebounds somewhat or sounds hollowly because Lanchester has about as much of an eye for modern society as Mole in The Wind in the Willows. (although actually there is much of the naïf in Mole that is often used as a satiric tool - see Dan Boleyn in The Apes of God for instance - and Mole's horrified reaction to Toad in his car. Actually, I take that back - Mole is Juvenal compared to Lanchester whose purblind vision of stuff that has been but dimly projected from somewhere in history her stuffy head.

I've decided that Lanchester belongs to a group I've just invented called Fucking Limey Writers. Unfortunately I suspect this category squares so closely with the literary pages literary fiction scene as to be more or less useless.

er wtf phone?

"has been projected from somewhere inside his stuffed-up head"

"and also why the waiters were dwarfs"

i think the sympathetic reading i was trying to advance upthread is something like: this is exactly about the tedious and useless idea that broadsheet paper media types have of everyone else in the world, and aware of it

but like i say, i'm not actually planning on reading it

"Smitty". FUCK.

yeah I like yr reading thomp. it's just hard to maintain that rarified possibility in your head when actually conducting intellectual transaction with the clodhopping lanchester-brain prose.

in fact I started coming round to that pov while not actually reading the book. then I started reading it again and realised it was too persistently incompetent for any sort of subtlety of interpretation, even as a way of maintaining interest.

"Smitty wasn't sure whether what he felt was sadness or foreboding"

^this sort of innocuous shite really pisses me off. drilling right down there, John.

I've got to do a thing on his list sentences as well. he uses then all the time and is really bad at them. (Great list writers - Kipling? there are others.)

Pynchon.

Rabelais / Urquhart

Oh yeah, that Urquhart translation is great. There's a couple of others floating round in my head as well.

Swift, Flann O'Brien good listers.

the policeman, who appeared earlier, and for whom NV had such high hopes, has been gone for some time.

A+ thread

mark my words the policeman will be back at the end to arrest Lanchester in a Blazing Saddles-style fourth wall breaker.

has tom wolfe been, like, rehabilitated while i wasn't looking

what's the consensus on wolfe on ilx?

did Fizzles finish this novel?

dipping slowly between other things. yesterday was reading it with the dimbulb tolerance that comes of a soporific early morning commute, even at one point thinking "maybe it's not so bad really, heart's in the right place" (a fine critical benchmark for a work of art!)

It quickly woke me out of my stupor tho, each new chapter's narrator bringing forth an exclamation of "oh god, not you again" and on one occasion a mystified "who the hell are you?". (Turned out to be "Smitty"'s sacked assistant - sorry I have to put that name in quotes - holidaying in the Cotswolds.)

Still no sign of the policeman who appeared for one chapter. The tempo of the book is really extraordinary - as bad as any other element. Will report back properly soon.

The Sengalese footballer Freddy Kamo's getting his first start for the wealthy West London club that has bought him.

'Good luck today,' the owner said in his slow, clear English. 'Be fast!'
'Yes sir. Thank you. I will try my best.'
'More than try!' said the owner. 'Do!' He was laughing; this was a great joke. He turned to the manager. 'Do!' The manager joined in his employer's laughter. Still laughing and nodding, the owner moved on. Freddy sat back down. Across the room he caught the eye of the club's longest-serving player, a central defender who had come up through the the club's youth system nearly twenty years ago, and never left. He winked at Freddy.

He was laughing; this was a great joke.

If I were writing a football book, it'd definitely be based around a John Terry type. He'd be an absolute dream for fiction, like Gordon Brown. I'd make more of him than that though.

Oh, also, once the mirth from that had subsided, I read an excerpt from Lionel Asbo in the Telegraph. It was a pastiche of a newspaper profile/interview. But the tone was slightly off. A bit like Lanchester, you got too much of the sense that Amis was accurately observing what he'd imagined in his head, here in the pastiched prose manner as much as the content. That said, it was a v brief excerpt - I mean, I don't expect it to be any good - but maybe it will be more bad in an interesting, possibly even spectacular way.

Well that's the thing Ismael. That's the only bit. There's not even anything of what Freddy Kamo (ffs) thinks about him, what he looks like, anything. JT great substitute for Amis Lionel Asbo in fact.

And yes, ciderpress, Lanchester seems to have some sort of Bond villain in his head at this point.

oh and Freddy Kamo gets his leg badly broken by a mistimed tackle within a few minutes of starting that match. I would say 'spoilers' or something, but I called it about two pages after FK was introduced at the beginning of the book so doubt anyone else is going to greet the actual event with anything other than embarrassment/irritation/weariness/sense of author demeaning superiority.

Who does the legbreaking? There should be rich universes within that little subplot, done right.

roman a clef this ain't, but here are the clues... oh, wait, I'd forgotten this bit:

this was a match day, which meant there were always plenty of opposing fans around - shout abuse, flick V-signs, call out player-specific insults (poof, black bastard, arse bandit, sheep-shagger, fat yid, paedo goatfucker, shit-eating towelhead, Catholic nonce, French poof, black French queer bastard, etc. etc.) and, once, take down their trousers and moon the coach. Despite the almost entirely unlikely insults and the mooning, my favourite bit here is the phrase 'player-specific insults'. Because 'insults' by itself would have been uninterpretable, presumably, so he manages to produce a phrase that makes the following list evening funnier as you try to put names to insults. Think 'Catholic nonce' might be my favourite, but obv there's close competition. Lanchester's writing's like a bull in a china shop.

Reminds me I must do something on Lanchester's lists (the way that last example, for instance, is presumably supposed to be humourously exaggerated).

Right, anyway, clues - I thought the opposing team's quality was referred to at one point, but I can't find it right now. (Arsenal is mentioned right at the beginning of the book, but for the rest of it, it's like one of those computer games that hasn't managed to get rights to all the team names, hence 'wealthy West London club' despite there being nothing even libellous, or even descriptive come to think of it, about the club in question.)

Um, can't find anything other than its a 'big' central defender. Um, 'slightly reckless tackle but without ill intent'. (Big touch for a nice man?) Nothing there I'm afraid. That's the story of this book more generally of course.

Sir, the youth used an, ah, person-specific insult.

Argh. Lanchester's got this knack for writing phrases whose meaninglessness worms away in your head for hours.

I did read a great literary tackle once. Sadly I don't recall where, but it went something like: narrator's a workmanlike player having a frustrating game; gets particularly annoyed at being repeatedly sonned by a tricky opponent; when the trickster is on a dribble near the end of the game, narrator goes to take it out on him; launches in recklessly with a reducer, cut the bastard off at the ankles; but at that moment the trickster pivots and he ends up just brushing off him, tackling thin air instead; after the whistle they shake hands, and the narrator apologises for going in too hard at the end there, he could've done some damage; but the trickster genuinely doesn't know what he's talking about, to him it was just another challenge that he'd factored out before it happened.

I seem to recall the trickster being a prisoner, maybe it was a David Conn social piece or something. Anyway, that's drama.

Lionel Asbo looks like car-crash awfulness. And I used to love Amis.

Rohinka slid around the table, attending to their breakfast plates so briskly and efficiently she might have been a Hindu goddess with more than one set of arms, clearing and stacking and sweeping and racking, and then bumping the dishwasher door closed with her hip before setting it going.

gets in a bit of a pickle with his simile there does our John, somehow suggesting that there isn't a Hindu goddess with more than one set of arms.

Then the sentence rattles, presumably semi-intentionally (but why?) off into Night Mail territory.

I don't think he can have intended the rhyme. that's very distracting.

Even though the big car was full of his family, he felt a sense of the bigger city around him as they struggled past the amazing size and variety of London, the feeling that everything had a history, and the press of the present too: roadworks, billboards, a small accident where a white van had driven into the back of a milk float and the police had closed a lane, as well as that good old favourite, 'sheer weight of traffic'. Sheer weight - how much of life was sheer weight of something?

1. Even though the big car/he felt a sense of the bigger city around him - not really an opposition, but I guess this just about passes (we assume since he is driving he has a sense of the city around him tho - weird).

2. 'struggled past the amazing size and variety of London' - size an external characteristic, variety internal. You can struggle through the variety, just about, I suppose - tho none of this sentence really makes sense. This character is English-Pakistan, but there has hitherto been no sign of Lanchester ribbing him for subtle errors of expression. FAIL.

3. OK Lanchester, this fuckin list expressive of 'the press of the present'.

3a. roadworks - well ok, tho infrastructure maintenance common across recent history, and probably more generally beyond.

3b. billboards - ok again, though it's weird to have the Americanism instead of hoarding/advertising hoarding, billboard more or less naturalised admittedly, just pointing it out as another example for Lanchester to unerringly hit a jarring tone.

3c. 'a small accident where a white van had driven into the back of a milk float and the police had closed a lane'. The fuck. Are we still on 'the press of the present' here? Possibly he's forgotten. Anyway - 'a small accident where a white van had driven into the back of a milk float'. No it hadn't. 'and the police had closed a lane'. No they didn't. Aren't many milk floats around really any more, certainly not in London. They are around early on quiet roads very occasionally. White vans tend not to be around at this time, not as much as just after rush hour anyway - that's the biggest time of construction traffic. Milk float? Probably suburban back street. They tend to have a lot of parking and are quite slow roads even if they don't have traffic calming. Unlikely a white van is going to crash into the back of a milk float. Not impossible, obviously, just not likely. My guess is that Lanchester was thinking 'white van man hitting something slow'. Anyway, the police didn't close a lane, not unless this was happening on a dual carriageway - again you do occasionally see petrol milk floats on dual carriageways... dear friends, I can't continue this.

The thing is, I wouldn't normally do it, but this ^ is the stuff, the matter of the book. It's what it consists of. The fucking kibble of John Lanchesters unversed mind.

'How much of life was sheer weight of something?'

How much indeed, John. How much indeed.

As he had that thought, Smitty had another one. It came unbidden and he couldn't have said how exactly he knew what he knew, but even as he had the idea Smitty felt certain that he was right: that he knew who was the person behind We Want What You Have.

because 'who the person behind We Want What You Have was' sounds too weird? Surely not weirder than what he went with. How did he... How did no one...

On Sunday morning at his flat, Usman opened up his laptop and took out his 3G mobile to do a bit of net-surfing.

this is not a joke.

i am surprised to learn that lanchester used to be an editor.

Okay, I'm actually intrigued now. Because I saw what that passage meant instantly, but it took me a long time to go back and untangle it. And when I did, it was indeed exactly as I thought.

And the Banksy type spending his time pondering someone else's secret identity is quite nice.

Besides, he had Sky Sports. The tackle which smashed Freddy's leg was shown, in the usual way, about ten times.

RONG.

Also, I don't understand Lanchester's methodology around nouns and proper nouns.

Okay, I'm actually intrigued now. Because I saw what that passage meant instantly, but it took me a long time to go back and untangle it. And when I did, it was indeed exactly as I thought.

posts that effortlessly sum up the spirit of John Lanchester's Capital.

incidentally, that whole 3G/laptop thing is to do with Internet tethering, something that JL laboriously explains two pages too late to prevent you being uncertain what exactly is going on.

Looking at or downloading Al Qaeda training manuals, for instance, was a criminal offence. Usman had no wish to go that far, even in the privacy of his own head.

eh?

http://www.sffaudio.com/images11/Neuromancer565.jpg

Now there's a book I'd like to revisit. Sure, the style as I recall was a bit Chandler-by-numbers, but I don't remember it mattering. At least it all made sense.

it's the unintentionality of Capital that gets me. Or maybe I shd say apparent unintentionality, just to cover myself. Even at this late stage I'm expecting athe confession of a vast literary prank or chapter of vertiginous revelation where Lanchester aligns all of the apparent faults into to some vehicle of profound meaning and insight.

I dunno, 'even in the privacy of his own head' seems alright to me, for the distinction between what you think as a consciously good person and what your inner dajjal might be leading you with your own semiconscious consent. There's a bit of 1984 about it.

Usman had no wish to go as far as downloading or looking at al Qaeda manuals in the privacy of his own head?

It's a little like that sentence you highlighted - I mean, yes, I know what he means, but the sense doesn't make sense. for me anyway - but I have developed a heightened awareness of LANCHESTERISM. May be leading me to pick on things that i'd let go with others.

I'm trying to be kind I guess; in the way you'd give an unruly pupil a bit more leeway. But yeah, it's come to something when this is how we're treating an acclaimed, successful novelist writing one of the books of the year.

Fizzles is right, you can't download something in the privacy of your own head.

Well done Fizzles, keeping it up here.

I don't think I've posted to ILB for months.

net-surfing, net-surfing, net-surfing.

sometimes i wake up with some of these phrases just toiling away in my head.

Does Usman not have broadband? Or does he just prefer to net-surf via a tethered mobile?

(Masochistic question. I imagine that L gives an explanation, and that it's quite boring.)

Sorry, woof, you asked for it.

Usman wouldn't have minded having a look at some clips of Freddy in his prime, but this particular technique for surfing the net was too slow for that. He had broadband, obviously, but there were some things he didn't like to do over his own internet connection. Usman was, always had been, careful about stuff like that. A neighbour had until recently had an unencrypted wireless connection which he used for his own surfing when he wanted to do something that couldn't be traced, but the neighbour - he didn't know who but guessed it was the flat in the basement - had wised up and gone to WPA encryption about three months ago. So now Usman used a pay-as-you-go 3G mobile phone which he'd bought for cash and was therefore untraceable, and tethered it to his laptop. He ran the browser with all its privacy settings on, via an anonymising service. An electronic spy or eavesdropper would have no way of knowing who he was.

It's the graceful economy of style that seduces you in the end. As I say this explanation comes a page or so after the intial laptop/mobile/3g conundrum part of your brain spends a small amount of time asking 'Does usman not have broadband? Or does he just prefer to net-surf via a tethered mobile?'

anonymising service.

'so part of your brain'

quis custodiet etc

What's he doing that he doesn't want to be traced for? Reading the Daily Mail?

thank you.

perhaps a cyberthriller next time out John, you have obvs mastered the lingo.

net-surfing radical islamic forums. xpost

that actually seems fairly reasonable, maybe slightly paranoid or overly convulted - wouldn't an anonymising proxy over broadband be sufficient? reading it all definitely hurts though.

oh yes, entirely reasonable. absolutely - Lanchester has a clear idea of what his characters do within the confines of their own character. I don't think he mis-steps with this sort of thing - it's part of his research thing. He knows how each type of person he's using is likely to behave - that's part of the problem. The only exception is the Polish builder who seems a bit out of whack at times (given how confining JL is to his characters generally).

But, mostly -

reading it all definitely hurts though.

this.

what do you think the editorial process on this book wz like

Well, it really is the key question. I don't really know much how the process works generally, but I'm assuming once it's written there's a publisher's reader report, and some professional proofing. So,

1. the publisher said 'No need to worry, it's only old John! Good old John, used to be an editor you know? Happy to take as is really, bound to be fine!'

or

2. The reader read it and decided it was either fine, or that the serious problems of style and execution were too fundamental to produce a report other than 'i rly can't recommend this book for publishing', which clearly wouldn't fly, so they just passed it with a 'yeah, fine. fill your boots.'

And the proofreader fell asleep while reading it, so that they didn't notice fundamental botches, like the thing about people getting their basements done up with a skip outside described twice in three pages, the second time with an air of complete novelty, right at the beginning. Or words like contentlessness, or that weird bit with the misplaced 'was' a few posts ago. Or any of the more nebulous but still persistently offensive ambiguous use of verbs across two clauses, the curious description of objects, the habit of producing sentences that have too many words (in order, presumably, to make up for an original under-specific level of thought - like a Hindu goddess with six arms/player-specific insults, and just the general capacity for grinding the meaning of words so none of them feel quite right in their grammatical or descriptive context.

So, yes, I would LOVE to know what the editorial process on this book was like. Anyone with better knowledge of the industry than me know how this sort of thing can get through?

was talking to an ex-publisher recently & mentioned the horrors of Capital: she repeated a thing that I've heard before - commissioning editors haven't had copy-editing skills beaten into them on the way up, so they're a bit hopeless when faced with the need for aggressive sentence-fixing (and money too tight to mention, so they don't get that long with a book and there's no freelance copy edit). On top of that agents have taken over some of the traditional space of the editor, advising on plot, structure, etc, so I guess that's another pair of eyes that's read the ms, but bombing along at 100pp/hour worrying about 'feel' rather than basic sentence-level mistakes that make his/her client look like a moron.

I too would love to know about the actual editorial process on this one.

we were talking about the death of editing at the last fap, weren't we? Here's a long + balanced but slightly dull thing on it.

Quite a lot of Blake Morrison in that article AND YET South of the River was the first literary novel I saw with an OCR mistake in it. (iirc) (haven't actually read it, a friend showed me)

private eye tells me that this didn't make the booker list (the lanchester nov, that is, not this lovely thread)

Nicola Barker, The Yips (Fourth Estate)
Ned Beauman, The Teleportation Accident (Sceptre)
André Brink, Philida (Harvill Secker)
Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists (Myrmidon Books)
Michael Frayn, Skios (Faber & Faber)
Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (Doubleday)
Deborah Levy, Swimming Home (And Other Stories)
Hilary Mantel, Bring up the Bodies (Fourth Estate)
Alison Moore, The Lighthouse (Salt)
Will Self, Umbrella (Bloomsbury)
Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis (Faber & Faber)
Sam Thompson, Communion Town (Fourth Estate)

fizzles for the booker

so wait he can't look at clips of freddy kamo even though he has broadband because when he wants to look at things he doesn't want traced he runs an anonymised 3G connection instead? why doesn't he just use his broadband connection for this bit?

At 10:35 on an early summer's morning, John Lanchester sat down at his study desk, switched on his new Dell computer, opened up the word processing programme that the computer had come with and began

ok, christmas is coming the tls is getting fat, and there's only one way to inaugurate the austerity festivities - where we hurl ourselves into an orgy of dyspraxia and incoherence in a final attempt to grab at the hope we promised ourselves the year would hold, before falling to our knees alone outside the pub shouting and crying and vomiting up the accumulated surfeit of unfulfilled desire within, and where the only Christmas lights are the torches they're shining in your eyes at A&E - and that's to finish the novel so shamefully overlooked for the Booker (my disappointed reaction here).

It's the only Christmas turkey that matters this year.

And, hey, it's not all over till you've surreptitiously dropped it on the communal reading shelf at work. maybe he's got some m amis style fourth wall tricks up his sleeve! an alien bursts out of lanchester's chest and starts goosestepping around elephant and castle, christmas tooter on the go; all Lanchester's characters turn up at his house and burn him Wicker Man style in a huge model of himself made of copies of the book he's writing! this could get exciting! let's go!

For those of you who have this book but haven't quite got round to reading it yet, now's your chance to read-along-a-fizzles. For those of you who haven't - make sure this book is in your christmas stocking! shd be out in paperback soon right?

word of warning: i'm not going to focus on the little nitpicky things like how badly it's written on a word-by-word sentence by sentence basis cos that's just the sort of thing that small-minded lit bloggers do, weighing well-meaning authors down with the impedimenta of pettifogging complaint. no, as we approach the end, it's a chance to look at the broader picture, engage with the bigger themes - we might even talk about what the book's about, well not that because it doesn't really reach the level of embodying something grander than its professed concerns, but y'know, the misfiring methods by which it fails to achieve its already limited aims.

not sure what that permalink is doing at the top there. takes you to a list of characters tho. handy reference.

It is out in paperback. I just saw it while getting a last-minute present.

Christmas Eve isn't a v sensible time to do this. I admit, I meant to finish the book a bit sooner, revive the thread a bit earlier.

I was sitting on the loo at work about a month ago, and - we share an office block with traffic wardens - a traffic warden was in the cubical next door, carrying on a phone conversation in a mixture of English and his unidentified-by-me native tongue (I always enjoy listening to this - a friend who works with refugee women in London says there's a sort of lingua franca the women have, where the specific jargon of the world they inhabit - form numbers, govt departments, charitable assistance programmes, admin processes - have become single-word nouns or verbs in that language)... anyway, I was sitting there, listening to the conversation, and I realised that I'd heard this a few times, and reckoned that probably the traffic wardens had to snatch their phone conversations and the other requirements of breaks at the same time. At least I hoped so - who wants to have a phone conversation while having a shit?

This gave me to start thinking about Capital, and specifically his traffic warden character, Quentina Mkfesi BSc MSc - a Zimbabwean refugee. We never see her in an office, she just exists on the streets (and in her refugee hostel tbf). I considered that this constituted one of the failings of Lanchester's novel - his characters only exist within the limits of his imagination and thus reveal the limits of his imagination, they do not push beyond it and require him to imagine how they might actually live, wch would give them detail that could not be contained within his perception of 'traffic warden' and 'refugee', and help them break out of their flickering holographic projection appearance. This isn't a new observation in this thread, but it occurred to me with renewed force. I was reading the praise on the back of the paperback just now, and one reviewer praises its 'humane empathy'. I very much think not. /flushes loo.

I'm not a good judge of what constitutes good character writing - and at the very most it seems to me to occupy the same place as 'good at landscapes', 'handy dialogue' - as a subset of genre rather than its reified place in lit fic (it was something I was going to bring up at about the time of Aimless' enjoyable reading of PKD). Nevertheless, this is a book risibly uninterested in its people, which, considering its people are p much the only thing in it (more of which later) is as much as to say 'this is a book risibly uninterested in its own content.'

Capital is a very unusual book, a very unusual piece of art, in this day and age, in that it is incontrovertibly, provably bad. In a time where register is all, and notions of gatekeeping and the worth of what is kept within are breaking down all over the shop (it is a time I favour in that respect), it's hard to make apodictic statements of critical worth (good), but with Capital you can: it's not very good. I'm going to double up on this one, because the other thing is that I don't really mind bits of bad in novels. I expect it. In fact I think the best writing tends to also be bad in some respect of aesthetic criticism (Dostoevsky's melodrama & Ballard's characters are two that spring to mind). VS Pritchett I think once said that story writing was a matter of selection and emphasis, and it's bound to be the case with a single-minded writer that the obsessions that make writing urgent and necessary to a certain extent deform critical precepts. I've never particularly liked what I've read of writing school novels, in that they seem to do everything obviously right, and as a consequence produce something depersonalised and wrong. like a 'perfectly' proportioned human, it strikes me as faintly nauseating and ersatz.

Reading a shitload of poetry recently brought me to the conclusion that poetry is the only artistic language - ideally we would have only poetry in writing. But given that poetry that meets the marker of that ideal occurs very rarely, and further that poetry is v expensive to write, novels are necessary. They are necessary for those that like reading to have something different and imaginatively engaging to read on a regular basis, they are necessary for those who write to be able to do so artistically without the unusual demands of poetry. There is a necessary compromise - they are pragmatic, they are not perfect, they are conversational and discursive, democratic, human. You accept a bit of looseness, a bit of bad, that is part of how they work.

Which is all by way of saying, I don't mind bad, and to a certain extent see it as required for good writing.

But Capital is bad on a level below that level of necessary bad. Its bad is not subject to critical discussion. To come back to the point about it being a novel uninterested in its own content, John Lanchester doesn't seem to have taken any pleasure in writing Capital, there's not a single moment where you think he would have enjoyed the conceit of his own invention, or be amused at a turn of phrase (god help us) or thrilled in constructing a particular scene, unless it is the rather hamfisted and jumpily unfunny scene where a toddler poos on the banker's carpet. This is not bad because of distorting overriding creative or imaginative purpose, this is bad because of a complete and evident lack of such purpose.

I'm putting off actually opening up the book. I've got some wrapping to do first.

No, wait, cup of tea then wrapping.

merry christmas fizzles

merry christmas thomp! (and festive booze n hugs to ILB cru generally)

Top takedown, Fizzles

The more I read about this book the more I want to actually read it, but it's kind of big and that's maybe two or three weeks of reading time I could be spending on something else.

My copy's got quite big letters, large margins.

I think you should read it.

'humane empathy' is a miserable pleonasm, though it does make me curious about what inhumane empathy might be, as an integrated idea and not merely 'empathy for serial killers' or whatever

Fizzles you are the Santa of ILB for taking this on, its rare to read anyone engaging in depth w/something so horrifying (instead of say, tearing the fucker into chunks and flushing these down the loo...many would make that kind of 'joke' but you did not (ok you came close w/'flushes loo' but that was funny).

Merry Xmas.

Merry Xmas xyzzz__. Think i actually just left the fucker at home - but my mum might have a copy.

"inhumane empathy" sounds as if, with a bit of twisting maybe, it might be suitable for Ballard. a sexualised, sensualised identification with others undergoing an essential, often painful metamorphosis from the human to something only residually human.

47

At 42 Pepys Road, Petunia Howe was
dying. Her condition was worse in every
way. Her level of consciousness varied:
at times she knew where she was and
what was happening; at other times she
was living through a delirium. Memories
swam through her like dreams.

"A masterpiece of inhumane empathy".

lol otm

those first two sentences though....

yep - his sentences can have a dreamlike quality where, although insubstantial to the point of being sub-little, they seem to take years to travel through.

That sub-literal quality is probably what gives his prose its character or voice. Empson's fecund and energising ambiguity of interpretation is here the opposite, an ambiguity of the insufficiently expressed or expressive, producing a constant uncertainty. I wonder whether Lanchester possibly sensed this, hence the way he tends to overload his sentences with inessential material detail, to give then the solidity they so crave. this ineffectual lumber gives the reader a feeling of eating institution food - both too much and too little. Sufficiency and piquancy both completely absent.

*fuckin sub-LITERAL.

One of the many things I am enjoying about this thread is how 'John Lanchester' actually sounds like the name a plodding American writer with no imagination would give a British character.

you know i am really coming to appreciate zadie smith more and more

MERRY CHRISTMAS

even to you John Lanchester

I no longer believe his articles because of this thread
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n01/john-lanchester/lets-call-it-failure

The person from the sock shop then takes your tenner and spends it on wine, and the wine merchant spends it on tickets to see The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant...

Weird insertion aside its a good explanation of GDP.

Whether its right or not I wouldn't know...

woof, his financial writing and his book on same, Whoops!, are actually really good. Shame he seems to have lost the ability to put that charm and wit into his fiction.

yeah, still like his financial writing, mainly for reasons of uninformed confirmation bias on my part really, tho yes, he has a good way with an example and phrase. also any takedown of that "household economy" thing (you know - the "tightening belts" bullshit) will always get a warm reception from me.

capital's been sitting on my desk again. I've been too busy promoting economic fluidity.

standing in Waterstones warning people off buying Capital while checking to see whether the early egregious blunders that did so much to indicate the extreme almost avant-garde mediocrity of this book had been expunged in paperback.

finding new things. he's almost an anti-list maker - y'know like Dickens and Kipling and Borges are great at cornucopias or euphonias and poetic itemisation, Lanchester is resolutely wingless in this area. A list indicating prosperity:

there were florists, Amazon parcels, personal trainers, cleaners, plumbers, yoga teachers, and all day long, all of them going up to the houses like supplicants and being swallowed by them

florists Amazon parcels.

swallowed like supplicants.

fuckin Amazon parcels.

I just scoured this thread, thinking it contained a genius remix of a Lanchester paragraph. Does it exist? I remember, I do!

dunno imago - we had some fun with Franzen.

^^^^that was it

NOW DO LANCHESTER

well, yeah, it's certainly available for something of the sort. i still haven't fucking finished it in fact. Any parody would have to also include those alarming moments of his style where you actually feel fear (the 'clunketa-clunketa' bit for instance), ie those moments when you realise the insistently boring mundanity of a person you are talking to is actually insane. Might give it a pop at some point. I thought i'd probably forgotten all the ticks in fact, but flicking through it earlier today brought them all back with anguished lucidity.

tics.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/mar/08/john-lanchester-capital-book-club

In which Lanchester reveals Capital was written by a committee of one.

NYRB Review, which i saw after seeing Helene DeWitt (who is obviously a **HERO**) mention it on her blog.

Interesting for being spot on in some respects:

And it shouldn’t work. It’s as if the author built the reader a mansion and then insisted that he sleep in a crowded tent out back—in hopes that life inside the tent will prove to be so much fun that the reader will forget about the mansion he was promised.

And not at all spot on in the baffling critical evaluation that he draws:

Somehow, it does work. The most obvious reason is that Lanchester is a talented enough writer that you are inclined to follow him wherever he wants to go, without asking a lot of questions along the way.

You can find this sort of thing on every other page—a fresh and interesting description of a sensation you might have experienced a hundred times without ever having bothered to attach words to it.

omfg wut. yes, there are descriptions of those experiences, no they are not fresh and interesting.

That interview ledge links to is a better guide for those of you beginning to think 'well it has got some good reviews...':

One is that today's levels of inequality are measurably similar to those of Victorian England; extremes of wealth and poverty, of good and bad luck and of good and bad behaviour are visible wherever you look in our capital city. Second, just as in Victorian England, London is where people now come to make their fortunes. Where once it was Dick Whittington, now it attracts Polish builders, plumbers and cleaners, Czech nannies, French bond dealers and Russian dentists – and those are just people who are personally known to me. The city seems to contain every possible combination of person, origin, profession and ambition.

some of my best friends are character templates. French bond dealers! Whatever next. Foreign women looking after children! Doctors from abroad!

also rmde at this new experience of bad luck and bad behaviour.

ha that paragraph was as far as i got in his piece. glad to see that London has become this cultural melting pot while the rest of the country is stuck in a 1950s hegemony of white English people only

i wish i had Polish friends

The city seems to contain every possible combination of person, origin, profession and ambition.

Crying out for an I-Spy guide. Female guatemalan legal secretary hoping to open a pet shop - check!

truly it is unique among cities

Before gastropubs London used to be grey. Before that it was black and white. And before that everyone was crudely etched and 2D.

He was very sensible that all political writers upon the subject had unanimously agreed and lamented, from the beginning of Queen Elizabeth's reign down to his own time, that the current of men and money towards the metropolis, upon one frivolous errand or another,—set in so strong,—as to become dangerous to our civil rights,—though, by the bye,—a current was not the image he took most delight in,—a distemper was here his favourite metaphor, and he would run it down into a perfect allegory, by maintaining it was identically the same in the body national as in the body natural, where the blood and spirits were driven up into the head faster than they could find their ways down;—a stoppage of circulation must ensue, which was death in both cases.

Wait, don't tell me. I recognise it. Fielding? Sterne?

As for this populous cities are populous, it's almost as old as its twin complaint recorded in Herodotus of outside/eastern effeminacy undermining the solid virtues of empire/city founders. Sure Polybius rags on about it.

Sterne, specifically Tristram's dad's opinions on London. maybe this Lanchester fellow is onto something.

dashes should have told me.

yes, JL's interest in London's diversity strikes me as very uninteresting

I am not really interested in diversity in that way

if I am a writer, what do I care that there are now some Polish plumbers around? this is not interesting.

sometimes i feel that you're damaged in some profound way

@OfficialMeshell: ok time to read a book i highly recommend CAPITAL BY JOHN LANCHESTER

seems like he has been moonlighting as a food critic

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/may/07/su-la-london-restaurant-review/print

that was his main gig originally i thought

he was? that explains a lot

I bought Capital yesterday, it was onsale somewhere for £2.50. It's worth that much, surely?

£2.50 plus x hours of your time, though

Matt DC went into the small charity bookshop on the high street with the white door. It's worth that, surely, he thought to himself as he picked up the paperback. Even a double espresso these days costs that. And besides, it's for a good cause.

Excited for Matt DC. Also worry someone at some stage is going report Capital's brilliance at dissecting contemporary mores and the profound clarity of its limpid prose.

On a rainy morning in early December, an 82-year-old woman sat in her front room at 42 Pepys Road, looking out at the street through a lace curtain. Her name was Petunia Howe...

Can't believe you cut this off when you did by the way, in its entirety its one of the most banal opening paragraphs I can recall reading.

This doesn't look like it will take very long to read.

i wasn't sure when to stop quoting, it felt like it could go on for a while.

and no it shouldn't do, unless you get trapped in one of his sentences.

limp id prose

I am about 100 pages into this and so far nothing at all has really happened.

Having read several financial pieces on this (including the LRB link upthread) it's evident that Lanchester isn't actually a bad writer himself, either that or he has good editors.

But Capital is full of terrible writing, you can tell immediately from the Prologue, because he equates 'accessibility' with 'patronising your readership' - it's written in the way someone would explain the gentrification of London to a small child. He doesn't actually understand or empathise with ordinary people at all, which is why every character appears to be a cardboard cut-out.

The worst section so far is the introduction of Freddy Kamo and his father (although the 'Smitty' sections come close). Apparently they've been in Senegal, being paid a Premiership club retainer to just sit around until Freddy is 17. Do football clubs ever do this? And apparently their arrival in London represents the first time either of them have been in a taxi, stayed in a hotel or eaten at a restaurant. After having been paid regular money by Arsenal for several years. It's astonishingly patronising writing.

He's also the worst list writer I've ever encountered. There's a scene I will type up later when Ahmed is surveying the bounteous contents of his shop that is just eye-clawingly clunky and banal.

His lists are dire.

said this upthread:

finding new things. he's almost an anti-list maker - y'know like Dickens and Kipling and Borges are great at cornucopias or euphonias and poetic itemisation, Lanchester is resolutely wingless in this area. A list indicating prosperity:

there were florists, Amazon parcels, personal trainers, cleaners, plumbers, yoga teachers, and all day long, all of them going up to the houses like supplicants and being swallowed by them

and i don't think that was anywhere near the worst example - the newsagent example you're talking about is hitting me with horrified recollection.

and so much of the book is just listing shit! all the time! as if accumulation of detail is world-building.

Ahmed loved his shop, loved the profusion of it, the sheer amount of stuff in the narrow space and the sense of security it gave him - The Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph and The Sun and The Times and Top Gear and The Economist and Women's Home Journal and Heat and Hello! and The Beano and Cosmopolitan, the crazy proliferation of print, the dozens of types of industrially manufactured sweets and chocolates, the baked beans and white bread and Marmite and Pot Noodles and all the other inedible things that English people ate, and the bin-liners and tinfoil and toothpaste and batteries (behind the counter where they couldn't be stolen) and razor blades and painkillers and 'No Junk Mail' stickers which he'd only got in last week and had already had to reorder twice, the laser-print-quality 80g paper and the A4 envelopes and the A5 envelopes which had become so popular since they changed the way postal pricing worked, and the fridge full of soft drinks and the adjacent fridge of alcohol, and the bottles of Ribena and orange squash, and the credit card machine and the Transport for London card-charging device and the Lottery terminal - it all felt snug and cosy and safe, his very own space...

http://i.imgur.com/TMhRo.gif

I was actually expecting this book to at least be entertaining in a kind of sloppy, knockabout soap-opera way but it is all SO FUCKING BORING.

Also this passage, in which one of the major characters has just found out she may be deported to Zimbabwe:

Her lawyer hung up. It didn't sound as if there was anything she could do about it, so rather than spend her day worrying about what was going to happen, she instead decided to spend it thinking about the church choir, he of the voice and the shoulders, the defined muscles... The Black Eyed Peas had a song which Quentina thought was hilarious: 'My Humps'. There was a line in it about 'my humps, my humps, my lovely lady lumps'. It made Quentina smile and it made her think of her date with Mashinko. He was going to take her to the African bar in Stockwell to listen to a band from South Africa called the Go-To Boys. Life was sweet. In her heart, she didn't think she would be returning to Zimbabwe until the tyrant was dead. Something told her that. In the meantime, my humps, my humps... my lovely lady lumps...

Lanchester presumably read and re-read this paragraph several different times, as did his editor. It's possible that pop songs do flood through your head at grave and significant moments in one's life but I get the sense that Lanchester is doing this not so much for verisimilitude but because to do anything else would require his characters to behave with something other than constant emotional tepidity. In the scene where [SPOILER ALERT] Petunia Howe finds out she is dying of a brain tumour she receives the news with exactly the same mix of banality and stoicism.

tom mccarthy should write a roman a clef about the period of research lanchester undertakes prior to the writing of this book

wait a second, is the church choir one guy

Why did I pause for a second before crashing through that spoiler alert?

47

At 42 Pepys Road, Petunia Howe was
dying. Her condition was worse in every
way. Her level of consciousness varied:
at times she knew where she was and
what was happening; at other times she
was living through a delirium. Memories
swam through her like dreams.

― things that are jokes pretty much (Nilmar Honorato da Silva), Monday, 24 December 2012 14:34 (5 months ago)

"the dozens of types of industrially manufactured sweets and chocolates" is the highlight of that newsagent passage, that or the envelopes

dozens of types of industrially manufactured sweets and chocolates

industrially manufactured sweets and chocolates

industrially manufactured sweets and chocolates

ah xpost!

I want to hang Lanchester over a bridge by his ankles until he tells me what the hell he thinks he's doing writing like this.

It made Quentina smile and it made her think of her date with Mashinko

that sort of thing is just offensive - the double 'made'.

is the double made maybe supposed to sound faux-naif like maybe it's supposed to be like that pitchfork reviews guy?

yes, but if i'm remembering correctly - the faux-naif is the exclusive reserve of immigrants, women and the infirm. i think - and here i feel like attempting to claw my way out through the wall behind me - it's gesturing at a sort of innocence.

that's gross. I was at the pub earlier this week and they had this on their free bookshelf, I almost took it but couldn't be fucked and took mark kermode's bookcast instead

He uses the word 'fizzy' twice in one sentence as well, that's just plain lazy.

There's also a scene where a grown woman uses the phrase "our tummies will be rumbling" when they're having a disagreement. It's all part of this infantilised language that everyone uses, narrator included.

Are these people poor, but happy?

everybody should read this book. i keep panicking - it's like peering into a void - and need other people round to reassure me, like Matt.

In fact I keep wanting to construct an argument that it's the opposite of Chesterton's view of fairy stories (brought to mind by dow quoting him on the What Are You Reading thread). Like a lot of Chesterton, that sort of thing makes me slightly queasy, but the principle that fairy stories remind us of the magical uniqueness of the world - by saying that an apple is golden they remind us of the miracle of an apple being green - is the exact opposite of what Lanchester is doing.

Like a pellucid moron he insists with bleak clarity upon a more unrewarding level of awareness below that of our generally indifferent quotidian sensation. It is in this respect subart, unart.

It's that thing of leaving nothing to chance - if he had not specified that the chocolate (and sweets) were not industrially manufactured what sort of mad things might we have conceived otherwise? What sort of crazed alternate universe he is at all costs preventing us with words of adamantine dullness from potentially visualising? He is the anti-imaginer. He is, as Matt has shown so well with that awful terrible list of things in the newsagent, a compulsive includer of the untelling detail. I say again - nothing is left to chance, as I say. The reader is forced into a fearful editorial practice of escapology.

In fact it reminds me of a quote I remember from another book, which shows rather more clearly what elevates Lanchester's style to the plane of criminal lunacy.

It's from an academic book and a theoretical framework is described as being 'firmly embraced'.

That ‘firmly embraced’ worried me. Just writing ‘embraced’ won’t cause your reader to become concerned that the embrace is reluctant or impartial. By writing 'firmly', it makes it seem that there is some doubt about the matter.

This is paradoxically what Lanchester does when he pathologically fills in every detail. It has the curious effect of making everything seem open to doubt, ersatz, possibly not true but for the asseverations of the author, precarious, balanced on the void. And before anyone suggests it, it's not precarious in a social or economic sense, possibly justifiable by the subject matter of the material, but in a strong tonal and epistemological sense. You start to feel frightened at every sentence. What does its banality or meaningless conceal? It conceals nothing. What is intended? Nothing is intended. It's like staring into the mind of Poe's Raven and seeing Lovecraft's Mountains of Madness within.

To take another Chesterton line from the same essay: Remember, however, that to be breakable is not the same as to be perishable. Strike a glass, and it will not endure an instant; simply do not strike it, and it will endure a thousand years. Such, it seemed, was the joy of man, either in elfland or on earth; the happiness depended on NOT DOING SOMETHING which you could at any moment do and which, very often, it was not obvious why you should not do.

This is Lanchester - he is uncontrollable smasher of glasses.

all the applause.gifs

not reading the book though, soz

dammit.

Lanchester loved his book, loved the profusion of it, the sheer amount of stuff in the narrow space and the sense of security it gave him - The Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph and The Sun and The Times and Top Gear and The Economist and Women's Home Journal and Heat and Hello! and The Beano and Cosmopolitan, the crazy proliferation of text, the dozens of types of industrially manufactured similes and syllogisms, the baked metaphors - white bread and Marmite and Pot Noodles and all the other inedlible things that the English language ate - it all felt snug and cosy and safe, his very own space...

That ‘firmly embraced’ worried me. Just writing ‘embraced’ won’t cause your reader to become concerned that the embrace is reluctant or impartial. By writing 'firmly', it makes it seem that there is some doubt about the matter.

i encountered "seriously embraced" in a work context once, like regarding ISO9000 qualification or health and safety or a diversity policy or something

I was going to give credit where it was due, to say that Capital picks up markedly in part three as things actually start happening to the characters. But then I read this sentence, which is surely the nadir of Leaving Nothing To Chance:

The London centre for asylum and immigration tribunals, where cases concerning the immigration status of asylum-seekers to the UK are decided, was near Chancery Lane.

I can't even...

Superb. Also for using two tenses in one description.

I just had to go back and check that the mangling of tenses there wasn't my work, but no, Lanchester actually wrote that.

Another thing that I don't think has been touched on upthread is that Lanchester's sense of the colloquial is just clunky and appalling on every level. In this scene, a group of investment bankers are playing poker. Note that Lanchester hangs out with bankers in real life, he isn't actually attempting to write patois or anything:

"You've got naff-all, I can tell", said Slim Tony. Michelle said nothing, did nothing. "Typical girl, they either fold every time you play back at them or they pretend to have a cock. Not just any cock, a really massive one. Big, big cock. Have you got a big, big cock, Michelle?"

And later, when Freddy Kamo is on a coach being jeered by opposing fans:

There were always plenty of opposing fans around to shout abuse, flick V-signs, call out player-specific insults (poof, black bastard, arse bandit, sheep-shagger, fat yid, paedo goatfucker, shit-eating towelhead, Catholic nonce, French poof, black French queer bastard etc etc) and once, take down their trousers and moon the coach

I'm assuming Lanchester enjoyed writing this section quite a lot, which is the only reason I can think of for its inclusion, especially when you consider the weird void of wit there.

black French queer bastard

Freddy caught a look in the manager's eyes, and stood up. The owner waved him back down again but Freddy stayed standing.

‘Good luck today,' the owner said in his slow, clear English. ‘Be fast!'

‘Yes sir. Thank you. I will try my best.'

"this was a great joke"

that "player-specific insults" still makes me laugh. what happens if you remove player-specific? people vaguely swearing about hypothesised opponents?

astonishingly, in a coup of literary style, lanchester then manages just that.

ts: poof vs. french poof

I know I shouldn't expect reason from Lanchester lists, but "catholic nonce" is especially provocatively baffling to me.

I haven't read this book but I'm sure this thread is 100% more entertaining than it could possibly be. I mean, why describe a fucking newsagents, as if there is someone out there reading this book who has never been in a newsagents before and noticed the things that they sell in there?

It's the aesthetic delight of a 100% fabricated quotidian mundane and the way the style effortlessly conveys the content.

i wd still offer the defence, which is really no defence, that i think he thinks he's doing some kind of Martian Sends a Postcard Home alienation affect thing

still makes him terrible, just terrible in a different way

DFW describes things in microcosmic detail too, but it's used as a literary device in which, say, the glint of light off a ballpoint pen suggests an abstract ray of hope in a world of mundanity. Here it seems to be mundanity for the sake of filling up space.

This thread really makes me want to read the book.

Balls to it, it's bought. I'm going to hate this.

It hadn't occurred to me to buy the thing until you posted that. Now I feel gravity inexorably pulling me in that direction.

the whole thing is on some russian site if u search for any of the excerpted phrases itt

If I don't spend cash on it, I'm not committed enough to it.

The last ILB rec I picked up was Alice Munro (thanks Ismael), which I was expecting to love (and did), so intersting to go in the other direction.

i have already seen this book in a number of charity shops (and i think that's where matt dc got his copy), no need to buy new

Yep got it second hand - speculative punts and hatereads always second hand.

Swear to god the intersting typo was unintentional.

" DFW describes things in microcosmic detail too, but it's used as a literary device in which, say, the glint of light off a ballpoint pen suggests an abstract ray of hope in a world of mundanity. Here it seems to be mundanity for the sake of filling up space"

DFW also wrote amazing sentences. Lanchester writes like he's putting together a primary school report about late capitalism.

I finished this on Friday, it doesn't even really have an ending, it just sort of stops. It does clear up the central "mystery" that ties the book together but I challenge anyone to be remotely interested in that.

that mystery isn't maintained in any meaningful way throughout the book - i still haven't finished this, but that description is exactly what i was expecting.

speculative punts and hatereads

was just reading (and cringing with) this thread thinking how alien this concept is to me. i mean i'll do any old film or album for the morbid craic but a whole shitty book seems like an affront to life somehow

i guess i'm not a very cultivated reader tho tbf

i've read as much of this book as i'm ever gonna read on this thread, but i'm neurotic about life being too short

seriously! when i think of the number of books that are actually good (or even just pleasurable) that i haven't read, how could i have time for hatereads?

tbh though that is the sort of thinking that if you transposed it to music would just leave you listening to the beatles and some bits off a wire magazine top 100 weird records list

literary poptimism, is it plausible

there's the simple fact of the time and effort it takes me to read but also i don't actively listen to things i think i'm gonna hate either. and there's plenty of pop/genre fiction i do like, so i dunno, i'm not gonna form a final codified judgement on what i'll waste time on before inevitable death and dissolution

Just have an afternoon off to skim through the "good" bits innit? Sure there are more choice bits to quote on this thread.

By this point its the only reason to read this.

tbh though that is the sort of thinking that if you transposed it to music would just leave you listening to the beatles and some bits off a wire magazine top 100 weird records list

wait, idgi, who is the beatles in this analogy? in the world of literary poptimism, Lanchester is, like, Frank Turner or something. comfortably 6music.

I think literary poptimism is plausible, I have read 50 shades and the novelisation of gremlins and a bizarre forgotten evangelical novel published in the 20s but I'm not gonna read capital by john lanchester

tru kult lit-popism = all urban fantasy all the time

There doesn't, unlike music or film, seem to be enough high-visibility product published (or consumed) on a weekly basis to drive a poptimism.

Otherwise we'd have way more threads here.

Can't read fast enough for one thing, compared to hearing the whole top 20 in an hour

also i think ilb posters aren't super interested in dealing w/ the most populist and formalist genres? i mean: people here do not post about YA novels, urban fantasy, crime, miseryporn, celebrity biography, romance novels, etc. (all of which tend to be much faster reads than contemporary literary fiction)

iirc there was a period where ILB was more poptimist - quite early doors, when there was a larger group of posters.

xp

agree, difficulty of consumption, slow production/turnover makes fiction popism difficult. Feel Harry Potter would be the core of a working lit popism, + YA fiction, maybe fantasy epic (though i think that last has moved in the respectability ratings lately, eg Lanchester on Game of Thrones in recent LRB).

I still think of ILB as being quite YA-fiction friendly, but maybe that's passed.

but otm c#

I am on holiday, which led to me finishing a book I didn't think much of (Americanah) for the first time in ages. Normally I'm ruthlessly life's-too-short about that kind of thing.

This may be a dumb question but what is meant by urban fantasy?

sexy vampire romance

there's something briefly interesting to be drawn from the parallel uses of "urban" as an adjective in pop music and popular fiction

Oh haha of course xp

YA novel?

I recall differently: there were never threads dedicated to anything too populist apart from maybe crime? I think the "50 Shades.." thread was posted in ILE so perhaps it shows this isn't very welcome.

ILB followed on from threads in ILE, back in 2001, where posters would talked about Pynchon, Joyce and the like.

i mean i'll do any old film or album for the morbid craic but a whole shitty book seems like an affront to life somehow

It's actually been both a perversely enjoyable and illuminating experience. I wouldn't do it regularly but, in general, I virtually never read genuinely bad books, so it's reassuring to realise that I can still recognise bad fiction writing.

I also was sort of hoping it would be either undemandingly enjoyable in a bollocks sort of way, or illuminate something about London. Neither of those things came to pass.

Also it's a piece of piss to read, you could probably cane through it in an afternoon if you were so minded, even if it is 500+ pages long.

I find I tend to take roughly the same amount of time over densely-written prose as easy-but-dull fluff. It can take me a strangely inordinate amount of time to read a graphic novel for instance, but I don't find myself necessarily taking lots more time over more complicated stuff. I guess if something's well-written I find it easier to concentrate on but something like Capital I'd probably end up taking AGES over because it's so tedious.

am engaging in my own version of literary poptimism atm - have put Mason & Dixon on hold and am halfway through The Crying Of Lot 49 instead

lol u cad

I've been working summers at the Notting Hill farmer's market for a few years, and our customers are a blend of long-time residents with family money (the kind of middle class who bought fixer-uppers in 1970), expats who nevertheless appreciate the community and participate in local stuff, older people of colour, ageing aristos in mansion flats shopping with their housekeepers, young middle-income professionals, old school BBC, oligarch WAGs, and (occasionally) Terence Stamp. But most are rosy-cheeked middle-class British foodies, and 99.9 per cent are genially polite and genuinely neighbourly to each other.

― aldi young dudes (suzy), Wednesday, 3 July 2013 08:22 (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

<3

haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarsh

kind of want the context but i think s is generally better at observing these things than john lanchester

high praise

Saw a guy reading this on the bus the other, chuckled at the thought of this thread

im a fan of suzy and her social panopticism is probably closer to zola or gorkiy or dreiser or some other writer i have never read than it is to big lancs but it still deserves inclusion itt for comparative reasons

This book was every bit as bad as the thread led me to think it would be. The whole thing reads like it was written by an 11 year old - this happens and then that happens and this is what the characters are feeling and thinking and then this happened. It reads like it's been written by an 11 year old who has read The Mezzanine and is trying to copy that focus on detail but hasn't the attention span, so it just slides into a list of superficial things thing things (different people in the park, the amazing, tone deaf football insults).

Favourite part: p193 "what he was qualified to know what a semen stain" - what does this even mean? Why do we need to be reassured as to Smitty's cum-spotting bona fides? This is the most perplexing of all the many irrelevancies in this book.

Actual favourite part: "such a mad texter" - the only instance of an interesting/rythymical phrase cropping up in the books facile, gliding artlessness.

And then at the end when you get to *SPOILER* the resolution of We Want What You Have its laid out as if this is the grand climax of the book, as if this it the moment that the curtain is pulled back and each and every reader will gasp at how they would never have guessed - the problem being that the mystery is (a) not interesting and (b) ignored pretty much for the vast chunks of the book, so the revelation of who the culprit is is more an exercise in tidying some of the more glaring loose ends. The book has no climax, it just slides before your eyes and then is gone.

(b)ignored pretty much for the vast chunks of the book

Yes!

Reminds me of Sarah Waters' The Night Watch, where *the central mystery* is an event that happens in passing and is explained a couple of hundred pages later - but I never realised it was the key event until I read the blurb after I'd finished. A shame in that case, because it really is a good book but now I groan inwardly whenever I think of it.

I challenge anyone to give a shit about that mystery.

It might be part of the JL's masterplan to document, like a novelistic Robert Shields, all the mundanities of human life but there does seem to be a preponderance of shitting and pissing in this book: the Yount shit carpet thing; Petunia Howe's bedpan; Shahid's loose stools; polish builder pissing; Smitty's assistant having some amazing capacity for possinng (carthorse? is that the expression he used?). Maybe the shit signifier is JL's way of identifying the characters he sees as being key, or signigificant: Yount as banking pinata/effigy; Howe as reminder of simpler time, anchor to the past; Shahid as oh I don't know - the problem is that each of the characters is resolutely depthless. Hanging significance of any of them is a fool's errand.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Roger Scruton:

Capitalism may be a dead concept. But the many meanings of 'capital' remain. John Lanchester's novel Capital (Faber), published in 2012, exploits this fact in a most ingenious way. It is a beautifully written attempt to put a smile on a multicultural and disintegrating capital of our country. Lanchester creates memorable characters, and implants them in their contexts with extraordinary delicacy and erudition. London may have become a vast airport terminal; but it still has the streets, and in those streets, Lanchester shows, life goes on

http://femaleimagination.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/white-rabbit.jpg

lol Scruton finds new way to be a douche

i can't make head nor tail of a single sentence of it. what the fuck is he going on about?

I can't get my head around how little appreciation of the art of prose one would require to describe Capital as "beautifully written".

have you read Scruton's work?

that is a very racist paragraph to have its racism go unhighlighted on a forum that discerns and complains about the most minor racisms at tedious length

not complaining tho, this is ilb after all and the esthetic bankruptcy is more striking

It somehow manages to be racist, self-contradictory and incomprehensible all at once.

oh it was a paragraph where everything was intended to be highlighted. in fact i got the same vertiginous feeling of mystifying non-reality that capital produced, more quickly expressed by going "what the fuck are you talking about?"

but yes "multicultural and disintegrating" is egregious, the sort of heedless stuff men like scruton start letting fly with when they're well into their "barmy racist" phase.

still trying to understand that vast airport terminal tho? tourists? architecture? wtf is he on about?

(incidentally the fact that scruton can apparently like this book, assuming it's not just belated back-rubbing, and do his racist academic thing indicates how badly, how patronisingly, lanchester does all his "diversity of characters")

"erudite" indeed. a word with absolutely no pertinence whatsoever.

surely it's a philosophical exercise in writing a paragraph in which no sentence bears any resemblance to reality.

what Matt said.

and c#m, yep, i almost feel admiration. as if it were some oulipo game.

airport terminal = carousel of rootless cosmopolitans

and yes fizzles i didnt intend to upbraid anyone, its just that sometimes its quite refreshing in an unpleasant way to see a barely cloaked virulent xenophobia in plain sight and nor cribbed from the facebook page of a 73 yr old rogue ukip activist or what have you

I think the vast airport terminal is intended to be a dismissive descriptor of the effect of multiculturalism. It's "capitalism may be a dead concept" that I don't understand.

Also the London we see in Capital is the opposite of decaying, if anything it's sprucing itself to death.

Make no mistake that Lanchester's portrayal of non-white/non-British characters is condescendingly dire though.

yep, ok. what an inept tool. get a brain scrutans. xpost.

nort

i think Scruton tends towards "end of history" bullshit so when he says "capitalism is a dead concept" he means "we're all capitalists now hooray!"

i can explain... well give a bit of context here, it's from that grim unrewarding feast that is the TLS Books of the Year:

I object to the French habit of describing everything around us as an expression of "capitalism". But in L'Esthetisation du monde: Vivre a l'age du capitalisme artiste (Gallimard), Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy make wonderful use of their powers of observation to show us the world of fetishes and baubles in which we live, no longer fulfilled by our desires but mystified by them.

One of those things if it's ever been true has always been true, rather than being characteristic of any age and certainly not as part of bogus narratives of humanistic decline. lol 'French habit'. Twit.

Amazing how many people couldn't actually choose a book 'of the year' by the way. <3 the way Joyce Carol Oates just sent a list tho with no gloss whatsoever tho.

Jesus. King Thotho the First.

lol in the Adrian Mole books Sue Townsend named the psychotic authoritarian headmaster of Neil Armstrong Comprehensive after Scruton

We shouldn't get carried away: 1.2 billion absolutely poor people is still 1.2 billion too many

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/sep/05/poverty-uk-better-calling-it-inequality/print

in order to avoid getting carried away, JL suggests a modest proposal...

how many should there be though?

if there were none at all, there would be no incentives to betterment

it's an odd article. he's usually really good at these but he seems to spend all of it fighting quite hard at defining poverty v inequality, which is really just clearing up a confusion. but he somehow manages to define away poverty (and starvation) completely, and ends up dropping that glib turd of a last paragraph.

the whole thing is trash, as if he had a heavy lunch and good bottle of burgundy and then a guardian amanuensis came along at 3pm and gave him some data printouts on poverty from the world bank and recorded about 15 minutes of lanchester slowly trying to digest what, if anything, they might mean, and then condensed it into an article

The prospect is one of a society such as the one we live in, only more so.

I laughed at that thinking you had nicely summarised what made the article bad. then I flicked back to the article and saw that's wrote he wrote.

that's wrote he what obv.

still he validates it all by saying piketty.

only morsel

a kind of simulation, except more so than the real thing ever was

one of a society such as the one. only more so.

kind of want to excelsior john lanchester for that

Nobody, in the Beveridge sense of the term, is lacking the means of subsistence: nobody is "poor".

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/feb/28/man-starved-to-death-after-benefits-cut

yeah, that's what really fucked me off about it. of course proper subsistence/starvation poverty exists. just because the poverty you start talking about is calculated relatively it doesn't mean the other lower-than-subsistence level doesn't exist. ffs.

nakh has already nailed the tone but i'm always just a tiny bit gratified in my deepest class prejudices - I KNOW THIS IS BAD - when i get a reminder that these glib cunts still roam the liberal thoughtscape sweetly ignorant of the lives of millions of the people they like to pontificate about

Just wanted to say thanks for this thread, I laughed out several times and now I'm sorely tempted to read the thing, it sounds hilarious.

this thread is not only hilarious it's a public service: that hulking hardback of Capital somebody gave us this summer will remain on the shelf.

Taken from his piece on automation

And it’s not just manual labour. Consider this report from the Associated Press:

CUPERTINO, Calif. (AP) Apple Inc. (AAPL) on Tuesday reported fiscal first-quarter net income of $18.02 billion.

The Cupertino, California-based company said it had profit of $3.06 per share.

The results surpassed Wall Street expectations … The maker of iPhones, iPads and other products posted revenue of $74.6 billion in the period, also exceeding Street forecasts. Analysts expected $67.38 billion.

For the current quarter ending in March, Apple said it expects revenue in the range of $52 billion to $55 billion. Analysts surveyed by Zacks had expected revenue of $53.65 billion.

Apple shares have declined 1 per cent since the beginning of the year, while the Standard & Poor’s 500 index has declined slightly more than 1 per cent. In the final minutes of trading on Tuesday, shares hit $109.14, an increase of 39 per cent in the last 12 months.

We’ll be returning to the content of that news story in a moment. For now, the fact to concentrate on is that it wasn’t written by a human being. This has been a joke or riff for so long – such and such ‘reads like it was written by a computer’ – that it’s difficult to get one’s head around the fact that computer-generated news has become a reality. A company called Automated Insights owns the software which wrote that AP story. Automated Insights specialises in generating automatic reports on company earnings: it takes the raw data and turns them into a news piece. The prose is not Updikean, but it’s better than E.L. James, and it gets the job done

Joke is too easy, given the excerpts on this thread..

Jay-Z sat down at his compaq presario desktop station, opened up his tidal web client, cracked his knuckles, and went to work on adding those tracks

― And let’s say a new Hozier comes along, and Spotify outbids you (Sufjan Grafton), Wednesday, April 1, 2015 8:29 PM (Yesterday)

So although Farage is an idiot, he also isn’t.

if there were ever a case for seo retrofitting ilx threads, then it would be getting some heat for this thread (which surely represents the longest sustained treatment of his work he is ever likely to receieve).......that there might be just one prominent page where this nudnik's eminent uselessness was attested to

i was just coming here to link Lanchester's Election Diary

which is, disappointingly, not that bad?

yes, it's not terrible - but he's pretty good at that sort of thing I think. I find I nurse a perverted desire for him to write more fiction.

er..http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/nov/24/capital-complicated-portrait-london-john-lanchester

Wanted Fizzles to liveblog the TV prog

This might be an apposite time to start my long-delayed 'Rewrite classic openings in the style of John Lanchester' thread.

"Call me Ishmael", said Ishmael as he was woken at 6.30am by his Precision LCD Radio Controlled Clock, purchased for £19.99 from Argos.

21 year-old medical student Malachi "Buck" Mulligan walked up the stairs to the roof terrace of his 1800s Martello Tower apartment holding a bowl of shaving foam and his Gillette Fusion ProGlide with NEW Flexball Technology Manual Razor. He reminded his friend, 20 year-old fellow medical student Stephen Dedalus, of one of those priests that frequently appeared as the perpetrator of some sexual scandal on the television news programmes.

frightened to go near the tv version. however already *v much* enjoying "openings in the style of"

lol "television news programmes" is pitch perfect.

So annoying they got Toby Jones involved in this. Gotta eat I suppose.

is there any way this would function better as a TV show given the absence of Lanchester's deathless prose? it's not like I'm gonna read any version other than Fizzles's

The plot, especially the main 'mystery' is so tedious and uncompelling that I can't imagine it working on TV.

well yes, I do feel either that NV, or that tv, possibly even reasonably decent tv, kind of sops up and neutralises in the visual field much of lanchester's spectacular redundancy, which made reading Capital the equivalent of a sort of literary carpal tunnel syndrome.

the fatuous-to-the-point-of-surreal characters can get dialled down by actors and a sort of automatic validity conveyed, again, by the visual.

it feels like the badness of the prose would have to be replaced by multiple badnesses elsewhere, committed by multiple people, and surely not everything can be that bad.

xpost and yeah, the plot in Capital, such as it was, was utterly mystifying: only periodically present, totally devoid of meaning other than as a completely buggered tool cackhandedly used by Lanchester to bring about the apparently difficult or abstract concepts "beginning" and "end".

rereading this thread before Sunday gets started. definitely a Top ILB Moment. anyway I see woof called this:

Feel like this is going to be a MAJOR NEW DRAMA on BBC1 at some point.

― woof, Friday, March 9, 2012 12:22 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

A copy of this is now lying around in the office (nearly burst out laughing when I saw it), a manager has caught this on tv and has decided to read the book.

I am going to try and keep my fucking mouth shut.

It's when you flick through and you read the first line of each chapter, one after the other, as I did at the weekend, that you realise quite how terrible this book is, that nothing in this thread is even an exaggeration.

I did enjoy Fragrant Harbour and The Debt to Pleasure, but yeah this one is garbage, and plotless garbage at that

"On the same evening, while Anthony was brooding over the Investment Review and Alison over her daughter, Len Wincobank was lying on his dormitory bed in Block D and listening to the radio. On the walls around him, naked girls in various rude attitudes winked at him and offered themselves to him, thrusting out handsome bums and eccentrically large tits"

That's from Margaret Drabble's The Ice Age. Always nice to spot a bit of proto-Lanchester in the wild.

Len Wincobank is a white collar criminal, by the way. The book was quite prescient until I reached this chapter, which is awful.

Handsome Bums are a mix between The Stone Roses and Primal Scream with the swagger of Oasis

had to be done

By half past eight, on this same long November evening, Anthony Keating had finished his sausages, idled away half an hour with a cup of coffee, switched the radio on and off several times, and done some thinking.

I wonder if Lanchester is even conscious of the extent to which he has ripped this book off, right down to its every plodding cadence.

he might be - it might even be an explanation. i haven't read the ice age. is there any aspect of it that might make a sane person sit up and say "hey this is *good*, i shd *do* something with this"?

it doesn't sound like it.

I have read the successor to THE ICE AGE which is called THE RADIANT WAY. It is in this mode.

In a way I think it is extremely prescient of post-Thatcherite Britain. But we are conditioned now to think of the late 60s and early 70s as this very innocent, social democratic, vaguely utopian time rather than an explosion of venality and greed that came crashing to a halt, which is how Drabble, writing in the late 70s, sees it. And that's interesting from my perspective in a way that, say, Capital isn't.

You also get the sense that Drabble had been regularly reading the FT and the Economist and decided to base a novel around what she was reading, which so far happens at the expense of character. At one point an unnamed economist literally sits at a breakfast table pondering inflation. But if you were John Lanchester then I can easily imagine you putting the book down and thinking "yes, this is what literature should aspire to!"

By the way I should really post that entire quote in its own right for all its Lanchestrian awkwardness:

"By half past eight, on this same long November evening, Anthony Keating had finished his sausages, idled away half an hour with a cup of coffee, switched the radio on and off several times, and done some thinking. He thought about the nature of property, and why it was that some people considered the owning of property particularly wicked: why was it more wicked to own a strip of land with a house on it than to own a sausage, a bicycle, a secondhand fur coat, or a colour television set?"

I've just come to this straight from reading Angela Carter, who really does write some sublime sentences, and on a pure prose level it's like following up Mozart with a Chumbawumba chaser.

why was it more wicked to own a strip of land with a house on it than to own a sausage
why was it more wicked to own a strip of land with a house on it than to own a sausage
why was it more wicked to own a strip of land with a house on it than to own a sausage
why was it more wicked to own a strip of land with a house on it than to own a sausage
why was it more wicked to own a strip of land with a house on it than to own a sausage
why was it more wicked to own a strip of land with a house on it than to own a sausage
why was it more wicked to own a strip of land with a house on it than to own a sausage
why was it more wicked to own a strip of land with a house on it than to own a sausage

Can picture Keith Joseph saying that at the 1974 Tory Conference.

... eight times in a row.

I wish I could agree about Carter, but actually I often find her quite a bad, clumsy writer -- whatever her virtues as thinker, polemicist, activist, etc.

Need to get around to reading an actual Carter novel, as I thought the Bloody Chamber was p trite and agree with pinefox's views on her writing. But I feel like maybe she gets into stride in novel form?

I thought The Bloody Chamber was written well, albeit flashily

(I've only read Several Perceptions and enjoyed it a lot, including on a pure sentence level. She is flashy and self-consciously writerly but so are a lot of post-war English novelists).

I've never quite got on with Carter either (and I like lots of writers the pinefox doesn't) (and vice versa). Keep meaning to give her a more serious try; keep losing interest when I go back (Nights at the Circus is the one I pick up -- someone I was fond of long ago always said it was her favourite book, and (even tho I haven't seen this person for abt 15 years) I want to work out why.

I started Whoops! but (again)* didn't get very far -- and some of the reasons Capital is bad (as per this superb thread) also apply. JL seemed to spend a lot of time over-carefully explaining fairly simple things I already understood and then nervelessly sweeping past stuff that really needed dwelling or on getting inside. (I have a close friend who used to be a banker who agrees about this; and talking to him about the sector makes me think that Lanchester's dad's connections and understanding may well not actually give as much purchase on the finance&trading world of the early 00s as you'd expect; that banking had in some key way slipped into a new phase, and that this was what needed exploring…)

*In many ways I am the world's most distractable person when it comes to reading, probably because proofing has been my day-job for such a long time.

Greil Marcus raves about the Ice Age in Lipstick Traces, like it was some protopunk prophesy, which I always thought was odd. This seems bonkerz:

Nowhere have I found the full weight of this burden assumed with such honesty and feeling as in The Ice Age. It is a rich book, full of characters that come to life in a page and grow throughout the novel—a building contractor in the Sixties who bids to escape his class and in the Seventies finds himself in prison for fraud; a spoiled, angry teenager eager for oblivion; a classics professor retreating not only from the present but from all signs of life in the past. But its richness is not really in its plot, which centers on two people in their late 30s, Alison Murray and Anthony Keating, who are trying to build a relationship in the midst of personal disasters and public decay. The richness of the novel has to do with the way Drabble connects the private lives of her characters to the public miasma they are forced to share.

https://greilmarcus.net/2016/06/07/undercover-johnny-rottens-soul-sister-102077/

the richness of the novel has to do with the sausage

(i have not read it)

but that marcus review always struck me as a reach, given that my mum loved margaret drabble and was not a noted aficionado of post-punk style anomie

Yes bonkerz is the mot juste.
This is absurd, just as Mark S says.
One can hardly think of two writers further apart.

I suppose the explanation is

a) MD was focused on 60s-70s, a period dear to GM

b) MD was writing about 'miasma' of contemporary history, confirming GM's sense of 'art as political statement'

c) above all, crucially, MD is English and GM perhaps has a tin ear across this cultural divide -- so he imagines that MD is the English Pynchon or Gaddis or perhaps Richard Yates -- as though I were to imagine that Garrison Keillor was the US Irvine Welsh. It is surely related to the fact that Americans take Nick Hornby seriously, and take G Dyer and Z Smith (who can both be very good) more seriously than we do.

Next week: Camilla Paglia on the Orphic power of Pamela Hansford Johnson.

Having read a handful of Carter novels I am doubtful that the novel is where she does best. Her last novel, always wildly praised, is particularly bad -- perhaps in part because she was ill when writing it.

Her approach to narrative can fall in with a general tendency of chortling garrulousness that I find generally a very bad thing for fiction - as in Rushdie and even, to some extent, one of the big problems with Finnegans Wake.

When she writes differently, more starkly for instance, she can be a bit better, but she is still often surprisingly cackhanded in basic ways.

I think for me her essays might be the best work. She was a pretty important commentator on style, gender, politics, linking these things together; that work seems to have some historical importance.

But I don't know the early Bristol-based novels and maybe they have something better to recommend them.

Next week: Camilla Paglia on the Orphic power of Pamela Hansford Johnson

tbf i wd read the fuck of that (once)

out of that

I wonder if people would bother to equate them at all were it not for Joe Strummer using the phrase "the ice age" in London Calling.

oddly enough big audio dynamite is named after a novel by a.s.byatt

someone on the thread i linked to said they skimmed an interview with JL in which he said his dad was a banker -- that's all the lead i have, it may be nonsense, he may be self-taught

basically if someone is not bothering to explore or explain the bits i think need explaining then i stop reading them -- i agree this is not the same as "knowing nothing" but for my purposes it is the same as "not knowing enough", since the bits i need to learn about are the bits not yet being explained properly

i could go back and reread whoops! and report to you exactly what those are but it seems a bit pointless, as you're obviously happy with what you're getting

oops

Ilxor poster oops?

only he can save me now

Taking on Facebook

a piece, in this week's New Yorker, unfurls with an almost fantastically Lanchesterian overexplanation of the term STEM: "Science and technology: we tend to think of them as siblings, perhaps even as twins, as parts of STEM (for “science, technology, engineering, and mathematics”)"

i cannot think of way to improve on this sentence as platonic lanchester

Reading this thread for the first time was a fantastic way to spend the evening, thank you.

The New Yorker piece is indeed feeble:

Walter Benjamin, the great German Jewish cultural critic, who committed suicide while trying to escape Nazi-controlled Europe, said that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” He meant that every complicated and beautiful thing humanity ever made has, if you look at it long enough, a shadow, a history of oppression. As a matter of plain historical fact, that seems right. It was a long and traumatic journey from the invention of writing to your book club’s discussion of Jodi Picoult’s latest.

thank fuck somebody was able to mansplain what Benjamin wrote

it is with a certain amount of shame that i have to tell you that for well over a week now i have been aware that john lanchester has had published in the latest issue of the london review of books a short story by the name of 'Coffin Liquor'.

Since then I have done all I could to avoid reading it: I assiduously read other articles in the issue even one on Gordon Brown to tell myself that i had extracted all the worth that was to be had from it, I folded it and put it on the lower magazine shelf of the front-room table, eventually I removed the paper from the front room entirely, throwing it idly in a place i hoped i would forget, so like unpaid debts and avoided chores it has sat at the back of mind like an oppressive shadow.

Finally, and as 2017 draws to an inauspicious close, I feel it's time to start as i mean to go on, aware that if 2018 is going to be anything like an improvement on the scorched earth and wreckage of 2017, I must show the same sort of indefatigable spirit John Lanchester seems to be able to show.

So I'm going to read it LIVE on ILX now.

I should say that I have no intent of deliberately guying lanchester, or mocking where mockery has not been earned. I'm not expecting fireworks, but equally it seems only reasonable to allow the possibility that it might be an unexceptionable piece of prose.

i will approach with the purest of intentions.

just going to make a cup of tea.

*settles in*

It was a darkening afternoon on the last day of the year 2017 A.D. and Noodle Vague sat down in his mother's living room and began reading the internet browsing program on his Toshiba Satellite laptop computer to discover what the celebrated London author John Lanchester had been up to lately.

great.

Coffin Liquor, by John Lanchester.

Monday

lol

I realised things had gone wrong as soon as I arrived at my hotel. The receptionist spoke no English. Only when I showed them my passport did they seem to accept, with reluctance, that I had a booking. I was given a key and took my own bag upstairs. the room was a cramped, over furnished space with thin brown walls. On the desk was an envelope of conference materials including a laminated pass on a lanyard and a printed programme.

now i have to confess that my flatmate and friend, aware of the strong feelings lanchester provokes in me, had already read me this paragraph out loud before I had to ask him to stop. but we both noted that, although we both use hotels in our separate work very frequently, we have never ever encountered a receptionist who didn't speak English.

I do remember a place in Italy about twenty years ago, which was more of a boarding house, where the late night receptionist didn't speak any English, and where there was a gunshot in the middle of the night and loud shouting. But it wasn't the sort of place that would host a conference.

I note warily the Lanchester signature of non-specific descriptions of material contents, 'Laminated pass on a lanyard.'

i mean basically it already feels like one of those stories that once memorably caused a friend of mine to say to someone after they'd finished, 'I'm sorry I don't believe a word of it.' (Again, as I think I said upthread, he has a habit of making you exclaim 'No, they didn't, no you weren't, no it *wasn't*.')

Ok, he's at a conference that he feels he's been misled into attending.

The first talk on the first morning was titled 'What String Theorists Can Learn from Vlad the Impaler: Narrative, Belief and the Immanence of the Imperceptible'. The other events were given similar names and had the same preposterous emphasis on the idea of an engagement or 'conversation' between areas that are manifestly questions of proof and fact, on the one hand, and, on the other side, a degenerate mass of of whiffle and nonsense.

It brings to mind a line in the address on the liner notes of The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall: 'Forcedcomedy, Lancs.'

oh god he's a Sokal guy, of course he is

In short, I find I have been brought to this godforsaken country in Central Europe – I say godforsaken purely as a figure of speech – to attend a conference on the 'dialogue' (emetic term) between science and mythology under entirely false pretences. My views on this subject are well known.

ok, unreliable narrator. we must tread carefully. any pomposities or imbecilities of statement may not be the author's own. I do note the not all covert hostility, as in lol how funny this sort of thing is, to the notion of theory - let's make it look silly or small. This isn't a narratorial thing I think.

I get the feeling his dismissiveness may be intended to be of the same category as MR James' academics, and that there will be some supernatural happenings.

yes! of course. xpost.

Bah! I have to go out now.

and regardless of it being a signal of the unreliable narrator, i don't think how godforsaken is used there is at all good. either in it being used in the first place, or how it is then reversed into irony.

taking it literally i suppose this is more indication that this will be a supernatural story.

it will be here when you get back, tom.

oh yeah, i have just remembered what "Coffin Liquor" means

Tom trudged out into the overcast late-afternoon pallor of a London New Year's Eve

he phones the organiser.

'I have been lured here under a pretext,' I said. 'My understanding was that this event would be an opportunity to explain my ideas and to point out the ways in which other people's beliefs are wrong. I now find this is not the case.

Swift or Myles this is not.

ok so it's a very heavy-handed satire of a Sokal guy, i'll let you off for now M. Lanchester

fiver says the narrator turns out to be called Dichard Rawkins

ok, so we know now this will be supernatural and the narrator is intended to be unreliable and pompous. so this sort of thing is probably fine?

I slept poorly. The atmosphere of this room is oppressive. The furniture is heavy but the walls are thin. The building creaks as it settles. The heating is set high and cannot be turned down...

this bit is very capital tho:

Breakfast was dark bread and black jam. Not bad.

"Prof. Pritchard Hawkins to rezeption."

little bits of the lanchester gps approach to scene-setting appear:

The conference centre is a short walk away from the hotel, about four hundred metres.

bit of tense oddity that i'm not feeling in the previous bit - "slept...is...are...creaks"

it is p tense amirite!

He was succeeded by a female Eastern European sociologist in early middle age who had hair with a coloured streak in it and purple glasses. Also bangles

...

As I made my way out of the room I found myself standing in front of the female sociologist. Under the circumstances, I felt it incumbent on me to say something about her talk. In a professional context, as a point of principle, I do not permit myself to dissemble my views. At the same time I am always scrupulously polite.

'You are stupid,' I said.

Irony is a delicate business, and stating the bleeding obvious, that last excerpt is really ill-judged. it's not at all funny, and its rudeness and stupidity bleeds through to the reader imo. also irony is obv a two-edged sword, and the targets of the unreliable narrator here are no less targets of the text. so that 'sociologist with bangles' really isn't very astute or amusing. it's very unfair to lanchester to compare him to swift - it would be unfair on anyone really - but the language of irony and satire needs to be language on a hair-trigger. you should feel the tension of wit. this is slack and does violence to the intelligence of the reader.

it's also not something i would expect a human being to say to a stranger even in the context of academia, think he's been on Twitter too long

good point about the tenses, it was nagging at me as well.

The heating is set high and cannot be turned down, and when I opened a window I was greeted by intermittent carousing from the street outside. An uncomfortable night. Breakfast was dark bread and black jam. Not bad. A number of other guests were eating the meal on their own; I surmise that they too are conference attendees.

it's a mixture of past simple and present simple, which I think is ok for diary observations, which is how this is structured? 'surmise' is a bit wobbly there, as present simple is something either factual or that he is thinking while writing the diary. it should be 'surmised' or 'I think', but it's just about allowable as a piece of narratorial pomposity.

i mean this whole piece is pretty hoary tbh. cat person it is not.

The closest was a famous church and graveyard of both architectural and historical consequence.

i mean i don't really want to read these words even as parody.

the tenses might be pointing towards our narrator turning out to be in some kind of limbo state, it feels too calculated to be simply accidental. we shall see!

his agent or somebody should really tell him to cut it out with this shit tho

ha ha, something's gone a bit wobbly here again:

I decided to take the opportunity for a little sightseeing. I had brought the guidebook and there was a selection of places of interest within convenient walking distance of the hotel. The closest was a famous church and graveyard of both architectural and historical consequence. I took some refreshment at a café in a side street and wandered through the paved lanes towards my intended destination. This is the medieval part of town. The buildings were close on either side; many of them had arcades for, according to the guidebook, the dual purpose of keeping off summer sun and winter rain.

That should be 'the buildings are close on either side'. also, 'my intended destination' and very much 'the dual purpose' are superfluous, and really cumbersome. this is pure lanchester. so laboured and cack-handed.

one of those passages where you feel a good editor would have edited it down to 0.

i'm going to get a an oatmeal cracker and some cheese. brb.

i've been rereading M.R. James over the last couple of weeks and i think i can hear him spinning from here

A decrepit stone arch ... opened onto an oblong patch of crammed, stacked graves. They were so densely pressed together that they seemed to be squeezing against one another, as only living things can. Some of them protruded sideways and upwards at erratic angles, like a mouthful of unstraightened teeth.

ok this is bad. 'as only living things can' is absurd, he means 'like living things', I think, if he means anything at all. taken as it is it implies graves are generically living things. the fact that he's trying to suggest malevolence, that these graves *are* living (when normally they are not) has as a consequence been confused.

that 'unstraightened teeth' is a balls up as well. for a start it's a f'ing cliche (but well, here we are). but also, 'unstraightened' is wrong. it should be 'crooked'. 'unstraightened' is very lol middle-class father perspective of dentristy. 'all crookedness is as yet unstraightened godliness.'

this incompetence with metaphor is also pure lanchester. he just simply doesn't understand how it works, frankly. it's incredible that he lacks a basic skill of imaginative writing.

of course these graves in this churchyard also show a fundamental lack of imagination, so we have a few problems here obv.

i mean i feel a bit bad, this is clearly meant to be a harmless festive bagatelle. but it's irritating.

an old woman in a shawl sat on a chair by the entrance to the graveyard.

-_-

i'm a little confused about the graves' stackedness? coffins, sure, but graves?

you're right, this is blasting away at fish in a little sandcastle bucket but he's getting paid and there are loads of writers who are good at this who he could copy from.

The church had strong historic associations with a monstrous feudal overlord of the town. The count had been a famous torturer, whose favourite practice was to exlinguate his victims (this being the leaflet's term for cutting out tongues, a neologism, I suspect)...

i feel like i'm on a long and arduous walk.

Count Magnus this is not.

and yes, he's manipulating cliches so his imagery is fucked. he hasn't actually tried to visualise what he's saying.

i mean it is remarkable how a little bit of picking apart destabilises the meaning of any of the words. it's a lanchester speciality.

we've given up on the comedy scientism now i take it

there's a stretch of very dull scientism, neither comedy nor parody, but just reiteration of a fairly standard rubric. I was going to pass over it, but since you asked:

He and a large number of his victims were buried in the graveyard outside. His activities supposedly continued after his death.

It goes without saying I was sceptical. I am familiar with the scientific explanation of this and similar narratives. A rash of deaths – their real cause inevitably viral or bacteriological – affects a place. Explanations are sought, and found in the arenas of legend and superstition and dream. A panic begins. Since the living are victims, the perpetrators must be found among the dead. Exhumations take place. Some bodies are found to have characteristics indicating postmortem existence – for instance, hair and fingernails that appear to have grown. In other cases the liquefaction of improperly preserved corpses leads to the creation of the substance known as 'coffin liquor'. As a result, in some crypts, coffins appear to have moved or burst. Supernatural phenomena are credited as the cause. Fear and superstition triumph over science, and myths are born.

lol

I went back out into the graveyard. The sky had clouded over, and full dark was imminent.

what the fucking fuck.

yeah you had to quote the bit with the title in it

I went to the place where the count had been tortured, partially dismembered, had his tongue cut out and then been thrown into a pit

bzzzzt! repetition.

also struggling with 'partially dismembered' - can't tell whether it's ok or not due to the temporary aneurysm reading lanchester gives you.

i did xpost. you suspect he read about coffin liquor and then a very dim wattage light bulb came on over his head.

The story was graphically, too graphically, told on the leaflet, which interspersed genuine information with fantasy about the count's supposed supernatural manifestations. Without the leaflet one would have known nothing of this.

a) can i read the leaflet plz
b) that last sentence - well no, i mean, what? it reminds me of trying to read quite simple things when hungover. you find yourself thinking 'hang on, does that make sense or not?'

ok i suppose this bit is important, grinding as it is:

It was this thought that gave me my brilliant idea. I could choose not to be in the conference by not being there, but perhaps i could also choose not to be at the conference even while i was there. I could go into a form of internal exile. The medium for doing so was simple: the translator's earpiece. One was supposed to plug these into a small radio, not much larger than a box of matches, and listen to the approved feed of the conference. But there was nothing to stop one from plugging the earpiece into a different device, a smartphone, say, and, instead of listening to sociological flummery about canon formation and the structure of myth, hear something interesting and intelligent.

i mean he's basically talking about plugging headphones in here isn't he? also he doesn't mean 'translator's earpiece', a confusing perhaps semi-legitimate piece of compression. i'm ignoring the last bit. even as a piece of narratorial colour, it's tiring and shit. your unreliable narrator is still a character ffs, and this is dire, very in the mould of Capital characters.

An excellent plan. I took out my mobile and opened the Audible app.

Yes! Back of the net.

A number of audiobooks were on offer at a special price

Aaah, it's like relaxing into a warm bath.

lol

what if his intentions were tier-2 satire all along

what if john lanchester has always been a shitposter

well in a sense he's coming home - The Debt to Pleasure was all about the unreliable narrator. I mean i thought it was ok when I read it, but i was also 16 or so, and given the conspicuous shitness of this, i'm wondering if wasn't very good after all.

again, i worry i'm loading too much on it - if i just read through it in a spare moment it would be relatively unobjectionable. but there are so many questions you find yourself asking that your entire notion of what fiction is, what it consists of, starts coming undone.

i'm going to get a beer, and do a bit more, but i think this is going to need to extend into two sessions tbh. liveblogging reading lanchester turns out to be more time consuming than anticipated.

why the fuck am i doing this.

i wonder if it would be worth reading 'one of the classics' with a similar semantic regard...lanchester lends himself very well to this sort of deconstruction, mind - it might end up being arduous in a different sense

i'm currently reading 'decline and fall' - my first waugh, amazingly - and ofc finding it hilarious & true - and while he is no grand stylist he has a comic terseness - the notes you don't play etc - that bulwarks himself against such prying. trying to think of published satire that overreaches quite like lanchester - it's hard

i usually try to pay this level of attention to at least part of what i read. i remember doing it with Jane Austen, and you could take so much on a semantic level (i mean obviously she was a genius at it) that applied in a complex way to the book as a whole). likewise george eliot

I mean doing it with Lovecraft, for instance, might produce something unsympathetic and comical, which would ignore the substantial value of the thing as a whole.

with Capital, i just remember being incredulous, that it was impossible to ignore the semantic cackhandedness and failures of writing and intelligence. it draws attention to itself.

I must admit i sat down to this reading with a certain amount of 'let's take the piss out of lanchester' in my mind, but actually i find myself becoming irritated and surprised again at the sheer badness. And as NV said, he's getting paid for this shit. People are waving it through.

i would say waugh was a great stylist (unless by grand you mean in the style of 'grand novels', which, no, he definitely isn't). as someone once pointed out he could write an entire page of dialogue without any indication of who was speaking or how, and you would be able to follow it all the way through, both who was saying what and in what tone. Often the bits of speech would only be two or three words long.

Decline and Fall is a masterpiece of style I think. I mean, again, I'm not expecting Lanchester to be that, but its the egregiousness of his failure that is so galling.

i'm still sitting here mulling over 'and full dark was imminent'.

maybe it was immanent

lol.

hold up, NV:

My mood called for something not-modern, something substantial; if the conference was to be the epic waste of time it promised to be, I would at least come back with some happy memory to show for it. Winter. Dickens. Yes. My finger hovered for a moment over A Christmas Carol, but although this would have been seasonally appropriate, I dislike the narrative apparatus of that particular tale. I have no interest whatsoever in the supernatural or the magical or any such claptrap. I despise myths and legends and their ilk. I believe that Richard Dawkins does not go nearly far enough when he says that astrologers should be prosecuted for fraud.

also this is very bad.

'a happy memory', or 'some happy memories', not 'some happy memory' you twat. that's not just a point of grammatical order, but sounds so silly as to be comical. again.

also yes yes we get it about the narrator's feelings about magic ffs.

Winter. Dickens. Yes.

Instead, priests and imams and monks and rabbis from every religion should be thrown into prison, unless and until they can prove the truth of their claims.

do you think we could work up a fatwah on lanchester?

yes i did mean 'in the style of grand novels' - waugh was obviously in full control but not given to flights of verbiage. apologies for not making that clearer

no what3words results for winter.dickens.yes, and yet

https://map.what3words.com/winter.chickens.keys

what's your game lanchester

it takes a powerful writer to make me feel sympathetic towards Dawkins tbf to the boy Lanchester

i think I'm going to need a break. the next (long) bit where he attempts to download Great Expectations to his phone while in the church is so bad that it's defeating me.

If it had been otherwise I would have waited until I was on wifi before downloading the book.

also

'Rău!' she said, shouting, pointing at my phone and then at the grave. 'Rău, rău, rău!'

https://youtu.be/WQreH2QZ_zc

haha

… i woke up a year or so back mouthing the phrase "sarcophagous jelly"

― mark s (mark s), Saturday, February 25, 2006 12:49 AM (eleven years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

>:(

oof. sorry for your loss. live long enough and you will live to see your dreams turned into laboured less good versions of themselves for the literary journal reading public.

i wonder if it would be worth reading 'one of the classics' with a similar semantic regard...

i've close-read a bunch of (since his shade is apparently being downloaded in vain) m. r. james on freaky trigger over the last few years and the most/worst you land on is odd lacunae in the plot -- sometimes actual errors, but just as often ambiguities, intended or otherwise, that deepen the story… but then james had a superb ear for mimicry, of a wide range of historical material (perhaps not working-class speech patterns lol), which served him well right down to the atomic level in his sentence-making. lanchester here is the epitome of "telling not showing" in the bad sense: basically bcz he has no such ear

au contraire, with the narrator he's doing an excellent job of mimicking a bad writer.

this story has prompted some jamesian close reading of my own so it's not all bad.

I was complaining to Fizzles about the semantic goofiness of the first paragraph of Lost Hearts just last week.

No 'I took out my mobile and opened the Audible app,' though.

He could use it to listen to the Capital novel.

no indication that the unreliable narrator is an actual masochist.

some of James's stories are weaker than others but i've never found much fault with his prose or his ability to sketch vividly and concisely.

coffin liquor in the front, coffin poker in the back

Came in late to this, glad there is more to come!

i wanted to expand on thomp's point about MR James. cos when you said that about Lost Hearts my immediate response was 'oh come on, it's MR James, the master, a writer in the rare (unique?) position of having perfected a genre!' And then I went and got Lost Hearts off the shelf and read the opening para and thought 'oh actually that is a bit weird.'

It was, as far as I can ascertain, in September of the year 1811 that a post-chaise drew up before the door of Aswarby Hall, in the heart of Lincolnshire. The little boy who was the only passenger in the chaise, and who jumped out as soon as it had stopped, looked about him with the keenest curiosity during the short interval that elapsed between the ringing of the bell and the opening of the hall door. He saw a tall, square, red-brick house, built in the reign of Anne; a stone-pillared porch had been added in the purer classical style of 1790; the windows of the house were many, tall and narrow, with small panes and thick white woodwork.

for me, the only *really* awkward bit there is 'it was, as far as I can ascertain' going into observed activity. Tho actually writing it down now, and reading it again, I think it's a legitimately telescoped transition from antiquary finding out about an unusual story into the detail of the story (sort of voiceover into actual filmed scene). iirc thomp you also took exception to the manner of delivering the architectural detail. that i minded less, i think it just goes with the MR James territory.

voices are: antiquary > into authorial narrative > 'what the boy saw when he looked at the house was this' (the boy did not think 'Queen Anne period house etc).

but examined closely i can see that it can feel a bit awkward.

i mean i'm not naturally a very editorially close reader, though as i said earlier, with Jane Austen, or with Swift especially, really close reading is very rewarding, as you separate out the layers of meaning and suggestion. But one of the reasons I've never really got on with Henry James is that i find the experience of reading him a bit pernickety. And yes I know I've got some cheek saying that here. But the thing is, and it relates to one of the wider fundamental questions about Lanchester, reading him forces you into it. You find yourself wading through the brambles, and then you become so tangled up you have to start hacking away at them.

and again, chatting with my flatmate yesterday, it comes back to the point about how the hell this gets published in the first place. I've met an editor from the LRB. He was intelligent, alive to nuance, and had just recently picked up Julian Barnes on a point of style.

My feeling is that any decent editor getting this story via the email app that comes with their desktop computer would immediately see all the problems, would find themselves heavily marking the first few paras before putting their pen down and going 'oh god'.

because, and i think this is unique in my reading experience - so well done, John, I guess - once you start trying to suggest tweaks, or tug at stray threads, you realise that its untweakably bad, that the whole fabric is coming undone. then you will find yourself scrawling 'rewrite this' and then you will realise that in fact no amount of rewriting will correct the problems, and normally of course you would reject it, but you can't because Lanchester is the LRB equivalent of unsackable, so you just end up writing FUCKING STET (sorry, stet) at the top of the page and waving it through.

I think this is because Lanchester's failures of style are often clearly linked to his failures of imagination (the graves thing that NV pointed out upthread, the structural incapacity with metaphor). he can't work out the semantics of his imagination because there is no imagination, no worked internal thought. it's just the manipulation of cliché and the setting out of hand-me-down images/concepts. It's the worst of the english middle-aged, middle class prematurely senescent male mentality: inherited, unexamined 'sense', a form of privilege that has to do nothing to earn attention.

this is seriously bad writing, and its badness is existential.

happy new year everyone : )

got to do some bits, try and sort out this hangover, go for a walk in the park etc, but will be picking up for another session later.

HNY! The LRB should publish a collated version of your Coffin Liquor analysis

re lost hearts: yes, it's a move he later got much better at, quilting together the layers of documentation and shifting angles of observer perception so that you weren't muddled the way you are a bit here (viz how does 22-yr-old stephen know or care about all this boring grown-up architectural detail, which is key to MRJ's version of the gothic pathetic-fallacy lens) (ans = he doesn't, someone grown-up -- possibly one of MRJ's beloved guidebooks, has supplied this element, but it's just been C/Ped instead of given proper attribution) (the list of necromantical titles later in the story is also quite proto-lovecraftian: tho a *far* more convincing act of forgery than mr mad fkn arab)

(i notice in the FT piece on it that tom ewing says it's an early story, which it is, that MRJ came somewhat to dislike: i don't know where he knows this from though)

the LRB should publish this whole thread! alan bennett retire bitch

(actually i like alan bennett and the ironic use of twitter bitch-memes shd be avoided if at all possible)

"MRJ was dissatisfied with the tale and only included it in GSA at the request of his publisher, who wished to make the book larger," according to Joshi. Not that that gets us anywhere.

The 'ascertain' is bloody weird. Also the later "Two incidents that occurred about this time made an impression upon Stephen's mind." Also "On the table in Mr. Abney's study certain papers were found which explained the situation to Stephen Elliott when he was of an age to understand them." All of these seem to transgress the line between the implied narrator and the omniscient authorial in ways I'm not keen on.

-

I wasn't dissatisfied with the architectural detail per se ('and Stephen sees this how' is probably reading James by the standards of the generation after his own) but having the context made weird for me made me think about the weirdness of this kind of fictional knowledge in general.

On reading this passage I am asked to conceive of 'a stone-pillared porch etc.' I do not know what 'the purer classical style of 1790' looks like. There is no way that I can get back from this nominally ekphratic exercise to a visual image. And yet the knowledge that this porch is built in this style is still capable of doing some kind of work towards my construction of the fictional scene.

(actually i like alan bennett and the ironic use of twitter bitch-memes shd be avoided if at all possible)

I guess it's related to my long-running epistemelogical query, viz., what is going on in the reader's head when they read this squib of John M. Ford's:

I don’t recommend playing with God. It isn’t that he cheats, exactly. But the other night we were in the middle of a game, I was about thirty points up, and He emptied out his rack. ZWEEGHB. Double word score and the fifty-point bonus.
“Zweeghb?” I said.

“Is that a challenge?”

“Well…”

“Look outside,” He said. So I did. Sure enough, there was a zweeghb out there, eating the rosebushes, like Thurber’s unicorn.

But none of this will help us get to the bottom of the badness of John Lanchester.