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

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.

ha that paragraph was as far as i got in his piece. glad to see that London has become this cultural melting pot while the rest of the country is stuck in a 1950s hegemony of white English people only

i wish i had Polish friends

The city seems to contain every possible combination of person, origin, profession and ambition.

Crying out for an I-Spy guide. Female guatemalan legal secretary hoping to open a pet shop - check!

truly it is unique among cities

Before gastropubs London used to be grey. Before that it was black and white. And before that everyone was crudely etched and 2D.

He was very sensible that all political writers upon the subject had unanimously agreed and lamented, from the beginning of Queen Elizabeth's reign down to his own time, that the current of men and money towards the metropolis, upon one frivolous errand or another,—set in so strong,—as to become dangerous to our civil rights,—though, by the bye,—a current was not the image he took most delight in,—a distemper was here his favourite metaphor, and he would run it down into a perfect allegory, by maintaining it was identically the same in the body national as in the body natural, where the blood and spirits were driven up into the head faster than they could find their ways down;—a stoppage of circulation must ensue, which was death in both cases.

Wait, don't tell me. I recognise it. Fielding? Sterne?

As for this populous cities are populous, it's almost as old as its twin complaint recorded in Herodotus of outside/eastern effeminacy undermining the solid virtues of empire/city founders. Sure Polybius rags on about it.

Sterne, specifically Tristram's dad's opinions on London. maybe this Lanchester fellow is onto something.

dashes should have told me.

yes, JL's interest in London's diversity strikes me as very uninteresting

I am not really interested in diversity in that way

if I am a writer, what do I care that there are now some Polish plumbers around? this is not interesting.

sometimes i feel that you're damaged in some profound way

@OfficialMeshell: ok time to read a book i highly recommend CAPITAL BY JOHN LANCHESTER

seems like he has been moonlighting as a food critic

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/may/07/su-la-london-restaurant-review/print

that was his main gig originally i thought

he was? that explains a lot

I bought Capital yesterday, it was onsale somewhere for £2.50. It's worth that much, surely?

£2.50 plus x hours of your time, though

Matt DC went into the small charity bookshop on the high street with the white door. It's worth that, surely, he thought to himself as he picked up the paperback. Even a double espresso these days costs that. And besides, it's for a good cause.

Excited for Matt DC. Also worry someone at some stage is going report Capital's brilliance at dissecting contemporary mores and the profound clarity of its limpid prose.

On a rainy morning in early December, an 82-year-old woman sat in her front room at 42 Pepys Road, looking out at the street through a lace curtain. Her name was Petunia Howe...

Can't believe you cut this off when you did by the way, in its entirety its one of the most banal opening paragraphs I can recall reading.

This doesn't look like it will take very long to read.

i wasn't sure when to stop quoting, it felt like it could go on for a while.

and no it shouldn't do, unless you get trapped in one of his sentences.

limp id prose

I am about 100 pages into this and so far nothing at all has really happened.

Having read several financial pieces on this (including the LRB link upthread) it's evident that Lanchester isn't actually a bad writer himself, either that or he has good editors.

But Capital is full of terrible writing, you can tell immediately from the Prologue, because he equates 'accessibility' with 'patronising your readership' - it's written in the way someone would explain the gentrification of London to a small child. He doesn't actually understand or empathise with ordinary people at all, which is why every character appears to be a cardboard cut-out.

The worst section so far is the introduction of Freddy Kamo and his father (although the 'Smitty' sections come close). Apparently they've been in Senegal, being paid a Premiership club retainer to just sit around until Freddy is 17. Do football clubs ever do this? And apparently their arrival in London represents the first time either of them have been in a taxi, stayed in a hotel or eaten at a restaurant. After having been paid regular money by Arsenal for several years. It's astonishingly patronising writing.

He's also the worst list writer I've ever encountered. There's a scene I will type up later when Ahmed is surveying the bounteous contents of his shop that is just eye-clawingly clunky and banal.

His lists are dire.

said this upthread:

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

and i don't think that was anywhere near the worst example - the newsagent example you're talking about is hitting me with horrified recollection.

and so much of the book is just listing shit! all the time! as if accumulation of detail is world-building.

Ahmed loved his shop, loved the profusion of it, the sheer amount of stuff in the narrow space and the sense of security it gave him - The Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph and The Sun and The Times and Top Gear and The Economist and Women's Home Journal and Heat and Hello! and The Beano and Cosmopolitan, the crazy proliferation of print, the dozens of types of industrially manufactured sweets and chocolates, the baked beans and white bread and Marmite and Pot Noodles and all the other inedible things that English people ate, and the bin-liners and tinfoil and toothpaste and batteries (behind the counter where they couldn't be stolen) and razor blades and painkillers and 'No Junk Mail' stickers which he'd only got in last week and had already had to reorder twice, the laser-print-quality 80g paper and the A4 envelopes and the A5 envelopes which had become so popular since they changed the way postal pricing worked, and the fridge full of soft drinks and the adjacent fridge of alcohol, and the bottles of Ribena and orange squash, and the credit card machine and the Transport for London card-charging device and the Lottery terminal - it all felt snug and cosy and safe, his very own space...

http://i.imgur.com/TMhRo.gif

I was actually expecting this book to at least be entertaining in a kind of sloppy, knockabout soap-opera way but it is all SO FUCKING BORING.

Also this passage, in which one of the major characters has just found out she may be deported to Zimbabwe:

Her lawyer hung up. It didn't sound as if there was anything she could do about it, so rather than spend her day worrying about what was going to happen, she instead decided to spend it thinking about the church choir, he of the voice and the shoulders, the defined muscles... The Black Eyed Peas had a song which Quentina thought was hilarious: 'My Humps'. There was a line in it about 'my humps, my humps, my lovely lady lumps'. It made Quentina smile and it made her think of her date with Mashinko. He was going to take her to the African bar in Stockwell to listen to a band from South Africa called the Go-To Boys. Life was sweet. In her heart, she didn't think she would be returning to Zimbabwe until the tyrant was dead. Something told her that. In the meantime, my humps, my humps... my lovely lady lumps...

Lanchester presumably read and re-read this paragraph several different times, as did his editor. It's possible that pop songs do flood through your head at grave and significant moments in one's life but I get the sense that Lanchester is doing this not so much for verisimilitude but because to do anything else would require his characters to behave with something other than constant emotional tepidity. In the scene where [SPOILER ALERT] Petunia Howe finds out she is dying of a brain tumour she receives the news with exactly the same mix of banality and stoicism.

tom mccarthy should write a roman a clef about the period of research lanchester undertakes prior to the writing of this book

wait a second, is the church choir one guy

Why did I pause for a second before crashing through that spoiler alert?

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.

― things that are jokes pretty much (Nilmar Honorato da Silva), Monday, 24 December 2012 14:34 (5 months ago)

"the dozens of types of industrially manufactured sweets and chocolates" is the highlight of that newsagent passage, that or the envelopes

dozens of types of industrially manufactured sweets and chocolates

industrially manufactured sweets and chocolates

industrially manufactured sweets and chocolates

ah xpost!

I want to hang Lanchester over a bridge by his ankles until he tells me what the hell he thinks he's doing writing like this.

It made Quentina smile and it made her think of her date with Mashinko

that sort of thing is just offensive - the double 'made'.

is the double made maybe supposed to sound faux-naif like maybe it's supposed to be like that pitchfork reviews guy?

yes, but if i'm remembering correctly - the faux-naif is the exclusive reserve of immigrants, women and the infirm. i think - and here i feel like attempting to claw my way out through the wall behind me - it's gesturing at a sort of innocence.

that's gross. I was at the pub earlier this week and they had this on their free bookshelf, I almost took it but couldn't be fucked and took mark kermode's bookcast instead