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

I now recall that these posts were very accurate:

The Lanchester neanderthal piece is not great. As Mark says: forced outrage at 'hobbit'; he says he feels much more distant from neanderthals than the neolithic tribes in britain and ireland 'but that's bollocks' - no need for profanity John, and it's not bollocks, the neanderthals were 30-40,000 years before the neolithic tribes and a different species. And wtf is this: lithics – the sciencey word for stone artefacts, used in preference to ‘tools’? 'Sciencey'? And yes it's used in preference to 'tools' because that could mean anything from a stick for getting termites out of a tree to a cordless power drill.

― ledge, Thursday, December 17, 2020 bookmarkflaglink

jesus.

― Fizzles, Thursday, December 17, 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Excellent post from Ledge!

At last someone takes on Lanchester's unnecessary, offensive (and here just misleading / mistaken) use of obscenity in print and his charmless colloquialism!

― the pinefox, Thursday, December 17, 2020 bookmarkflaglink

i class his charmless colloquialisms as 'blokey simplification' to make something sound unthreatening. and as you say, here mistaken. i think it's possibly more insidious than it looks, as it belongs, effectively to the world of Boris Johnson, and male workplaces where people (often middle-aged white men) feel threatened by difference, and need reassuring about it in comforting language.

― Fizzles, Thursday, December 17, 2020 bookmarkflaglink

its also the notion that you (a pleb) need this 'blokey simplification' to ease you into this concept that I (Lanchester) understand perfectly well

― plax (ico), Thursday, December 17, 2020

Pretty dreadful, indeed, when Lanchester talks about 'sciencey word'.

But Mark S's post also reminds me of a ridiculous para about 'mirror-gazer'. Here Lanchester starts on a metaphor and completely loses his way; the metaphor doesn't do what he wants it to do at all, and quite distracts from, rather than confirms, his argument, such as it is.

LRB recently landed in my inbox: "John Lanchester almost gets stuck at Suez".

Admitidely an amusing mental image.

was probably trying to write a sentence.

re Condition of England novels:

https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/04/you-can-never-go-home-anymore

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/03/perfidious-albion-sam-byers-review

Come back John Lanchester all is forgiven.

― Matt DC, Monday, 27 August 2018 13:20 (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

i'm reading this guy's new book after seeing juliet jacques being enthusiastic about it sadly its not very good and quite lanchestery

or maybe like an episode of black fucking mirror

i think its not helping that i recently read a joy williams book that covers some quite similar things but is startling and hypnotic and this feels so ploddingly mediocre in comparison. it reminds me of this thing she says in a paris review interview where she's talking about boring 'issues' writing. i keep thinking about how derrida talks about the irreducible excess of language but there doesn't seem to be any of that here, everything is so easily parsible (this is how i think of lanchester too, very mechanical analogies, nothing volatile within the writing or reading of it)

I read and really liked Perfidious Albion, did you read that one plax?

no i just heard about this on suite 212 and thought it would be fun to read something 'new'

The author is 31

I would like to read this tbh but I suspect if you didn’t like this you might not like Perfidious Albion, which was mostly quite appealingly clear in what it set out to do but the characters were a bit lacking

there's lots of stuff that's depressing me about this book. it was supported by arts council money. like given his last book was a big success seemingly, why aren't faber and faber who are publishing this one not just paying him well? there's something really depressing about this, like i'm keenly aware of how difficult it must be to get to write a novel 'these days' but this is so uninspiring and plodding. nobody has said anything so far that was not expository and usually in the service of making some aspect of the plot that was already clear MUCH CLEARER.

Lots of paragraphs like:

"the particular room in which I found myself contained two men. The desk between us was less a working surface than a barrier, stretching from wall to wall and bolted at both ends, meaning I had to enter through a separate door and hallway. It was a neat statement, I thought: the clearest signifier of bureaucracy, repurposed as a blunt communication of division: the men across from me were protected: I was held at bay."

I feel like this paragraph could do without the narrator interpreting the scene for us in such an obvious way. there's a lot of this iron grip stuff, where we get a fairly obvious metaphor and then its laboriously parsed. (I literally picked this paragraph at random now) I wouldn't have minded so much if the interpretation was something surprising like a conveyor belt of bearing statuary of martyrs in agony or something to be limboed under or

its like why live in the imagination of this person if their interior world is so uncluttered with unruly associations

"The room contained two men. The desk between us stretched from wall to wall and was bolted at both ends. I had to enter through a separate door and hallway."

i have an offer of editing work i will not be taking: based on just the first sample page i was describing it as a just-about-adequate translation of a da vinci code knock-off in the manner of tom sharpe, but further examination reminds me powerfully of you-know-who (in its handling of technology in particular)

apologies to all who love the thread but i will still not be taking it

What if they drove a truck of money to your house?

sir this is a SOW'S EAR for the task of making it into a SILK PURSE i charge ONE MILLION DOLLARS *doctor evil gesture*

Couldn't you 'edit' it into something better?

yes!

for ONE MILLION DOLLARS *doctor evil gesture*

Will Zimbabwean dollars suffice?
(£2000 to save anyone else checking)

The thought of Dan Brown meets Tom Sharpe is baneful in the extreme btw

never got round to writing up my review of the very bad ghost story book, and just now discovered while looking back thru old NYRBs that it got a full-on rave write-up from some idiot:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/07/01/john-lanchester-reality-selfies-from-hell/

so far i have only skimmed as i am busy today, saving the hate-read for later lol

Handy reminder at the beginning there to never read Martin Amis either.

never got round to writing up my review of the very bad ghost story book, and just now discovered while looking back thru old NYRBs that it got a full-on rave write-up from some idiot:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/07/01/john-lanchester-reality-selfies-from-hell🕸/

so far i have only skimmed as i am busy today, saving the hate-read for later lol

there was at least one -- possibly two -- published in the new yorker iirc!

where was the second-best underpants story to be found? or was it just that (opening) paragraph?

oh god. no. i don’t know. i don’t want to know.

i looked up my notes:

Signal first published in the New Yorker
Coffin Liquor and Reality first published in the LRB (the latter as Love Island)
We Happy Few first published in Esquire

that's four out of the eight stories given this hens-teeth level affirmation!

(Reality = "second-hand sleeping shorts")

or more accurately second-best sleeping shorts lol

You never know what riches these thread revives will provide.

As Mark S implies: Lanchester can publish anything, because of who he is, now.

Standards don't really apply.

In principle, FWIW, an academic journal would or should not be like this, if it operated double blind peer review. But these papers can't even pretend to have such standards.

has anyone ever published fiction on the double blind peer review principle? it seems a bit unlikely (not least since anyone involved would immediately know who the writer was)

As Mark S implies: Lanchester can publish anything, because of who he is, now.

how would you characterise who he is, now? not an avatar of literary fiction, surely? more, a well-embedded member of the literary journal establishment?

Yes - but one who started out as quite an acclaimed novelist, and does publish fiction often nowadays eg: CAPITAL, THE WALL.

I don't think he's regarded as a great writer but he is clearly an insider.

Colm Toibin is similar except that he is regarded as a great writer - wrongly, I'd tend to say.

yes ok. i think i agree. i don’t really think anyone with any sort of faculty for thought or reading can rate lanchester, which must say something about the countervailing power of his lit establishment network?

or the quality of lit establishment critical capabilities. despite cynicism i feel it would be wrong to snarkily assume the latter - as usual i prefer corruption to imbecility as an explanation, though the capability of not wanting to offend people in your network resulting in the stupefaction of your critical faculties probably plays a part.

From the current LRB:

Picture​ the following age-old scene: a writer sitting at a kitchen table, pretending to work. Set it forty years ago. The Conservatives are in power and everything is broken, but our subject is the writer’s stuff. On the table is a typewriter; to one side is a radio, to another is a phone; also in the room are a fridge, an oven, a hob, a toaster, a set of car keys and a vacuum cleaner. Now fast-forward to the same scene forty years later. The Conservatives are in power again and everything is broken again; the room (and perhaps the writer) is a little shinier, but the stuff in the room is more or less the same. At least, it serves the same functions, if you swap laptop for typewriter, mobile for landline, Dyson for Hoover.

wtf is that?

oh it’s lanchester. sorry i forgot that thread i was in.

you couldn’t make this stuff up. (unless you’re lanchester i guess)

that hob in detail

https://gruesomemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2021/02/DeDw08PVAAAjksO.jpg

I've had a difficult day but getting to the end of that paragraph nearly broke me. I had a sense of where it was going early on and could parse his rhetorical process, but still had a sense of dragging myself from word to word, sentence to sentence.

brb having at lanchester w/ a spiraliser

"but our subject is the writer’s stuff" wasn't even the first rock in the path. I had to back up and read it a couple of times. "Our subject (the Conservative government, and how it affected writers 40 years ago) is the stuff of literature." Obviously not, really, but there was a whisper of that. No, the first obstacle was that I was picturing a writer, with a small laptop, sitting in a modern kitchen, maybe playing with her phone, looking at Instagram. And then I was asked to set it 40 years ago! OK, erase the scene. Start again. A typewriter. Some notebooks. The Conservatives are in power... I start trying to line up the dates. Major? Thatcher? Wait, the sentence isn't over yet! Our subject....... is the writer's stuff. Okay, erase all those thoughts about Major and Thatcher. Concentrate on the objects in the room. Helpfully, they are ploddingly enumerated. But now we're fast-forwarding, back to the present. I've barely had time to register anything but it's okay, we're in the hands of the great Lanchester. The room is... shinier? The writer is shinier? Is that what 40 years does to you? Is he talking about being bald? Why would the kitchen be shinier? The writer has a cleaner now that she (or he, if bald, probably) is successful? Or are modern kitchens just shinier in general? Not sure about that, really. Formica and chrome were bigger back then, surely. Anyway, that's not the point. The point is, that, well, the point is that things have not really changed that much. A typewriter is basically a Macbook. Right? So here we are. The same as it always was.

he's back baby

omg that para is a+.

genuinely feel he’s breaking new ground here.

age old and forty years ago.

to another side. also in the room (that last pure classic lanchester - one of his finest modes)

a master at lists this is one of his finer examples, suffering from some sort of ontological saccade:
fridge, oven, hob, toaster, car keys, vacuum cleaner

it’s the oven/hob bit. but also appliances and temporary objects. so good.