The first time I was meant to interview John Lanchester, we sat in two Zoom rooms waiting for each other – a modern case of Missed Connections. It was an apt mishap for an author intrigued by the ghosts in the machine: his last book, Reality and Other Stories (2020), featured devices such as phones, audiobooks and selfie sticks with minds of their own.
In Look What You Made Me Do, a twisty dark comedy, Lanchester puts people back in the driver’s seat. Kate Hittlestone is a woman in her mid-50s living in north London with her architect husband, Jack, whom she met at Oxford. An art historian, Kate now devotes her time to charity work. She is among the “smug-marrieds”, pleased that her husband looks like “the ‘after’ character” in Viagra ads, until her life is upended by his sudden death.
While Lanchester didn’t set out to write about his father, who died at the age of 57 when Lanchester was 21, “that must be one of the reasons [the book] popped out fairly fully formed”, he tells me from his home in Clapham, now that we’re in the same Zoom room. “On some level, I’d been thinking about it, or processing it, or thinking of ways of making it into a story. Because actually, when someone dies suddenly, it isn’t a story. It’s just this terrible, random thing.”
While Kate is in the throes of grief, the “bigger horror” is yet to come, when a buzzy Netflix series, Cheating, becomes the talk of the town. In the show, billed as autobiographical, a screenwriter has an affair with an older architect. To Kate’s shock, the show reproduces her marital intimacies with Jack – including pet names and sex games – verbatim. “It was impossible,” Kate thinks. “And yet there was only one explanation. Which meant it was not just possible but certain.”
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It’s not just the humiliation of being cheated on and having the secrets of her marriage exposed that sting, but the betrayal of the private language she shared with Jack. “I think there’s a particular idiolect that marriages have,” Lanchester explains. “I was interested by that, particularly in its loss.”
The book toggles between Kate’s first-person perspective and that of Cheating’s spiky screenwriter, the 30-year-old Phoebe, with the two women’s narratives essentially competing for posthumous possession of Jack. “People sometimes separate form and function, but I think they’re very much a linked thing,” Lanchester says. “The person who gets to tell the story determines the meaning of the story.”
Lanchester has been playing with narration since his prize-winning 1996 debut novel The Debt to Pleasure, the confession of a murderous psychopath disguised as a cookbook. The hilarious Mr Phillips (2000) relates a day in the life (and the head) of a sex-obsessed accountant, and in Fragrant Harbour (2002), an expat looks back on his life in Hong Kong. Capital (2012), later adapted for television, is a state-of-the-nation novel about the impact of the financial crash on multiple characters. The Booker-longlisted The Wall (2019), a dystopian novel about climate refugees, used the first person to convey immediacy.
Look What You Made Me Do is dedicated to Lanchester’s wife, Miranda Carter, the author of acclaimed biographies and, as MJ Carter, historical detective novels. Although there are some similarities – the couple also met at Oxford – the novel “couldn’t be less autobiographical,” Lanchester takes pains to point out, although he admits with a sly grin that he toyed with giving the protagonists their names as a “joke about autofiction”. While “Miranda was completely up for it”, his editor talked him out of it, worried about it taking over the discourse about the book.
Despite the grief at its core, like much of Lanchester’s oeuvre, Look What You Made Me Do is mordantly funny (Capital earned him a nomination for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic literature). “One of the spines of English literature is the comic,” he says. He laments that more recently, “there has been this slight divide between furrowed-browed, serious, capital-L literature and the comic or entertaining strand, and I think there’s no need for that. Things can be funny and serious at the same time.”
I mean, 500 words a day is a laughably low target, but the point is that then you can do it the next day. And the day after, and the day after that
— John Lanchester
Lanchester deliberately held back the humour in The Wall, in order to convey the oppressive nature of climate collapse and “that the people in it have no agency,” he explains. “We’re hard-wired to want agency in the world, and then there’s this brutal fact that in quite a lot of the most important things in life, you actually don’t have it.”
Family Romance, a 2007 memoir about his parents, was also more serious. “I think that humour can be a distancing mechanism. And I didn’t want to distance myself from it.” His nonfiction books also include two titles demystifying finance: Whoops!: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay (2010) and How to Speak Money (2014), which came out of his research for Capital.
A contributing editor at the London Review of Books, Lanchester’s long-form pieces have covered topics as diverse as bitcoin, Neanderthals and the Suez canal. Whether he’s writing for “work” (journalism) or what he describes as the “play” of fiction, Lanchester follows Graham Greene’s technique of stopping after hitting a certain wordcount target each day (500 words for fiction; 1,000 for nonfiction; and 1,500 for journalism) – the idea being that the unconscious keeps working in the interim and you know where to pick up when you begin again.
“I mean, 500 is a laughably low target,” says Lanchester, “but the point is that then you can do it the next day. And the day after, and the day after that. And I found the hard way that that’s how novels get written. For me, it’s not a mad burst of energy, it’s an effort that I can sustain over days, and it’s actively helpful to be mid-thought.”
The idea for the plot of Look What You Made Me Do – the backwards and forwards over a couple’s private language following a sudden death – came to Lanchester in the middle of the night during the pandemic – he shows me the notebook page on which it was scrawled, with “novel” at the top. Kate’s widowhood, in which she is buoyed by friends, is very different from how his mother was treated when his father died in the early 1980s, Lanchester shares. “This friendship group, to use the modern term … they’re not necessarily all there for you. You’re a package deal, and that was definitely something that happened to my mother.”
Lanchester’s father was British, and his mother, who died in 1988, was Irish, from Co Mayo. She was a born storyteller, Lanchester says, “but she was also good at not telling stories. The two things quite often go together. Storytelling is often a form of misdirection.” The facts about her life that he discovered after her death, including two stints as a nun and having lied about her age in order to marry his father, are detailed in Family Romance.
Even more formative, however, he says, was a feeling of dislocation. “Every writer I’ve ever known has some sense of being displaced or dislocated, whether it’s class, gender, ethnicity, geography, history, ability, disability, cognitive divergence, whatever … everyone has some way in which they don’t quite feel they fit in.”
Born in Hamburg, Lanchester was raised primarily in Hong Kong, where his father worked at HSBC. “Being brought up mainly in Asia, with both my parents being from very different kinds of place, and my mother’s background in particular being wildly different … I think it’s one of the reasons I ended up being a writer.”
We reflect on the extraordinary shifts in the industry over his 30-year career. “I always wanted to be a writer,” he says. “I didn’t exactly think it was writing with a freshly dipped quill pen, but did think it was basically a kind of fixed world.” Instead, he’s had “a front seat of this technological revolution in every aspect of production, distribution, connection with [your audience], I mean, everything.”
Machine learning is putting further pressure on the industry, as it is in the world of work more broadly. “It’s a hell of a shift to have happened in basically the last year or so.”
AI taking over entry-level jobs will only exacerbate the tensions between boomers and millennials, a persistent theme for Lanchester. Capital and The Wall both featured the young paying for the mistakes of previous generations. Cheating, a journalist writes, is “very strong on the mutual loathing of millennials and boomers”. The title of Look What You Made Me Do does not, however, come from the Taylor Swift song, Lanchester confirms; it appeared already as the name of a section describing his mother in Family Romance. “I flirted with the idea of saying [Swift] got the idea from me, but I don’t think I could get away with that,” he says, grinning again. “I’d love to say that with a straight face if I could, but no.”
The novel also takes on cancel culture, as Phoebe and her partner, Tony, are subjected to defamatory online comments. It’s a theme that cropped in Reality and Other Stories as well. Lanchester himself stays off social media. “I used to lurk on Twitter. I stopped years ago … There’s no question it fragments your attention,” he says. “But also, I don’t think this is a universal law, this is just how I see it: if you take a while writing a book, and that’s your claim on people’s attention … It’s the summary of what I was thinking and feeling about a particular subject over a stretch of time, and it’s really the best I can do, and I’m asking for your attention for it, I think it’s then confusing to mix that with ‘or you can have a two-sentence joke I wrote in 30 seconds when I was sitting on the toilet’.”
Having read it twice with great pleasure, I can confirm that Look What You Made Me Do is well worth your attention.
