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

Some of the sentences make me feel slightly frightened.

and a bowl of dal, one of Rohinka's specialities, something she cooked nearly every day and never twice to exactly the same recipe.

He doesn't actually mean that I hope. I think he means it tastes a bit different each time she makes it, and the small differences in flavouring and seasoning are apparent because of the frequency with which it is cooked, so that it is never the same twice.

Or does he actually mean that she's cooked it nearly every day for however long and used a different recipe each time?

It's like being on acid or something, apparently mundane observations, objects and processes appear freakish or alarming. Otherwise graspable concepts unravel at the slightest tug and suddenly you find yourself questioning eveything about the assumptions apparently implicit in your "normal" world view. The fact it also looks like just a normal sentence is disconcerting. Maybe I am going mad, you think.

That's ok a hoy hoy - if just one person who might otherwise have read Capital decides not to as a result of this thread etc.

ye gods

Ahmed thought he could .. put out of his mind for as much as five minutes at a time the thought Hashim running up incorrect amounts on the till, taking orders for expensive part-works without getting the customer's full details, selling alcohol to fifteen-year-olds, and forgetting how to operate the lottery machine and the Oyster top-ups

how to operate the Oyster top-ups. How does one operate the oyster top-up. Gotta do your oyster top-ups innit.

Also another fucking LIST of just stuff.

otoh he can just make you snort with amusement. Rohinka is bringing food (including her wacky dal) to the table where her husband and his two brothers are sitting.

The men made varying murmurs and groans of appreciation

lol r they zombies.

Sometimes I fear I'm just attacking normal sentences, but I know now that they're all totally ersatz. Every one. Come behind the partition folks! You can see out of John Lanchester's *eyes*.

I was having a go at a dialogue this morning, and think I was being unconsciously influenced by this thread in how I approached the non-speaky parts. I tried the internal monologue thing, writing without thinking and hoping to catch my character in his banalities.

The thing is, I found it impossible to write anything like Lanchester's come up with - my character's talking to his wife while she's putting on make up, and within a couple of lines he's imagining punching her in the stomach. (apologies to Lanchester if the bits you're not copying are all like that)

no I think you're safe IK. One thing that is very noticeable about this book is that people very rarely talk to each other. certainly not without explanatory text between each line of dialogue.

Also Lanchester seems to have v peculiar form of bad writing going. It looks very much like the bad writing of someone totally inexperienced in writing. But that is not John Lanchester. How on earth did he end up here?

Sad.

I loved 'Whoops!' and was looking forward to him tackling it fictionally. Glad I didn't preorder the book, though, having read this convincing demolition

Still really dig 'The Debt to Pleasure'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2012/mar/19/fabrice-muamba-sir-dave-richards

I have discovered a Malcolm Bradbury volume of 1987 entitled CUTS. It appears to be the progenitor of this book.

"It was the weekly board lunch, and Lord Mellow, the board chairman, sat at the head of the long table, in his familiar bow-tie. Most of the board members, from old Lord Lenticule to the Bishop of Whiddicupthwaite, who was Eldorado's religious advisor, had struggled in, in their chauffeur-driven cars."

Fuck me.

in, in

Quite an innie, eh?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2012/mar/29/john-lanchester-london-video

"it was the peak of a bubble"

"I can't look half a century into the future of London"

I started browsing this in the bookstore and it would be my contention that he's going for a sustained note of deliberate banality. The sentence I opened it to was something like 'Zdanislaw was not of the sort to get up in arms about being paid to spend time taking down work he had just done, unlike other builders he had known.'

I think that's true. Unfortunately, it is also actually banal to read. I need to find... there were a couple of sentences, utterly innocuous in themselves, that represented the acme of reading boredom. I also think there's something incredibly patronising about the whole 'this is what normal lives look like and how normal people think'. In fact it's at the bottom of why the book is so bad.

At 11:35 the following Monday morning Trevor Banner looked out from his glass office window high above London's City area. Trevor was one of the 'Masters of the Universe', a class of men (and occasionally, but not often, women) who through their power over the banking world had gained power over the government, the city, the whole country - in fact the whole world, or even (as the term suggested) the Universe. Not that it always felt this way to Trevor, though.
'Joanne!' he shouted, impatiently. 'Where's that *coffee*?'.
Joanne was Trevor's secretary, or 'PA' (personal assistant), to use the more contemporary term that was now often used in the City.

I also think there's something incredibly patronising about the whole 'this is what normal lives look like and how normal people think'. In fact it's at the bottom of why the book is so bad.

This attitude in the author seems to say implicitly, 'I may be banging on at great length about what you already know better than I can tell you, but I am not writing a document for my own time, but for a distant posterity, who will appreciate my labors on their behalf'.

is the banality meant to be an accurate representation of anything, though? i wonder if maybe this is some grand flaubertian exercise which has been dutifully misread by the broadsheets to a marvellous degree

tbf it's not like i'm going to read the fucker to prove this

He writes enough journalism, you'd have thought he could have said somewhere 'I am writing the epic of the banality of contemporary capitalism'.

it's weird because i am sure i have read the odd author who can turn the mundane - banal is such a loaded word - into thrilling prose. not saying Lanchester is a snob. just saying.

http://gentlyread.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/166997.jpg

banal is a bad word, agreed. and an examination of the minuscule events and chores that make up so much of our (my?) daily existence would be v interesting (tho Ulysses? and many others). Like anything else it wd need to be done well of course.

I'm finding myself wanting to play, well not Devil's advocate, heaven's advocate maybe on this book, at least wrt the mundanity and childlike delivery. Take the following sentence (please!):

Either way, the floor looked permanently dirty; it looked clean only in the immediate aftermath of being washed. So Mary set out to wash it. She got out the mops and brushes and ran a bucket of warm water and set to. The water turned grey and so did the linoleum, as it always did at first. It looked cleaner when it was wiped down and began to dry.

I hated spending any time reading this. I found it extraordinarily onorous. But the subject matter and childlike writing style ("and, and, and", the equal length sentences that make this such a fucker to read) are clearly deliberate.

So yeah, why? Is he saying that the mental and physical impedimenta of daily life make us supine and imbecile before large scale systemic catastrophe? That there is a nexus of culpability, that our childlike ignorance is no proof against?

Actually I think the answer is no. And even if it isn't no the attempt is so poorly managed that it fails. Everyone sounds too similar, it's too badly written from a technical point, the insights, whether in terms of detail or a wider understanding of that detail, are not insightful, interesting or amusing/witty. Lanchester feels too limited for the book he has attempted. Haven't had a chance to watch the interview yet, but thanks for posting it pinefox.

on phone at the moment and at work, so will try to be more coherent later + actually carrying on reading this thing.

Joyce was, as usual, exactly what i was thinking about. I can believe that Lanchester is deliberately writing this ugly prose, but i can't imagine any good purpose that its ugliness serves. at times it reminds me of Douglas Adams' comic distancing, without the comedy.

either Lanchester is trying to make a systemic point, in which case there really is no need for any examination of the characters' inner lives, or he is trying to portray "people as they are" in which case he's displaying the most banal - necessary use here! - misanthropy, without spirit or indignation or insight, a dinner party disdain for the hoi polloi that is plenty common but a terrible look for a novelist. for a human being, tbh.

our experience of the mundane isn't usually mundane in itself, if you approach it with genuine vision. to reduce mechanical bodily processes to mechanical experiential processes is a failure of imagination.

agree, the mundane is not that mundane, it's full of fascination

surely after Joyce Nicholson Baker is key

so i hear but i've read the wrong Nicholson Bakers :)

Updike is another author who revels in this.

Right - I've got a lot of train travelling to do over the next few days: let's finish this fucker.

http://s1063.photobucket.com/albums/t516/diasyrmus/?action=view¤t=463ea74b.jpg&evt=user_media_share

Piotr came in, looked over, saw what he was drinking, made a sign with two fingers pointing up in curls at the sides of his head - their private gesture for bison, therefore bison-grass vodka.

Not a gesture. Not private. More like a reasonably obvious metonym for the thing in question and totally unlikely to be a casual and familiar sign of communication between two grown men. Yet another example of how his prose walks like human, but talks like robot.

+ You've already said he's drinking bison grass vodka. Reckon I could have done the math. Still best not leave anything to chance, John.

I remember when I first saw this book mentioned the piece included the description "Dickensian". Which reminds me to say how underpopulated this book is. Very far from Dickens' "why have a family of three when you can have a family of twenty" profusion.

Despite the considerable number of narrative voices (all very john lanchester of course) the rest of the world and the people in it is v sparse. Another aspect of the book's curiously lenten feel.

"And yet there was a femininity to her too; her clothes were always slightly too tight, as if her womanliness wanted to burst out, to contradict the rest of her persona"

eeeee. it's at this point you start to look round and see if there's anyone else you can talk to at the party.

also - womanliness... there's something that's very bad about this word, and I can't work out whether it's a conceptual thing, or a word thing, or both, maybe the way it throws you forward into "manliness" when you say it.

This sentence works only if you conceive of 'womanliness' as being the same as subcutaneous fat, and the rest of her persona as being 'someone who does not burst out of her clothes'.

there was a stretch where the writing seemed to me unexceptionably exceptionable - where there was a monotony rather than a continual response of "No he didn't. No it wasn't. No it isn't. Come off it, no they DIDN'T."

But this might also have been me becoming slightly desensitised to the style as the stretch also included an art exhibition in a warehouse in Clapton with... well, I'll let him do it

The party was called Politics of the Dream, which was why there were sword-swallowers and fire-eaters by the warehouse door as people came in, and also why the waiters were dwarfs.

Writing that reminds me that all these "Smitty" sections are apparently intended to be mildly satiric of the art world btw.

unfortunately the satire rebounds somewhat or sounds hollowly because Lanchester has about as much of an eye for modern society as Mole in The Wind in the Willows. (although actually there is much of the naïf in Mole that is often used as a satiric tool - see Dan Boleyn in The Apes of God for instance - and Mole's horrified reaction to Toad in his car. Actually, I take that back - Mole is Juvenal compared to Lanchester whose purblind vision of stuff that has been but dimly projected from somewhere in history her stuffy head.

I've decided that Lanchester belongs to a group I've just invented called Fucking Limey Writers. Unfortunately I suspect this category squares so closely with the literary pages literary fiction scene as to be more or less useless.

er wtf phone?

"has been projected from somewhere inside his stuffed-up head"

"and also why the waiters were dwarfs"

i think the sympathetic reading i was trying to advance upthread is something like: this is exactly about the tedious and useless idea that broadsheet paper media types have of everyone else in the world, and aware of it

but like i say, i'm not actually planning on reading it

"Smitty". FUCK.

yeah I like yr reading thomp. it's just hard to maintain that rarified possibility in your head when actually conducting intellectual transaction with the clodhopping lanchester-brain prose.

in fact I started coming round to that pov while not actually reading the book. then I started reading it again and realised it was too persistently incompetent for any sort of subtlety of interpretation, even as a way of maintaining interest.

"Smitty wasn't sure whether what he felt was sadness or foreboding"

^this sort of innocuous shite really pisses me off. drilling right down there, John.

I've got to do a thing on his list sentences as well. he uses then all the time and is really bad at them. (Great list writers - Kipling? there are others.)

Pynchon.

Rabelais / Urquhart

Oh yeah, that Urquhart translation is great. There's a couple of others floating round in my head as well.

Swift, Flann O'Brien good listers.

the policeman, who appeared earlier, and for whom NV had such high hopes, has been gone for some time.

A+ thread

mark my words the policeman will be back at the end to arrest Lanchester in a Blazing Saddles-style fourth wall breaker.

has tom wolfe been, like, rehabilitated while i wasn't looking

what's the consensus on wolfe on ilx?