The contemporary, said Jean-Paul Sartre, is something you see disappearing behind you, like the view from a car’s rear window. Any zeitgeist you can capture is already yesterday’s zeitgeist. This is especially true in the online age of total context, when “eras” succeed each other hourly. (I’m in my grumpy middle-aged critic era. But then, I always have been.)
How to capture such fleeting symptoms of the age as Cottagecore, mewing, and Jacob Elordi? None of this has prevented a certain kind of novelist from energetically obeying the original injunction implied by the word, novel.
For this kind of novelist, the contemporary is out there to be hunted, and, if possible, shot and hung on the wall like a moose’s head.
John Lanchester is one such novelist. Which is to say that he is a writer concerned with the now, or with the recently-now. His fiction has a journalistic zip, a reportorial nous. He knows a lot about how the contemporary world works. (He wrote Whoops!, one of the best books about the 2008 financial crisis.) He is also highly imaginative. He does not merely laminate his page with facts. He tells a good story. Best of all, he has a satirist’s interest in class markers and in the psychology of self-betrayal.
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You will almost certainly zip through Look What You Made Me Do, his new novel. (While the book shares a name with Taylor Swift’s worst song, it is not otherwise related to Taylor Swift’s worst song.) It is a contemporary satire of the rich-people-behaving-obnoxiously type. The function of this genre is to sublimate what Nietzsche called ressentiment, the rage that arises from a feeling of powerlessness: a general problem, in the early 21st century. See: Succession, Saltburn, The White Lotus, The Housemaid ... And in literary fiction, Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road, Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood, sundry other examples.
Look What You Made Me Do has two narrators and a great hook. The fact that this hook makes no real sense only comes to matter in the novel’s latter stages. The first narrator, Kate, is married to Jack, an architect. When we first meet them, Kate and Jack are setting off from their north London house to a dinner party in “a house near Notting Hill, or rather two houses, or rather what used to be two terrace houses but had been knocked together to make one single, very fancy, double-sized house[.]” Kate is deeply envious of this house but can’t admit it: “The way I’d put it is to say it’s not Hello! vulgar, but on the other hand it is Architectural Digest vulgar.”
Kate and Jack share private jokes based on old New Yorker cartoons. At the dinner party, Jack delivers an unbearable riff about the popularity of Yotam Ottolenghi: “he has done more damage to this country than the Luftwaffe.” The other guests are a TV producer and his wife, who “did a job-share at the Guardian”. Bored at dinner, Kate thinks: “I wonder if any men ever feel that they are picking up the burden of social obligation like a huge bag of other people’s laundry.”
All of this – Lanchester’s vivisection of the north London middle classes – is tremendously good, uncomfortable, accurate fun. It’s almost a shame that Lanchester has to go and introduce his plot. But his plot starts well. That night, after the dinner party, Jack dies. Kate eventually emerges partway from grief and returns to her book club, where the women are discussing a new TV show, Cheating. Kate watches Cheating, and discovers that it has been stolen wholesale from her life with Jack – it includes not just their private jokes, but the fact that they occasionally had threesomes with escorts.
At this point, we meet the second narrator, Phoebe Mull: the screenwriter behind Cheating. Phoebe is winningly aphoristic and amusingly cruel: “People who want to be liked, turn up early. People who want to be needed, turn up late.” The hook is: how did Phoebe glean so much private knowledge about Kate and Jack? And why did she turn that knowledge into a TV show?
The problem is that there can be no satisfactory – that is, persuasive – answers to these questions. The novel reveals itself, halfway through, to be a revenge story with a generational inflection – Millennials versus Boomers – and the two narrators grow less likable, and therefore more fun, as events unfold. But long before that halfway point, the reader’s suspension of disbelief starts to lurch dangerously close to the ground. Put simply, the plot makes no sense.
On the other hand, there is Lanchester’s eye for the material trappings of bourgeois life, and his ear for the sinuous ways in which Kate and Phoebe recast their sins as justified gestures ... Who needs a logical plot, when you can sit back and luxuriate in pleasures such as these?
Kevin Power is Associate Professor of Literary Practice in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin
