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

“Jess popped to the toilet to tweet” is almost the Platonic ideal of a Lanchestrian sentence in its mix of try-hard banality and chuntering prose rhythm. The only reason I can think of for its being approvingly cited in this review is that there's an entire genre of novels out there which garners publicity largely as a result of making broadsheet journalists feel like they're both very smart and with their finger right on the literary pulse.

I deliberately didn't post that Harris article because I didn't want to derail the thread with Corbyn chat but that's precisely the sort of clapping-seal approval I was getting at. The review he links to describes the novel as "an episode of Black Mirror as scripted by a “woke” Martin Amis" which is pretty much the least appealing thing I can possibly imagine.

I might actually read it.

by ilx law you have to liveblog it if you do

terrible sentences are ok because it's a madly funny rollicking farce with a cast mainly made up of scathingly ventriloquised grotesques

i appreciate yr point re: Harris Matt, hopefully this is a thread where we can leave that scathingly ventriloquised grotesque outside

A friend of mine has informed me in response to this that his wife is reading the following https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/02/the-power-naomi-alderman-review

Same bloody reviewer too

Jesus christ that Byers thing sounds like some hideous lovechild spawned from the combined loins of J.G. Ballard and Tom Sharpe.

'The Power' is hugely enjoyable fwiw.

Where's the line with these satires though? I guess it's all about execution

Well the Alderman isn't a satire, which is one thing. It didn't make me think particularly deeply but it was a lot of fun.

I’m better at dialogue. It took me a long time to figure out what it was for: it’s to give information to the reader in a different form so their eye doesn’t get wearied by the paragraphs. I used to think it was about imitating the way people speak.

Sebastian Faulks in an interview published today. Coming from somebody else I might think this was wilful provocation but he's being sincere. This is just such a weird binary to make

I've never read him but Jesus fuck that is not what dialogue is "for".

Yes, I read Wodehouse for the scintillating information

Is William Boyd anything like Lanchester?

I’ve only read one of his, Restless, iirc it read like a cackhanded SOTN type book with requisite banalities, albeit in thriller-ish form

i haven't really read any Faulks but he's fucking terrible so this checks out

Boyd used to be good, except for his short stories. He seems to have decided he wants to be a commercial thriller writer now, though, and it does not suit him. The rot really set in when he published a commissioned short story for some car company and then a James Bond novel.

Jonathan Coe has a new book called "Middle England". That is all.

Coe is rather more capable of carrying this sort of thing off, I think.

I've no great yen to go back to What a Carve Up!, tho I enjoyed it at the time. The blurb I've seen for this doesn't look promising and I'm not sure he should keep repeating the trick.

"In the next issue: John Lanchester on Agatha Christie"

:(

I have enjoyed SOME Lanchester writing. I have never enjoyed any Christie.

congratulations on

christie never for one second attempted a "state of england" novel obv* but i think but in passing you can often pick up a better sense of small currents active in the (non-marginal) society of her time than you ever really can from the try-hard boys

*except maybe the early tuppence and tommy one (forget title)** where they unmask the MAN BEHIND THE MAN BEHIND THE BOLSHEVIKS
**this is a built-in problem with AC, an evident mark of a limit

I might have to read that.

One mention of Bolsheviks and xyzzzz is sold.

THE MAN BEHIND THE MAN BEHIND THE MAN BEHIND THE BOLSHEVIKS to thread

if you want to sell me anything don't give me this or that just tell me there are communists in it (mark s if you have it I will borrow thank you)

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n24/john-lanchester/the-case-of-agatha-christie

:-)

"It’s not as if anyone, even her hardest-core fans, ever makes any claims for Christie as a writer per se. Her prose is flat and functional, her characters on a spectrum between types, stereotypes and caricatures; so, you might well ask, what’s to like?"

looooool

lololol

Agatha Christie is, according to her website, ‘the world’s bestselling novelist’. That is a difficult claim to prove, and the official site makes no attempt to do so, but when you think that she wrote 66 novels and 14 short story collections, all of them still in print in multiple formats in dozens of languages, you can begin to see how she got to a total of one billion copies sold in English and another billion-odd in translation. Oh, and the longest-running play in the history of the world. Sceptics would be well advised to admit defeat on the issue of whether or not she sold more books than any other novelist ever has, and instead pivot to a more interesting question...

indeed..

EVENT: John Lanchester, LRB contributing editor and author of CAPITAL, will join us at St George's Bloomsbury for a special event to celebrate his latest book THE WALL, on 23 Jan. Book here: https://t.co/lyvJ9Kt5HA pic.twitter.com/hRCYlGV4UD

— LRB Bookshop (@LRBbookshop) December 13, 2018

FAP?

ps i need to reread the christie piece when not semi-dozing in bed past midnight but i thought it was in fact non-awful and perhaps even moving a little way towards interesting (compared e.g. to the quote edmund wilson piece which has always been bad not good)

It was interesting, just odd to read him write so much about style.

I don't find him at all convincing when he tries to critique style or close read, surprise surprise, but there is a kernel of thoughts worth reading in that piece.

This wasn't very good. Essentially the LRB are terrible at conveying what might be good, about something that isn't as well written as *whatever literary thing* they think the LRB readership likes (love toooo beeeee patronised to) so Lanchester gets into an argument that the conventions of genre are approaching some kind of modernist framework that simply doesn't land (can we flip this around? I mean Cervantes was playing on specific types of romantic novels at the time? What pulp did Joyce read? Molly's Requiem didn't come out of nowhere. What was Melville mining when writing about whales - which was a jumping of point for all sorts of things that had nothing to do with whales) leading to that awful moment where he is dutifully listing the half dozen or so of her best books like some accountant - like does that matter if its easy to read/re-read anyway. He dismisses any of her more political works, but if we are going to praise her like this why not start with those anyway?

In this piece you could map where literature has just gone wrong with a certain section of the public. There is a...basic misunderstanding on how fiction works, what it can do or more importantly what it gives, despite these people's attempts to kill it - and they might succeed.

I want to re-read Auden's essay on detective fiction because I don't know if that was any better. Might report back.

I think Beckett used to read Agatha Christie? Certainly he read detective fiction, "Molloy" shows an influence.

Yep, there's this famous reading list where Beckett mentions (unfavourably) a Christie:

http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/the-books-samuel-beckett-really-liked.html

Talking of Ward Fowler, I wonder if he ever watched Columbo.

i mean, i think the refinement of the formalist puzzle-making element, to the exclusion of most the other factors in the pleasure and/or value of writing&reading fiction, *does* fit somewhere alongside the modernist project, but in a way that recasts how we shd think about modernism... which is at least partly to do with a response to the industrial encroachment of genre fiction forms

(years ago jenny turner wrote a long piece on lord of the rings noting the various ways its innovations could be tidied up into the categories within modernism that joyce in particular also had assigned him, except joyce is doing THIS -- good? -- but tolkien is doing THAT -- not so good?)

i still haven't reread this un-tired but just noting before anyone else does: lol at him making the joke abt the only author he's read a book by under no less than three different titles, but only giving us the politically non-problematic one (= and then there were none) (= also the one that gives the plot away… ) and dodging the original unsayable title even by hint. you have to know this book's history to know what he's evadiing…

molloy, malone dies and just one more thing

xp he does say he has read that particular book under three different titles IIRC, but that's still a reference for the true headz really

Obviously he's never seen the 80s TV movie version where the two heroes escape in a helicopter at the end.

It's interesting that Lanchester mentions Dorothy L Sayers - they have a lot in common, in that they're both successful bad writers who write overlong novels full of pedestrian detail passed off as canny observation. Obviously I'd rather be stuck on a desert island with Gaudy Night than Capital, but it's not much of a choice...

disagree, Sayers is the best of the golden era detective fiction writers (with the possible exception of Ngaio Marsh) IMO, but Gaudy Night isn't a great example of her work

it's years since i read much allingham to be fair but i think *all* the tec fic ppl he discusses are more able as writers and more observant detail-wise than lanchester is himself

(i am also v pro sayers)

The thing that confused me most was his choice to pull three extracts - one each from Allingham, Sayers and Christie - to show that Christie's lack of style makes her less "dated", while the other two's ambitions (stylistic and I suppose political) imprison them in their own time. But the stuff he quotes from Allingham and Sayers is evocative, summons up some character, gives you at least a faint interest in what's going on, while the Christie excerpt, divorced from its original context, is literally some "the butler came in and said SOMEONE'S BEEN MURDERED" self-parody, it couldn't possibly sound any creakier. Of course Lanchester's argument is that Christie's insistence on the mystery to the exclusion of everything else is what makes her great but in that case surely using an excerpt is doing the writer a disservice from the get-go.

I also didn't think much of his assertions on what genre fiction is "supposed" to do, the marking off of boundaries against anything too aesthetically or politically ambitious. Really don't think we need to mount a defense of genre fiction in 2018, those battles have been won ages ago, but it still feels like Lanchester's being somewhat patronizing about what he believes to be genre fiction's place.

(I also don't really think much of "dated" as a criticism in the first place, a book belonging to a time and a place is part of the appeal, and yeah that includes when I'm "reading for pleasure").

"There’s also a new novel from John Lanchester: The Wall (Faber, March) is set in a dystopian Britain under siege from the Others. Written in chilling, affectless prose, it’s like The Road meets Never Let Me Go – smart, speculative fiction from one of our most brilliantly wide-ranging minds."

affectless prose as a sort of commendation! lack of affect is typically seen as a psychological problem of course. and while affectless prose can have an aesthetic and emotional purpose certainly, lanchester’s “badly translated instruction manual” style doesn’t really seem equipped for that sort of nuance.