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

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.