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

lol i am again very busy and still want -- and need -- to come back and dig into this at some point

I actually enjoyed Lanchester's Simenon article in the latest LRB but there are a couple of good moments that made me think of this thread (not for the prose so much as the weird intrusion of oops, tripped over a kerb! Lanchester).

1) Weather used, powerfully - who knew?

The second bunch of Maigret novels have a more relaxed and expansive feel than the first cluster. At times the landscape itself is sunnier. (This is a powerful technique in fiction, more so than readers consciously notice. Christopher Sykes once asked his good friend Evelyn Waugh how it was that one of his earlier novels, apparently light and humorous, had an undertow of melancholy. Waugh said he had done it by keeping the weather in the book grey and rainy.)

2) Uh, really?

The reader whose idea of the novel is formed by the English canon may at some stage start to read books in the French tradition. At that point, it may suddenly seem that everything one has previously read has essentially been children’s literature. Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, even Austen and Eliot, are all wonderful writers, but their work is founded in wish fulfilment, happy endings and love conquering all.

jfc

that doesn't preclude you enjoying the article, of course, but what a maroon

Innit though. So weird and clumsy.

makes me doubt he's ever read Eliot for one thing

The French adored George Eliot's novels.

Yes - these statements are very bad.

The whole point of the end of MIDDLEMARCH is that it is downbeat, gradualist, meliorist but modest. The last word is 'tombs'.

Someone should tell him about Thomas Hardy some time.

Also I don't know why this should surprise anyone but it's nice to have confirmation in print that Lanchester has no sense of irony.

DC completely correct - Hardy is now seen as central to the English canon and 100% contradicts JL's statement.

I suspect you could even go further and find an argument that lots of French literature is more fantastical or wishful than English - say Dumas, Hugo, Jules Verne, though they're certainly not wholly representative. But the more you look at it the more of a fool JL looks, which is the main thing.

like...I was reading the plot synopsis of Silas Marner while teaching a comprehension on a passage from it yesterday. man suffers for that happy ending

i only just started reading this piece this morning (and already lol-hiccuped at chinaski's first quote)

a few days back a US musicwriter (never an ilxor i don't think tho i have met them IRL) (they seemed nice!) announced with anticipatory pleasure that they were setting this piece aside to read "like slipping into a warm bath" which very nearly caused me to jump into a tweetbeef before i remembered "let ppl like things" sometimes has a kindness to it -- is good reading ever a warm bath? no. BUT relaxing warm baths are likely needful in These Trying Times™ and who knows what griefs and stresses this writer is currently dealing with -- so no beef for them this week

on the other hand (in anticipation of beef to come) lol wtf

Warm beef bath

thought about doing a "best wish fulfilment ending" with Wuthering Heights and Middlemarch and Bleak House and Tess and etc etc but really why dignify Lanchester?

i wd happily write a nice tart letter-to-the-LRB abt it -- except of those four i have only completed bleak house (and that hurriedly in service of a film review)

also it was little dorrit not bleak house lol

it's such a non-reader's point anyway, "wish fulfilment". Jane Eyre marries Rochester, woooo what a romcom ending

more indications that no informed sub-editor gets to lay a hand on the copy of the star writer

(speaking as a less-informed sub-editor in this instance, but actually i wd probably have queried exactly these claims even tho i hadn't read these books) (if only to head off the exasperation of those LRB readers who have, which is surely at least some of them?)

i don't know, we were discussing this yesterday, can you edit for "idiotic but not technically factually incorrect" opinions?

if so i think the "wish fulfilment" bit would be the phrase to go for, if he was trying to say 19th Century French Realism was the dark and gritty lit of its day there is probably a less inaccurate way of being wrong about it

molloy, malone dies and just one more thing

― mark s, Tuesday, 18 December 2018 11:19 (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

^^^very slept on btw

can you edit for "idiotic but not technically factually incorrect" opinions?

of course you can, you send the copy smartly back to the writer with a big red ring in felt-tip on it, and say "this is *sort* of correct, but some of our readers will bridle at it and bring up counter-examples, can you tighten and redraft to tackle this issue so we look less idiotic plz?"

i should stop seething but without remembering all the plot lines Middlemarch is *literally* about how middle class patriarchy crushes you so y'know

does the "canon" have a terminal date? it's an even more risible line if you're allowed to venture into the 20th century. excluding drama also feels like a cheat to avoid mentioning Shakespeare ffs but at least he's clear about doing so

from a lit crit nerd point of view a bunch of the writers he names, especially Dickens, haven't been regarded as central to the canon by 20th C big dogs like F.R. Leavis

Dickens, Thackeray and Trollope all considered second tier by mainstream critics at some point

i think leavis changed his mind on dickens? also i feel that the leavis version of the canon has not gone uncontested among critics since at least the bust-up with eliot at scrutiny (also i read FRL's book on lawrence a couple of years ago and it FUCKING SUCKS)

checking up on the dates of this i digressively discovered that there is an a.s.byatt character called BLACKADDER

oh i agree Leavis's opinions on the canon were for shit but not uninfluential and again i suspect Lanchester is oblivious to any of this stuff. and Lawrence is a godawful prose writer. some of the poetry i can live with.

actually pinch of salt, the last time i *tried* with Lawrence i couldn't do it to myself but it's not like my opinions are set in stone.

yeah what grates about Lanchester, always, is the real sense that he's talking from glib ignorance.

i find it so weird JL's become the LRB's golden boy! so much of it feels like stuff they shd just be writhing away from

i think lawrence is interesting exactly bcz he's so obviously talented and obviously insightful and obviously very problematic, and just so complicatedly on the move through various social and cultural layers and issues -- but FRL just finds 5139847519879384759 ways bang on abt him being "virile and morally taut" or whatever)

His argument makes even less sense wrt Wuthering Heights than it does with Middlemarch.

WH is more obviously tragic but Middlemarch is existentially bleak af imo, they both give him the lie tho

i mean at least Heathcliff and Cathy kind of get to have passion, Middlemarch is about the impossibility of passion under capitalism

now i want to know if there any any pop songs based on maigret or simenon

https://genius.com/Saian-supa-crew-la-preuve-par-3-lyrics

how peculiar. i assumed the sentence would end something like, let me summon my inner review of books syntactician, ‘a view of the world in which the act of coitus is removed entirely from romantic love and in which death is for the most part sanitized and picturesque’

ilxors will be delighted that he has now written a whole collection of ghost stories to go with that one from the LRB
https://s3.amazonaws.com/netgalley-covers/cover198036-large.png

the horror

What if reality but too much

I'm confused to see that this thread is 8 years old.

Even if you have genuinely creepy ideas, writing a good ghost story is a big technical challenge. It requires a level of command over pacing, atmosphere, tension, plus the element of surprise. Nothing I have read of Lanchester's writing suggests he is capable of any of that.

im sorry im really looking forward to this feast i will give a stinky review for clout and become the new james wood

At precisely 00.00 on the 9th of December, John Lanchester witnessed a pale, hooked hand appear out of the Måbli two-door wardrobe which he had bought the previous year in a sale at the Eastgate branch of Ikea. It had been a strange week, full of ouija boards, floating hourglasses, creaking floorboards, eerie knocks, ghoulish voices, figures appearing at windows, blood-curdling screams, flaming death-skulls, vampire bites, zombie pandemics, creepy Victorian dollsand killer clowns. And it was only Tuesday.

I was going to make a point about how Doglatin's list is actually too good to be believably Lanchestrian, remembering that I'd C&Ped one of his terrible, terrible lists upthread, but then I saw a subsequent post and realised I had entirely forgotten there's an entire paragraph in Capital where one of the characters muses in detail about 'My Humps' by the Black Eyed Peas and dear lord. Just this overwhelming sense that Lanchester has no feel for what aspects of mainstream culture are interesting or realistic and just throws in anything he can possibly think of, hoping people will see this gigantic pile-up of the mundane and mistake it for social realism.

A few messages down from here:

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

Also, "the African bar in Stockwell".

you step away from ilx for five minutes.

there’s several things here.
* ghost stories are finally and stylistically quite demanding
* your story has to tacitly be aware of/acknowledge/comprehend the aggregated history of ghost stories
* you need to understand where ghosts live in the contemporary material world - what’s their environmental niche

2 + 3 there transact with each other - the classic environmental niche for the ghosts in English ghost stories is v heavily determined by the Victorian settings - the channels and conduits you set up to manage that are crucial. (and of course it needn’t be UK ghost stories).

i suppose that’s nothing more than saying you need to be able to manage genre without falling into pastiche or hamfisted smushing together of common tropes (lanchester will do both of these things)

he’s also conspicuously bad at depicting the material world, constructing it, understanding it, so how he’ll be able to spot where ghosts live in the contemporary world, and construct an immaterial word to go along with the material is terrifying to consider.

this is going to be straight up garbage.

(that lrb story will be a good example - graft some bad modern world signifiers (the podcast app he had downloaded onto his mobile device) and graft it onto some badly realised old ghost story template, and write it badly)

“These are stories of selfie sticks with demonic powers”

fu lanchester.

gigantic pile-up of the mundane and mistake it for social realism

otmfm