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

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.