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

net-surfing, net-surfing, net-surfing.

sometimes i wake up with some of these phrases just toiling away in my head.

Does Usman not have broadband? Or does he just prefer to net-surf via a tethered mobile?

(Masochistic question. I imagine that L gives an explanation, and that it's quite boring.)

Sorry, woof, you asked for it.

Usman wouldn't have minded having a look at some clips of Freddy in his prime, but this particular technique for surfing the net was too slow for that. He had broadband, obviously, but there were some things he didn't like to do over his own internet connection. Usman was, always had been, careful about stuff like that. A neighbour had until recently had an unencrypted wireless connection which he used for his own surfing when he wanted to do something that couldn't be traced, but the neighbour - he didn't know who but guessed it was the flat in the basement - had wised up and gone to WPA encryption about three months ago. So now Usman used a pay-as-you-go 3G mobile phone which he'd bought for cash and was therefore untraceable, and tethered it to his laptop. He ran the browser with all its privacy settings on, via an anonymising service. An electronic spy or eavesdropper would have no way of knowing who he was.

It's the graceful economy of style that seduces you in the end. As I say this explanation comes a page or so after the intial laptop/mobile/3g conundrum part of your brain spends a small amount of time asking 'Does usman not have broadband? Or does he just prefer to net-surf via a tethered mobile?'

anonymising service.

'so part of your brain'

quis custodiet etc

What's he doing that he doesn't want to be traced for? Reading the Daily Mail?

thank you.

perhaps a cyberthriller next time out John, you have obvs mastered the lingo.

net-surfing radical islamic forums. xpost

that actually seems fairly reasonable, maybe slightly paranoid or overly convulted - wouldn't an anonymising proxy over broadband be sufficient? reading it all definitely hurts though.

oh yes, entirely reasonable. absolutely - Lanchester has a clear idea of what his characters do within the confines of their own character. I don't think he mis-steps with this sort of thing - it's part of his research thing. He knows how each type of person he's using is likely to behave - that's part of the problem. The only exception is the Polish builder who seems a bit out of whack at times (given how confining JL is to his characters generally).

But, mostly -

reading it all definitely hurts though.

this.

what do you think the editorial process on this book wz like

Well, it really is the key question. I don't really know much how the process works generally, but I'm assuming once it's written there's a publisher's reader report, and some professional proofing. So,

1. the publisher said 'No need to worry, it's only old John! Good old John, used to be an editor you know? Happy to take as is really, bound to be fine!'

or

2. The reader read it and decided it was either fine, or that the serious problems of style and execution were too fundamental to produce a report other than 'i rly can't recommend this book for publishing', which clearly wouldn't fly, so they just passed it with a 'yeah, fine. fill your boots.'

And the proofreader fell asleep while reading it, so that they didn't notice fundamental botches, like the thing about people getting their basements done up with a skip outside described twice in three pages, the second time with an air of complete novelty, right at the beginning. Or words like contentlessness, or that weird bit with the misplaced 'was' a few posts ago. Or any of the more nebulous but still persistently offensive ambiguous use of verbs across two clauses, the curious description of objects, the habit of producing sentences that have too many words (in order, presumably, to make up for an original under-specific level of thought - like a Hindu goddess with six arms/player-specific insults, and just the general capacity for grinding the meaning of words so none of them feel quite right in their grammatical or descriptive context.

So, yes, I would LOVE to know what the editorial process on this book was like. Anyone with better knowledge of the industry than me know how this sort of thing can get through?

was talking to an ex-publisher recently & mentioned the horrors of Capital: she repeated a thing that I've heard before - commissioning editors haven't had copy-editing skills beaten into them on the way up, so they're a bit hopeless when faced with the need for aggressive sentence-fixing (and money too tight to mention, so they don't get that long with a book and there's no freelance copy edit). On top of that agents have taken over some of the traditional space of the editor, advising on plot, structure, etc, so I guess that's another pair of eyes that's read the ms, but bombing along at 100pp/hour worrying about 'feel' rather than basic sentence-level mistakes that make his/her client look like a moron.

I too would love to know about the actual editorial process on this one.

we were talking about the death of editing at the last fap, weren't we? Here's a long + balanced but slightly dull thing on it.

Quite a lot of Blake Morrison in that article AND YET South of the River was the first literary novel I saw with an OCR mistake in it. (iirc) (haven't actually read it, a friend showed me)

private eye tells me that this didn't make the booker list (the lanchester nov, that is, not this lovely thread)

Nicola Barker, The Yips (Fourth Estate)
Ned Beauman, The Teleportation Accident (Sceptre)
André Brink, Philida (Harvill Secker)
Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists (Myrmidon Books)
Michael Frayn, Skios (Faber & Faber)
Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (Doubleday)
Deborah Levy, Swimming Home (And Other Stories)
Hilary Mantel, Bring up the Bodies (Fourth Estate)
Alison Moore, The Lighthouse (Salt)
Will Self, Umbrella (Bloomsbury)
Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis (Faber & Faber)
Sam Thompson, Communion Town (Fourth Estate)

fizzles for the booker

so wait he can't look at clips of freddy kamo even though he has broadband because when he wants to look at things he doesn't want traced he runs an anonymised 3G connection instead? why doesn't he just use his broadband connection for this bit?

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

ok, christmas is coming the tls is getting fat, and there's only one way to inaugurate the austerity festivities - where we hurl ourselves into an orgy of dyspraxia and incoherence in a final attempt to grab at the hope we promised ourselves the year would hold, before falling to our knees alone outside the pub shouting and crying and vomiting up the accumulated surfeit of unfulfilled desire within, and where the only Christmas lights are the torches they're shining in your eyes at A&E - and that's to finish the novel so shamefully overlooked for the Booker (my disappointed reaction here).

It's the only Christmas turkey that matters this year.

And, hey, it's not all over till you've surreptitiously dropped it on the communal reading shelf at work. maybe he's got some m amis style fourth wall tricks up his sleeve! an alien bursts out of lanchester's chest and starts goosestepping around elephant and castle, christmas tooter on the go; all Lanchester's characters turn up at his house and burn him Wicker Man style in a huge model of himself made of copies of the book he's writing! this could get exciting! let's go!

For those of you who have this book but haven't quite got round to reading it yet, now's your chance to read-along-a-fizzles. For those of you who haven't - make sure this book is in your christmas stocking! shd be out in paperback soon right?

word of warning: i'm not going to focus on the little nitpicky things like how badly it's written on a word-by-word sentence by sentence basis cos that's just the sort of thing that small-minded lit bloggers do, weighing well-meaning authors down with the impedimenta of pettifogging complaint. no, as we approach the end, it's a chance to look at the broader picture, engage with the bigger themes - we might even talk about what the book's about, well not that because it doesn't really reach the level of embodying something grander than its professed concerns, but y'know, the misfiring methods by which it fails to achieve its already limited aims.

not sure what that permalink is doing at the top there. takes you to a list of characters tho. handy reference.

It is out in paperback. I just saw it while getting a last-minute present.

Christmas Eve isn't a v sensible time to do this. I admit, I meant to finish the book a bit sooner, revive the thread a bit earlier.

I was sitting on the loo at work about a month ago, and - we share an office block with traffic wardens - a traffic warden was in the cubical next door, carrying on a phone conversation in a mixture of English and his unidentified-by-me native tongue (I always enjoy listening to this - a friend who works with refugee women in London says there's a sort of lingua franca the women have, where the specific jargon of the world they inhabit - form numbers, govt departments, charitable assistance programmes, admin processes - have become single-word nouns or verbs in that language)... anyway, I was sitting there, listening to the conversation, and I realised that I'd heard this a few times, and reckoned that probably the traffic wardens had to snatch their phone conversations and the other requirements of breaks at the same time. At least I hoped so - who wants to have a phone conversation while having a shit?

This gave me to start thinking about Capital, and specifically his traffic warden character, Quentina Mkfesi BSc MSc - a Zimbabwean refugee. We never see her in an office, she just exists on the streets (and in her refugee hostel tbf). I considered that this constituted one of the failings of Lanchester's novel - his characters only exist within the limits of his imagination and thus reveal the limits of his imagination, they do not push beyond it and require him to imagine how they might actually live, wch would give them detail that could not be contained within his perception of 'traffic warden' and 'refugee', and help them break out of their flickering holographic projection appearance. This isn't a new observation in this thread, but it occurred to me with renewed force. I was reading the praise on the back of the paperback just now, and one reviewer praises its 'humane empathy'. I very much think not. /flushes loo.

I'm not a good judge of what constitutes good character writing - and at the very most it seems to me to occupy the same place as 'good at landscapes', 'handy dialogue' - as a subset of genre rather than its reified place in lit fic (it was something I was going to bring up at about the time of Aimless' enjoyable reading of PKD). Nevertheless, this is a book risibly uninterested in its people, which, considering its people are p much the only thing in it (more of which later) is as much as to say 'this is a book risibly uninterested in its own content.'

Capital is a very unusual book, a very unusual piece of art, in this day and age, in that it is incontrovertibly, provably bad. In a time where register is all, and notions of gatekeeping and the worth of what is kept within are breaking down all over the shop (it is a time I favour in that respect), it's hard to make apodictic statements of critical worth (good), but with Capital you can: it's not very good. I'm going to double up on this one, because the other thing is that I don't really mind bits of bad in novels. I expect it. In fact I think the best writing tends to also be bad in some respect of aesthetic criticism (Dostoevsky's melodrama & Ballard's characters are two that spring to mind). VS Pritchett I think once said that story writing was a matter of selection and emphasis, and it's bound to be the case with a single-minded writer that the obsessions that make writing urgent and necessary to a certain extent deform critical precepts. I've never particularly liked what I've read of writing school novels, in that they seem to do everything obviously right, and as a consequence produce something depersonalised and wrong. like a 'perfectly' proportioned human, it strikes me as faintly nauseating and ersatz.

Reading a shitload of poetry recently brought me to the conclusion that poetry is the only artistic language - ideally we would have only poetry in writing. But given that poetry that meets the marker of that ideal occurs very rarely, and further that poetry is v expensive to write, novels are necessary. They are necessary for those that like reading to have something different and imaginatively engaging to read on a regular basis, they are necessary for those who write to be able to do so artistically without the unusual demands of poetry. There is a necessary compromise - they are pragmatic, they are not perfect, they are conversational and discursive, democratic, human. You accept a bit of looseness, a bit of bad, that is part of how they work.

Which is all by way of saying, I don't mind bad, and to a certain extent see it as required for good writing.

But Capital is bad on a level below that level of necessary bad. Its bad is not subject to critical discussion. To come back to the point about it being a novel uninterested in its own content, John Lanchester doesn't seem to have taken any pleasure in writing Capital, there's not a single moment where you think he would have enjoyed the conceit of his own invention, or be amused at a turn of phrase (god help us) or thrilled in constructing a particular scene, unless it is the rather hamfisted and jumpily unfunny scene where a toddler poos on the banker's carpet. This is not bad because of distorting overriding creative or imaginative purpose, this is bad because of a complete and evident lack of such purpose.

I'm putting off actually opening up the book. I've got some wrapping to do first.

No, wait, cup of tea then wrapping.

merry christmas fizzles

merry christmas thomp! (and festive booze n hugs to ILB cru generally)

Top takedown, Fizzles

The more I read about this book the more I want to actually read it, but it's kind of big and that's maybe two or three weeks of reading time I could be spending on something else.

My copy's got quite big letters, large margins.

I think you should read it.

'humane empathy' is a miserable pleonasm, though it does make me curious about what inhumane empathy might be, as an integrated idea and not merely 'empathy for serial killers' or whatever

Fizzles you are the Santa of ILB for taking this on, its rare to read anyone engaging in depth w/something so horrifying (instead of say, tearing the fucker into chunks and flushing these down the loo...many would make that kind of 'joke' but you did not (ok you came close w/'flushes loo' but that was funny).

Merry Xmas.

Merry Xmas xyzzz__. Think i actually just left the fucker at home - but my mum might have a copy.

"inhumane empathy" sounds as if, with a bit of twisting maybe, it might be suitable for Ballard. a sexualised, sensualised identification with others undergoing an essential, often painful metamorphosis from the human to something only residually human.

47

At 42 Pepys Road, Petunia Howe was
dying. Her condition was worse in every
way. Her level of consciousness varied:
at times she knew where she was and
what was happening; at other times she
was living through a delirium. Memories
swam through her like dreams.

"A masterpiece of inhumane empathy".

lol otm

those first two sentences though....

yep - his sentences can have a dreamlike quality where, although insubstantial to the point of being sub-little, they seem to take years to travel through.

That sub-literal quality is probably what gives his prose its character or voice. Empson's fecund and energising ambiguity of interpretation is here the opposite, an ambiguity of the insufficiently expressed or expressive, producing a constant uncertainty. I wonder whether Lanchester possibly sensed this, hence the way he tends to overload his sentences with inessential material detail, to give then the solidity they so crave. this ineffectual lumber gives the reader a feeling of eating institution food - both too much and too little. Sufficiency and piquancy both completely absent.

*fuckin sub-LITERAL.

One of the many things I am enjoying about this thread is how 'John Lanchester' actually sounds like the name a plodding American writer with no imagination would give a British character.

you know i am really coming to appreciate zadie smith more and more

MERRY CHRISTMAS

even to you John Lanchester

I no longer believe his articles because of this thread
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n01/john-lanchester/lets-call-it-failure

The person from the sock shop then takes your tenner and spends it on wine, and the wine merchant spends it on tickets to see The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant...

Weird insertion aside its a good explanation of GDP.

Whether its right or not I wouldn't know...

woof, his financial writing and his book on same, Whoops!, are actually really good. Shame he seems to have lost the ability to put that charm and wit into his fiction.

yeah, still like his financial writing, mainly for reasons of uninformed confirmation bias on my part really, tho yes, he has a good way with an example and phrase. also any takedown of that "household economy" thing (you know - the "tightening belts" bullshit) will always get a warm reception from me.

capital's been sitting on my desk again. I've been too busy promoting economic fluidity.

standing in Waterstones warning people off buying Capital while checking to see whether the early egregious blunders that did so much to indicate the extreme almost avant-garde mediocrity of this book had been expunged in paperback.

finding new things. he's almost an anti-list maker - y'know like Dickens and Kipling and Borges are great at cornucopias or euphonias and poetic itemisation, Lanchester is resolutely wingless in this area. A list indicating prosperity:

there were florists, Amazon parcels, personal trainers, cleaners, plumbers, yoga teachers, and all day long, all of them going up to the houses like supplicants and being swallowed by them

florists Amazon parcels.

swallowed like supplicants.

fuckin Amazon parcels.

I just scoured this thread, thinking it contained a genius remix of a Lanchester paragraph. Does it exist? I remember, I do!

dunno imago - we had some fun with Franzen.

^^^^that was it

NOW DO LANCHESTER

well, yeah, it's certainly available for something of the sort. i still haven't fucking finished it in fact. Any parody would have to also include those alarming moments of his style where you actually feel fear (the 'clunketa-clunketa' bit for instance), ie those moments when you realise the insistently boring mundanity of a person you are talking to is actually insane. Might give it a pop at some point. I thought i'd probably forgotten all the ticks in fact, but flicking through it earlier today brought them all back with anguished lucidity.

tics.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/mar/08/john-lanchester-capital-book-club

In which Lanchester reveals Capital was written by a committee of one.

NYRB Review, which i saw after seeing Helene DeWitt (who is obviously a **HERO**) mention it on her blog.

Interesting for being spot on in some respects:

And it shouldn’t work. It’s as if the author built the reader a mansion and then insisted that he sleep in a crowded tent out back—in hopes that life inside the tent will prove to be so much fun that the reader will forget about the mansion he was promised.

And not at all spot on in the baffling critical evaluation that he draws:

Somehow, it does work. The most obvious reason is that Lanchester is a talented enough writer that you are inclined to follow him wherever he wants to go, without asking a lot of questions along the way.

You can find this sort of thing on every other page—a fresh and interesting description of a sensation you might have experienced a hundred times without ever having bothered to attach words to it.

omfg wut. yes, there are descriptions of those experiences, no they are not fresh and interesting.

That interview ledge links to is a better guide for those of you beginning to think 'well it has got some good reviews...':

One is that today's levels of inequality are measurably similar to those of Victorian England; extremes of wealth and poverty, of good and bad luck and of good and bad behaviour are visible wherever you look in our capital city. Second, just as in Victorian England, London is where people now come to make their fortunes. Where once it was Dick Whittington, now it attracts Polish builders, plumbers and cleaners, Czech nannies, French bond dealers and Russian dentists – and those are just people who are personally known to me. The city seems to contain every possible combination of person, origin, profession and ambition.

some of my best friends are character templates. French bond dealers! Whatever next. Foreign women looking after children! Doctors from abroad!

also rmde at this new experience of bad luck and bad behaviour.