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 also hate the comma after already.

it’s an extremely enjoyable paragraph. as so often with JL it contains multitudes. i found myself on the somewhat catechistic train of thought, hopelessly banal: “JL is a very bad writer. In the same way that some are very good writers, he is very bad at it. He cannot do it. Even where he thinks he is doing something (and i think he must think this) it does not then pass the test of *why* he thinks this is something he should do. *Why*.”

And you end up going round again, like Michael Finnegan… “Because he is a very bad writer.” etc

You can compound it with questions like “*why* do they let him? *Why* do they pay for him to do it? Does he think he is in some way good? When he’s finished a work, does he feel, like Nabokov, satisfied as if he had laid an egg? *What* do people say after they’ve read something by him? Do they feel their store of imaginative exploration has in some way been replenished? *Why*

You are aware that it’s a form of mediocrity so intense that it is worse than the merely very bad.

There is something Widmerpool like about it all (from Dance to the Music of Time). The stolid successful progression of lack of talent. It perhaps is related inversely to the same energies and demons that occasionally take great talents from us early.

xpost oh.

who is this epigone.

it is very characteristic.

has he taken on a disciple?

brought them into his workshop of dreams?

I just looked it up on my laptop via the internet search engine and discovered it to be Claire K33gan.

I am being mean but the top quote from CK says 'I can't explain my work. I just write stories'.

“I can't explain my work. I just sit down at my study desk, switch on my laptop, open up the word processing programme that the laptop came with and write stories“

<3

it’s interesting to consider why they’re v similar. one aspect of manchester’s prose is the sense that he’s imagining himself walking or going through the process as it happens, so that his sentences and the thought of his prose is also organised in this way. the sentences sort of discover what’s happening at the same time the writer and relevant character does.

the same things going on here. they are a mere stenographer for the minimal levels of empathetic imagination going on. there’s no sense of organisation or art to it.

i’ve never read any keegan, so this may be unfair - after all deploying a style like that in a v limited way within a wider context may have some meaning or purpose. rather than just being how you write.

xpost

lol mark s.