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

x-post i guess, though merely an hommage to the master

i mean tbf to lanchester - writers do other writers is *hard*. you can always spot something. it's an interesting sub-genre, and it can tell you a fair bit about both writers i think.

he requires you to push your reading mind through a confused and confusing version of a REALLY SIMPLE activity, like approaching someone, or going into a room

^ v much otm. this feels like this is one of those observations that needs to be collected as part of a set of conclusions.

This was neither standing nor walking, nor, perhaps, was it a man

bad not good

not sure what makes me uneasy about this lovecraftian use of slither, which i take it after a quick look at the OED comes from its usage wrt to reptiles, which dates from the 1830s and so is legit.

interesting to see some of its non-unpleasant uses:

2. intr. To walk in a sliding manner; to slip along or away.

1848 A. H. Clough Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich iv. 176 The streets of the dissolute city, Where dressy girls slithering-by upon pavements give sign for accosting.
1857 C. Kingsley Two Years Ago III. 183 Gay girls slithered past him, looked round at him, but in vain.
1894 H. Caine Manxman 36 Philip slithered softly through the dairy door.

oh god, i paused briefly at that 'it was none of the things that it might have been' and the 'nor, perhaps' construction before passing it over. but you singling it out like that has had the true lanchester effect of me laughing going away, and then coming back to it like i've been hypnotised, and laughing some more, and then my heart starts to beat quite fast through a mixture of irritation and excitement as I realise it's yet another sentence which is a sort of semantic 'undoing' of understanding or thought.

This passage made a very disagreeable impression on me

sez teh narrator after that excerpt. and on that note, i'm going to go and catch the two remaining rooms of the Kabakov exhibition i didn't see last week.

it's the key to yr slithering problem i think

fake dickens has just expressed the calibrated doubt that this is a man, but simultaneously knows it DEFINITELY CAN'T BE A MAN bcz SLITHERING!*

hence the "perhaps" is misplaced (i suspect it's there for more for rhythm-of-uncertainity than semantics anyway -- i.e. he's trying to do "penwiper? no such thing in the house! a rat?" etc, the dawning of doubt… but as ever he gets it all in the wrong order

*with all due respect to the examples quoted (all i think semi-satirical observation-description, of movement in skirts, or of a reptile-type person)

Thread is doing so much to get me out of bed in the morning these horrific first days back at work, thanking all of u but most of all mr lancs, without whose taper we shadows would have no music to dance

xpost

yep, you've nailed the slithering problem.

tho i'm not sure about the semi-satirical/reptilian use in those examples - there are enough older uses of slither which are not to do with reptiles but to do with non-reptilian motion. however it's never *graceful* motion, so while the reptilian aspect *may* not be present, it's hard to see how there isn't some sort of satiric intent.

yes, thanks John, for this winter sustenance you have provided.

the proportions of this analysis to the actual story remind me of VS Pritchett's observation about Wyndham Lewis, that he used an atom bomb to destroy a coconut shy.

Are we meant to be in Romania or is the spooky old Romanian woman somewhere in Central Europe stock antiziganism?

yes it's romania: vlad the impaler is mentioned in the first para

Aha!

reptile is via late latin/old french, and before it got locked into scientific taxonomy meant any creature that creeps or crawls (hazlitt calls a spider a "little reptile")

i somewhat took its use of women to be a reference to long skirts where you can't see the walking legs (as you might say gliding except with possibly sinister purpose? saurely these ladies are entirely respectable in intent, but the word raises doubts)

i said hungary upthread bcz i'm an idiot

reptile is via late latin/old french, and before it got locked into scientific taxonomy meant any creature that creeps or crawls (hazlitt calls a spider a "little reptile")

i somewhat took its use of women to be a reference to long skirts where you can't see the walking legs (as you might say gliding except with possibly sinister purpose? saurely these ladies are entirely respectable in intent, but the word raises doubts)

lol saurely

i fear i may have opened up an app that comes with my laptop

A spectre is haunting literary fiction;

between / a range is typical of his problems in that it acts like a pebble throwing your bike slightly off course; by the time you reach the end of the graf the cumulative effect has wrapped the bike completely around your neck

i never really liked Virginia Woolf's dictum of writing being 'the right words in the right order', but tbf Lanchester does a lot of the wrong words in the wrong order:

Lanchester grabs Fizzles by the lapels.

"I'm writing all the right words but not necessarily in the right order... I'll give you that... I'll give you that, sunshine".

Fucking hell, this thread has been a magnificent read, thank you.

I've not read Capital (and never will) but I've always enjoyed Lanchester's economics coverage. The shitness of Capital (as presented here, admittedly) astounds me - the tin ear, the size of the undertaking and the implications of the ongoing lack of self-awareness. The lists!

Anyway, before discovering this thread, I did read the opening three or so paragraphs of the new story in the LRB and sweet christ. It was sort of anti-reading - repellent and ugly, like a quagmire of laboured sentences. I sort of assumed the fault was mine and that I was missing the thing he was satirising or parodying (I'm still a little bit convinced this must be the case) but having seen the takedowns on here, it's clearly not me, or not just me. Glancing back at it now, it's like a translation by someone with no aesthetic sense whatever - merely transcribing the job, as it were, without any recourse to nuance, to poetry or rhythm or humour. Is that undead nature of it - given the 'story' (and the location) the point, perhaps?

Fizzles i know you are a busy guy with 8:15am meetings but I need you to get to the end of this story because it's sitting there in my head and i don't know what to do with it and whether you have an answer or we can work one out together or just share the pain idk but I can't shoulder this burden alone much longer.

am keenly aware of this. there’s going to be some activity this afternoon once i’ve done some bike repairs and baked a caek.

and picked my ass up off the sofa.

i'm here for you ledge. no one should have to shoulder this burden alone.

can't remember where i got up to. hang on.

quick xpost to Chinaski. i do think, to try and be as fair as possible to Lanchester, he's deliberately not aiming for poetry or rhythm. this prose is to a certain extent his vision of the world - prosaic, lacking in conspicuous beauty or romantic notions of awe and the sublime. i don't think that has to mean that your prose is so club-footed or syntactically cross-eyed. successful humour is completely absent. it's a notoriously hard thing to do of course. but he does feel the need to *try* all the time.

And I mean there is intended parody in this story, but the intended stuff is all very bad. and the rest of the stuff that is all very bad isn't parody.

i think you are being too subtle for lanchester by observing (correctly) the undead nature of the prose and linking it to the subject matter. unfortunately too much of what is bad here is also bad in Capital.

so, yes, ok, we were on Thursday and he's done one of his large excerpts from Great Expectations with a bit of Lanchester whoooooo stuff tacked on the end, then we went down a 'slithering' rabbit hole. still feel it's anachronistic somehow (as well as being bad for all the other reasons).

On reflection, the likeliest explanation, by far, is that somebody at the audiobook company Audible has been playing a joke, a joke in exceptionally poor taste

'the audiobook company Audible' is almost too wearying to flag, but again, because lanchester has mentioned Audible I think about five or six times so far in this short story, I know what it is. As always, and in part because of Chinaski's comment, you go back and look at it and think 'how or why might this be deliberate?' And i just can't see why you would deliberately create such heavy-going countryside in your sentences.

earlier in the paragraph (i wasn't going to quote this, but now I need to):

The only possible explanation is that my recollection of Great Expectations is inaccurate, and yet that is unlikely, because my recollection is never inaccurate, and especially not on a question of such particular interest to me as the absence of supernatural paraphernalia from one of my favourite writer's best books – perhaps I should say, my former favourite writer.

this is a bit odd as a piece of literary criticism. i can't remember GE in enough close detail, but most Dickens has something almost of the supernatural about it. And of course he wrote a few ghost stories, and was capable of an atmosphere of grotesque and creeping dread. more, many of his books have a massive dose of Christian sentimentality about them, which doesn't seem likely to appeal to the cardboard cutout narrator of this Lanchester short story.

Also couldn't he look up the gutenberg edition on his smartphone browser application? I mean presumably the same reason it's available there has allowed Lanchester to quote it here, ie it's out of copyright.

theory: Lanchester read the original critique of Capital in this thread, had a long think about it and decided that from now he will only use ludicrously over-pedantic narrators in his stories because that's the only voice he can do.

I have abandoned this attempt to listen to this book, indeed I have gone further and have deleted it. Instead I have, while at the conference and making further use of my superb 4G data plan, downloaded a copy of Dawkin's The God Delusion. I feel in the mood for an encounter with some bracing plan-spoken, self-evidently true atheism. I suppose I can be accused of a form of superstition, in that my wish to avoid reading something superstitious has led me superstitiously to crave something with no taint of superstition, however faint! Amusing.

"superb 4G data plan" is clearly the tone of the narrator. but "4G data plan" by itself could easily have been a bit of Lanchester's unique authorial colour in Capital. What's going on here? Here it represents pompous superfluity, in Capital this sort of thing, being generous, was Lanchester insisting on the literal mapping out of the contemporary commonplace, no matter how badly done or what painful reading it made. again, one of the interesting things about a narrator of any sort, but especially an unreliable one, is watching the writer keep them separate from themselves. there is bleed across the author/narrator membrane here, and it's disconcerting.

the failures of 'this attempt to listen to this book', and 'have gone further and have deleted it. instead i have' beat dimly on the brain creating a sort of literary fatigue.

and that superstition bit is like someone forcing funny on you at a party or something. headache-inducing.

xpost - yes! that was the other option of the 4g data plan thing. 'Ok, I can't write any other way, i'll put this in the mouth of a buffoon' making the best of a bad job.

Thursday (continued)

wtf are you kidding me JL.

i'm gonna guess he gets eaten by a vampire at the end

there's another couple of paras where he complains about a female sociologist (again) and says 'however, the idiotic, like the poor, are always with us'. the problem with sentences like these is that I'm sure who he's supposed to be laughing at. because the effect, as with the constant appearance of female sociologists to complain about, is to suggest readers nodding in recognition at the strawman dislikes he presents.

then discreetly plugged in my faithful friend, selected Dawkins’s tract and awaited the familiar greeting:

Audible – audio that speaks to you.

The God Delusion

by Richard Dawkins

Chapter One

However fast I ran, however far I ran, I could not escape the figure pursuing me. Its speed never increased, its mode of locomotion never altered from its terrible, maimed, partially limbless slither. I ran and ran, but it never fell behind me, and as night fell, and my strength began to fail, I turned and looked, and saw to my horror that the shape was now closer than it had ever been. It was close enough that instead of a gasp or hiss, I could now tell it was trying to speak, to utter a single word. It repeated the word several times before, with a sensation of ice spreading through my body, I realised what it was trying to say:

‘Listen … listen … ’

I've got a horrible feeling the 'moral' of this story will be that he is punished for not listening to people.

quick xpost to Chinaski. i do think, to try and be as fair as possible to Lanchester, he's deliberately not aiming for poetry or rhythm. this prose is to a certain extent his vision of the world - prosaic, lacking in conspicuous beauty or romantic notions of awe and the sublime. i don't think that has to mean that your prose is so club-footed or syntactically cross-eyed. successful humour is completely absent. it's a notoriously hard thing to do of course. but he does feel the need to *try* all the time.

And I mean there is intended parody in this story, but the intended stuff is all very bad. and the rest of the stuff that is all very bad isn't parody.

i think you are being too subtle for lanchester by observing (correctly) the undead nature of the prose and linking it to the subject matter. unfortunately too much of what is bad here is also bad in /Capital/.

Thursday (continued)

...

The following is what happened next.

I'm going to do JL the favour of assuming that *has* to be deliberate. The problem is it's fairly close to some of his other möbius strip sentences.

xpost to wins - no i don't think so. i think he's aiming for the flat, affectless prose you get in some 20th century writing. Remainder would be one example. Flatmate suggested Gertrude Stein's manner (which W Lewis referred to as the 'Stein stuffer', which influenced early Hemingway, and via him (always bizarre this to me) some of the UK's 20th Century humorists. You can also take it via Hemingway into Raymond Carver, say.

The specific humour he's aiming for, I think, relies on a reader who is both self-consciously knowing, but actually socially purblind. It's the sort of thing.. i'm trying to get it straight in my head, but you get it in conversations at work. It's effectively relying on social and observational cliches for your conversation and humour. The dentist is always something to be feared, buses never come singly etc - there's a sort of non-directional irritation and cynicism at play that completely lacks imagination.

That makes sense - was just a passing thought re a kind of deliberate parodic bumptiousness

it's reasonable, and 'parodic bumptiousness' is right, but i guess i'm not quite sure what 'Irish' would equate to here – obv Myles, but this is not that. none of the high flights of absurdity and enjoyment to be had. the narrator in this story is closer to an extremely moribund version of the Nabakov unreliable narrator, in Lolita, or The Real Life of Sebastian Knight say (or even Pale Fire.)

I was thinking of myles yes, and some Beckett, and uhhh darraghmac lol

basically he goes through another couple of paragraphs slagging the conference and a moderator 'with hooped earrings' and then he puts his earplugs i to listen to the simultaneous translation feed. this despite him already having plugged in his earphones at the beginning of the paragraph.

I inserted my earphones into the conference radio apparatus and settled down to listen

then about 70 words later, with no intervening action:

The three Europeans were all talking simultaneously when I plugged in the earphones

i've got a little bit of sunday evening / pre-week tiredness, but considering that (the inevitable 'why?' 'how?' 'have i missed something?') has just produced enough anger to wake me up i can tell you. fuck i've made a cup of tea and not brought it in. hang on.

lol the holy trinity yes.

ha ha 'I inserted my earphones into the conference radio apparatus and settled down to listen'.

it's like the thread title aaaaaargghgh.

I've gone over a couple of JL reviews recently and have been on the alert to see whether any of this stuff has been called out at all. Just went to see whether Capital had been reviewed in the LRB - it hasn't interestingly, you'd've thought it wd've been. The most recently reviewed is Fragrant Harbour from 2002, which I got bought but haven't read (I thought it was factual), but this jumped out:

There are names within the novel, too, that Lanchester seems to have not quite worked out what to do with: it would be fine to give London’s newspapers aliases such as the Toxic, the Serious and the Sentinel, and it isn’t a bad joke, only it sounds slightly odd when the Mail and the Times and the Guardian are in there as well, with their normal names.

(it is a bad joke). this reminded me of something i noticed upthread in Capital:

"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.

he has to refer to a 'west london club' but will also say 'Sky Sports' – and this isn't the only example of the oddly parallel or partially remembered universe he lives in. something Kasper Hauser-ish about it - like asking someone to recollect their society after they've suffered a brain lesion.

the generally trustworthy Nicholas Lezard's review of Mr Philips was also interesting:

I had my reservations about this one. Lanchester's previous and first novel, The Debt to Pleasure, I had left mostly unread; there was too much of an odour of Nabokov coming off the book. Still, reviewers loved it, and it won more prizes than I have space to mention. Now this novel is about its eponymous hero's thoughts and feelings as he wanders around London during the course of a single day. Mr Phillips is a reasonably kind-hearted, randy nonentity. What does that remind you of?

Sign up for the Bookmarks email
Read more
If nothing else, one could be impressed by Lanchester's sheer cheek. Lanchester, an intelligent and trustworthy critic himself, cannot be unaware of the possibility of comparison. What on earth could he have been thinking of, apart from, "I know - I'll write a book that isn't as good as Ulysses "?

Still, many critics, including our own, loved this book to bits as well. Adam Phillips, whose opinions on such matters I used to revere, said it was "exceptionally funny"; Allan Massie said its "comedy" was "rich and humane", which is at least a more honestly decipherable way of saying "the kind of comedy which does not actually make you laugh".

I should point out that there may well be something wrong with me that prevents me from finding it as hilarious as everyone else seems to. (I did laugh out loud on page 168.) There are people for whom The Diary of a Nobody is not a comedy but a heartrending, Chekhovian tragedy, a book that cannot be read without hyperventilating with painful compassion; I'm one of them. And this might be the case here. I suggest that you go to a shop and read a couple of its pages of flat, busted English (the prose is almost a textbook example of style indirecte libre), and if you like them, then buy the book: it's like that all the way through.

I, for my part, am suspicious of my own suspicion. It is the kind of book that may turn out to be very good after all, but whose qualities are only revealed after days, weeks, or even years of thinking about it.

So I may well be missing something here. It reads as if it took about two weeks to write; three, if we include some research on double-entry book-keeping to give Mr Phillips's past as an accountant some plausibility.

I haven't read Mr Phillips either. it's interesting that Lezard (this 18 years ago) has the same uncertainty and suspicion of himself that is characteristic of approaching Lanchester today. Everyone else seems to like him, and he gets published, so it must be me, sort of thing. But he has at least two or three otm points there - the sort of comedy that doesn't make you laugh, the flat, busted English, and the sense that it must have been written quickly without much attention.

here's a pure bit of lanchester doing horror writing (mainly trying to channel MR James) - haven't read it yet, but i'm interested to see how he approaches it (btw just in case the description of him doing it twice in the paragraph wasn't enough, he's plugged into the conf translation feed):

I reached my lodging with my lungs bursting and my heart racing, unable to draw a full breath or think a clear thought. I do not believe that any man could have outpaced me through those streets. I tried to take comfort from that thought even as my mind wrestled with the impossible horror it had seen and heard. I found that it was difficult even to speak my own name. I am Pip Gargery, I said, or tried to say, but my mouth was so dry I could form no intelligent sentence.

And then I heard a noise, a noise I had never heard before and hope never to hear again. It was a noise of a body moving along the ground, propelling itself with audible effort. The lower part of the torso was wet and so the thing (I will not call it a man, though it seemed as though it had once been human), as it moved, made a slithering, sucking noise. It was a sound similar to a heavy man wearing waders and walking through thick mud. I felt an overwhelming sense of cold, not merely inside my veins, but as if all the air in the room was suddenly blowing with the coldest of north winds. The slithering, sucking, mucilaginous noise grew closer and louder and then as it came to the door there was a pause. The silence lasted for a few seconds. I hoped that the creature’s strength had failed. Then I heard its crying hiss, louder than ever, through the wooden frame that stood between us.

‘ … listen … listen … ’

The noise, terrible in itself, was followed by an abrupt crash. The thing had flung itself against the door, which shook and rattled and seemed set to give way.

‘ … listen … listen … ’

"crying hiss" is sheer class

lol that 'audible effort' is unfortunate as we've all been primed to expect 'propelling itself with the audible app that comes on my smartphone' by now.