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

what is lionel shriver's work actually like, i feel like i ought to read her just to, you know, keep my finger on the pulse of the corpse, sort of thing

I am really curious about the one that followed We Need to Talk, where it's a sliding-doors double narrative about a sophisticated middle-class woman having/not having an affair with a professional snooker player and being drawn/not being drawn into the world of the pro snooker circuit.

People just love writing these fuckers

all the way through this thread i've been thinking - does anybody not associated with the lit mafia actually want to READ these books??

oh i'm all for a good social problem novel

can you suggest some examples of that, nv ('modern' ones, i mean)?

xp that guardian review of Capital seems to think Faulks did well with his version of a banker, a footballer, an asian, but ikwym, we're not listing smash hits here mostly.

lol modern ones i have a problem with. Money is probably the modern-est thing I like in this ilk. 2666's long central catalogue of the disappeared? most of my reading is at the very very least stuff from 20 plus years ago.

Houellebecq is doing a deranged-masquerading-as-clearsighted version of this too, i guess. can't think of Englishes. sort of like Peace but think he's over-rated in some quarters not least of which is maybe his own.

I was just thinking about how lit-world often acts as though there's a kind of social explanatory force that people want from novels, when it looks on the tube like people actually want sexy vampires (STILL!), game of thrones and thrillers in which women are tortured or in danger of torture, but I am abandoning this line of thought because I think a sexy vampire state of the nation novel might be a goer and I need to get plotting & think about how a 2nd generation Bangladeshi immigrant vampire who runs a corner shop would actually think, actually feel.

sexy obese vampire state of the nation novel featuring romance with 2nd gen south asian corner shop manager = winner

twist: the sexy obese vampire is wall street

dunno if Dhabihah wd make being a vampire easier or harder tbh

xps (lol)

I struggle to think of Englishes too. Don't know much about this, but Scotland seems better at The Social Aspect of The Novel.

a greedy banker with a greedier wife, a young African footballer, an edgy young artist, an illegal immigrant parking warden and a family of Muslim shopkeepers. The ambition is nothing less than Dickensian.

fuck off

picked to live in a house

to find out what happens

when people stop being polite

and start getting real

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/book/literary-treats-for-2012-7304502.html

John Lanchester publishes a 630-page whopper of a novel, Capital (March), which locates itself in one south London street where the properties have risen to more than £1million in value. It describes what it is to be a Londoner now, on a broad canvas that takes in a greedy banker with a greedier wife, a young African footballer, an edgy young artist, an illegal immigrant parking warden and a family of Muslim shopkeepers. The ambition is nothing less than Dickensian.

In September, Zadie Smith publishes her first fiction for seven years. Called NW, it is, as the postcode title suggests, set in her old patch of Brent. All she has disclosed about it so far is that it is about class, as it affects "a few people in north-west London" and that it's a "very, very small book".

Martin Amis looks to be playing to his strengths with his new novel Lionel Asbo (July), a satire on the scummy state of Britain. His anti-hero is a skinhead crim who wins £90million on the lottery while in prison, and spends it grossly. Other characters include a Katie Price lookalike called Threnody

In Skagboys (April), Irvine Welsh has written a prequel to his 1993 debut, Trainspotting, showing how Mark Renton et al first descended into heroin addiction in the Eighties. Even more keenly awaited will be Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel's sequel to her Tudor masterpiece, Wolf Hall, due in the autumn. It continues the story of Thomas Cromwell, focusing this time on the fall of Anne Boleyn.

Lionel Shriver's work in progress, said to be an assault on the culture of obesity in the States, is much anticipated.

fucking kill me.

― desperado, rough rider (thomp), Friday, March 9, 2012 3:21 PM (3 hours ago)

the first few posts of this thread caused me to look up the names & led to that ES article & i copied the same four paragraphs ready to post itt

not the shriver line tho

Kinda think China Miéville believes he is writing sexie 2nd gen bangladeshi vampire state of nation novels and he is practically as bad as Lanchester :(

harsh!

I was thinking that lit eco-niche must be filled, couldn't think who it would be.

whatabout whatsername. elfride jelinek.

More about the failures of feminism bcz-capitalism-gets-in-the-way-of -anything-progressive thing, I think. She does hate Austria but still stays there, like Bernhard, but not as pathological.

lol modern ones i have a problem with. Money is probably the modern-est thing I like in this ilk. 2666's long central catalogue of the disappeared? most of my reading is at the very very least stuff from 20 plus years ago.

― Nultified Ancients of Man U (Noodle Vague), Friday, 9 March 2012 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Not sure: you get one section that I guess can be looked at (esp in light of what is happening in Mexico these days) as state of the nation but there is much more to that bk. Guess I'm doing the 'this author in retrospect is about this' that thomp describes.

Sorta of a point I'm arriving at is you can't be state of the nation and be any good. Most authors I like will have a specific field of things they talk about (which is why when an author publishes a study on jazz or whatever, etc.) but they'll find room for manoeuvre around that.

But they are narrow-minded. Its good to be like that.

i agree that 2666 isn't a SotN book, i singled out that section because i was floundering for contemporary novels i like that might fall into the category.

i'm all for a novel having tight focus but i wdn't want to say it has to be the case, i have a lot of time for the rambling and capacious and picaresque but feel like for some reason those things aren't being done well, now.

I kind of feel it should be possible, and in a way inevitable, just by having a set of characters with varied interests. You'll not get anything comprehensive, but that's okay because neither author nor reader is ever socially omniscient.

What you shouldn't consciously do is aim for it, because then you end up with ciphers instead of characters.

I dunno, maybe I'm not getting at the same thing - but to me 'state of the nation' shouldn't just mean 'what you find in the Home section of a broadsheet'.

Random thughts

broadly speaking I'm with xyzzz, & think this is unlikely to work here and now – one of the reasons it's irresistable I suppose is that the part of lit London with eng lit degrees all know that this sort of thing is backbone of the English novl's victorian heyday.

feel like there's almost inevitably going to be some patrician ventriloquism as member of literary class decides to 'do' a struggling single mother or whatever (oh, 'an illegal immigrant parking warden'. I see); I mean I know 'doing' people is part of the point of The Novel, but the odds just seem so against you pulling it off or multiple voices if you're stalwart of literary london.

'home section' is right, i think - It's a v. journalistic conception of the novel - like it's muddled up with hack 'first draft of history' pomp (eg The Blake Morrison one mentioned upthread is set around the 97 election), and an elevated conception of what novel can/should do.

When is Capital set, Fizzles? I mean apart from while Flouressa Glunt is polishing her sideboard at 11.15 on a Wednesday morning in mid-May etc. Is it 'The Eve Of The Crash' 07/08 or anything?

Alternative/additional genealogy: Feel like Bonfire of the Vanities is nearest american equiv of this form, and might be directly to blame for a good few of the British versions of the last 25 years.

Definitely right re Bonfire. I had a go at it myself recently and was appalled. Wolfe writes amusingly, but not with the care or sympathy a novel demands. The number of times I read the phrase 'aquiline nose'.

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

nah, nothing like, but there's a literary journalist sort who's never quite let go of Bonfire of the Vanities.

maybe we build and knock down stereotypes so quickly now that by the time novelists come to explore them they're stale? I'm not sure. I do remember liking Mr Phillips very much but I think that was due to the affectionate portrait rather than the cultural references.

I enjoyed this book from a few years ago, more in the Peace vein than anything else. It's not 100% successful (he can't really write female characters) but it works pretty well, maybe because its focus is less State of the Nation and more State of Post-Industrial Midlands.

i suddenly remembered Matt Thorne's Eight Minutes Idle which I enjoyed when it was published and is at least partly addressed to a section of "modern life". turns out it's been turned into a movie, i'm not sure how that'll work.

xps the difficulty in getting near 9/11 etc as a thing-for-fiction - there have been attempts, but mostly clunky - suggests that maybe instead we're looking for novelists to move too quickly, if anything

I'd agree with that, there's too much noise around massive events like that as it is, and we don't yet understand where they fit in a historical context - probably more the case with the economic crisis than 9/11 at this juncture, although we're still a bit too close to 9/11 as well. Someone like Roth is usually writing at a distance of at least a couple of decades when he's putting on his Serious Historical Face.

Also the problem I find with modern British state-of-nation fiction is that it usually feels like the author is thinly laying the viewpoints of three or four newspapers up against one another.

agree, and if good novels use fiction to reveal truth, then with 9/11 that's a difficult space to move in while all the conspiracy theories are still circulating. Out of interest, is there a decent novel around the Kennedy assassination, even now?

Libra by Don DeLillo is incredible, I haven't read any others. I doubt I'll need to.

American Tabloid by James Ellroy is a p gd kennedy assassination nov told mainly from the crim's POV

haven't read either but will on those recommendations. they were 25 and 32 years after the event respectively, perhaps the good 9/11 novels will be published after 2026?

according to geoffrey hill culture will unquestionably be vanquished by 2032, so they're going to have to be p quick off the mark

I was going to mention Libra actually, it's excellent, whereas his DeLillo's 9/11 novel Falling Man is ropey as hell. Also Libra's *all about* history from viewed distance vs history as it happens, it encourages you to build up your conspiracy theories and then knocks them down.

never mind all that - I think there's a chance that Lanchester might actually write the thread title at some point:

Mill took his desktop PC out of sleep and navigated to the web page.

Mill is a policeman. Another new character. The first line of his chapter is "Shit flows downhill". A cynical, common-sense policeman? No, wait.

Mill was not, demographically or psychologically, a typical policeman. He was a Classics graduate from Oxford

ffffff... Any advantage you might think this might afford Lanchester, not so far showing conspicuous flair for the indirect free speech of his culturally diverse range of characters, he neatly sidesteps by having him think? in the same neutered, maimed prose, expressive of the same slightly sub-normal fascination with the arbitrary mundane, as everyone else.

The chapter ends with this enigma:

As for the main issue, which was what this whole thing was, Mill's conclusion for the moment was that he didn't have a clue.

Navigated!

There's a very bad bit about the office Mill works in as well but I'm ion a bus at the moment.

That bit about the PC and the webpage reads like a technophobe author doing research via a "for Dummies" book.

<i>Mill took his desktop PC out of sleep and navigated to the web page.</i>

There is some perverse anti-poetry about this now. It's like Lanchester is a white-knuckle, recovering Nabokovian, determinedly sweating out the most awkwardly banal sentences, afraid that at any moment he might freak out into some psychedelic alchemy of the word.

Think you deserve public commendation for your sterling work liveblogging this, Fizzles.

Maybe the introduction of Mills will turn this into a Morse whodunnit? for the remainder.

There is some perverse anti-poetry about this now. It's like Lanchester is a white-knuckle, recovering Nabokovian, determinedly sweating out the most awkwardly banal sentences, afraid that at any moment he might freak out into some psychedelic alchemy of the word.

I genuinely think there's something in that, Stevie. I mean, I think he thinks he's doing something. Take this sentence:

She put the pot of tea, which had now steeped for four minutes, onto the tray, then picked up the tray, then put it down again.

I think he may think that he's detailing the essential details of our daily lives and thought processes. The things that no one else catalogues. I think that is potentially a good idea, really pushed to some sort of avant-garde obsessive level. Unfortunately the tedium of content is matched by the tedium of style, of insight, and character. More importantly, as I say, it's arbitrary, often bizarre, and as a consequence more revelatory of what is in his head when he looks at the world, which unfortunately, to come back to the beginning, is a load of very very boring stuff.

Take this description of the office:

Two dozen Met officers were in constant motion, most of them also talking, joshing, making off-colour jokes, often while simultaneously keying data into computers, or flicking through files, or dialling phone numbers, or eating muffins, or lobbing crumpled paper into the bin, or carrying piles of forms from one end of the office to the other.

He forgot about people chewing the ends of their pens, leaning back on their chairs, holding doors open for people, pinning charts on a cork board...

Then you get into the detail (because you've had to ignore the detail to get through the sentence). I break down the absurd bits in this sentence something like this:

1. "Two dozen Met officers were in constant motion" (something about this makes me want to snigger - suggestive of people sitting at desks flailing their arms about, or running from one end of the office to the other)

2. "Most of them also talking" But not all of them. Some of them, a smaller number, are not talking.

3. "making off-colour jokes" Off-colour jokes! Maybe he is Petunia Howe in disguise.

4. "often while simultaneously keying data into computers". This actually deserves to be broken down into three, as it does the individuals-as-collective absurdity of (1), the strangely diverting non-specific non-detail of (2) ('often while'), and his more general habit of sounding like he's just arrived from an alien planet ('keying data into computers').

3. "eating muffins". 24 policemen in constant motion eating muffins. It's like a mnemonic.

4. "lobbing crumpled paper into a bin" oh come off it, this off the tv or an ad. I mean yes, it happens, but it's the suggestion that somehow it's a telling quotidian detail that drives me nuts (like with the fucking teapot earlier)

5. "or carrying piles of forms from one end of the office to another" Reminds me of the bit in Watt is it? with the milkman on the station platform moving the milk churns from one end of the platform to the other and back?

The proprietor of 51 Pepys Road, the house across the road from Petunia Howe's, was at work in the City of London. Roger Yount sat at his office desk at his bank, Pinker Lloyd, doing sums.

I still love this. Apparently he knows bankers in real life? You wouldn't have thought so. "Hmmm, what would a banker be doing while sitting at their desk? Sums, yes, of course". Presumably followed by writing down what he did at at the weekend and then a butterfly painting.

I think he may think that he's detailing the essential details of our daily lives and thought processes. The things that no one else catalogues. I think that is potentially a good idea, really pushed to some sort of avant-garde obsessive level.

That would be Nicholson Baker territory, but (iirc, it's been a while) Baker manages to find the exceptional within the everyday, he has a kind of autist's eye for the interesting detail that is normally overlooked. Lanchester seems (from these extracts) to focus on the things that are overlooked precisely because they are devoid of such detail and intrinsically banal.

Yes Baker is a whole different moulinex of mackerel.

The use of "sums" suggests there is some kind of irony going on in Lanchester's narrative voice - iirc Peppa Pig goes to visit her Daddy Pig's office in one episode and finds out that he too does "sums" all day (actually I think he tells here he works out "load-bearing tangents") - but... it seems like a very feeble gesture? It's like the opposite of the mock-heroic of Fielding. Mock-banal.

That 'sums' one was slightly unfair of me, because they turn out to be him working out his bonus, so there's a sort of (v lame) joke there.