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

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

It was the twin 'where there was no one' and 'on which nothing was scrawled' that finally made me throw up my hands.

i did wonder if he was going for a bit of poetic balance there ('empty' is probably a better phrase for the toilet).

but now i'm laughing at ever going into the 'men's room' (? oddly american turn of phrase?) and thinking 'there is no one'.

i feel i should point out i was drunk when i first read this

Sorry, the bit I posted is not written by the man himself, I just felt it was absolute textbook Lanchester. The towel dispenser is the low point for me.

I also hate the comma after already.

it’s an extremely enjoyable paragraph. as so often with JL it contains multitudes. i found myself on the somewhat catechistic train of thought, hopelessly banal: “JL is a very bad writer. In the same way that some are very good writers, he is very bad at it. He cannot do it. Even where he thinks he is doing something (and i think he must think this) it does not then pass the test of *why* he thinks this is something he should do. *Why*.”

And you end up going round again, like Michael Finnegan… “Because he is a very bad writer.” etc

You can compound it with questions like “*why* do they let him? *Why* do they pay for him to do it? Does he think he is in some way good? When he’s finished a work, does he feel, like Nabokov, satisfied as if he had laid an egg? *What* do people say after they’ve read something by him? Do they feel their store of imaginative exploration has in some way been replenished? *Why*

You are aware that it’s a form of mediocrity so intense that it is worse than the merely very bad.

There is something Widmerpool like about it all (from Dance to the Music of Time). The stolid successful progression of lack of talent. It perhaps is related inversely to the same energies and demons that occasionally take great talents from us early.

xpost oh.

who is this epigone.

it is very characteristic.

has he taken on a disciple?

brought them into his workshop of dreams?

I just looked it up on my laptop via the internet search engine and discovered it to be Claire K33gan.

I am being mean but the top quote from CK says 'I can't explain my work. I just write stories'.

“I can't explain my work. I just sit down at my study desk, switch on my laptop, open up the word processing programme that the laptop came with and write stories“

<3

it’s interesting to consider why they’re v similar. one aspect of manchester’s prose is the sense that he’s imagining himself walking or going through the process as it happens, so that his sentences and the thought of his prose is also organised in this way. the sentences sort of discover what’s happening at the same time the writer and relevant character does.

the same things going on here. they are a mere stenographer for the minimal levels of empathetic imagination going on. there’s no sense of organisation or art to it.

i’ve never read any keegan, so this may be unfair - after all deploying a style like that in a v limited way within a wider context may have some meaning or purpose. rather than just being how you write.

xpost

lol mark s.

luckily andrew o'hagan has written a state-of-the-nation novel

Right, I'm seeing Caledonian Road quite a lot, and my main reaction is a sort of plaintive whhyyyyyy. People who put it on their summer reading lists need help - I'm looking at you Margaret Drabble.

I re-read his 2018 LRB article about the 10-year anniversary of the crash for a school thing and it's really good: clear on complex ideas, angry where it needs to be and he has a natural way with analogy and metaphor. What a strange case he is.

I know 'his writing on economics is good, not bad' isn't a breakthrough opinion but I was still shocked enough to share it.