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

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