Lanchester, John. Look What You Made Me Do. Norton, New York, 2026. F; 6/26.
“As every grown up in the world knows unexpected things happen all the time.”
(John Lanchester)
The two books by this author (I.O.U.:Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay and The Debt to Pleasure) I’ve reviewed were both good but I think this one is even better. The quote above comes from the financial nonfiction I.O.U.Why Everyone…, and it reflects the common sense Lanchester believes about why things tend unexpectedly to go wrong. But it also applies to this quirky but surprising and allegedly dark (I’m not so sure about that) novel. The characters seem to me a lot less cartoon-like, more realistic, than the main one in Debt to Pleasure and in spite of their selfish viciousness they inspire a questionable empathy for me. A bit like Humbert in Lolita.
Lanchester’s writing is arch and openly ironic. Characters have convincing humanity but at the same time personal flaws that open the question (for me anyway): “Could I do this?” The pleasure in reading is supported by this ambivalence which was missing in his other fiction along with any plot with the ingenuity I found in this story.
Kate and Jack are a fiftysomething upper-middle-class couple and the opening of the story where they joke and socialize with similar friends was so superficially self-satisfied I almost closed the book. But the plot thickened as architect and smart-home aficionado Jack dropped dead. We are told that Kate in university captured Jack when he was the proverbial big man on campus. Trouble was, he was dating another girl. So Kate set a trap to humiliate the girl and ended up dating and then marrying wonderful Jack.
The other couple are Phoebe and Tony, a generation younger than Kate and Jack. Tony is a good-looking teddy bear of a guy who is trying to make it as a musician, Phoebe is a suddenly successful TV writer who has everyone talking about her new series Cheating. Kate, grieving but out socially for the first time hears dialogue from the show and recognizes very idiosyncratic lines that she and her husband shared, which nobody else could know about. Horrified, she concludes Jack must have had an affair with Phoebe and whispered the same endearments into her ear.
Alternating chapters narrated by the two women include one by Phoebe where she says of her parents’ generation that “they are always and permanently all about themselves”. She then goes on to describe her mother as spectacularly dreadful and represents Phoebe’s idea of all of the three types of her mother’s generation, the bitch, the vampire, and the squid:
… the bitch. No need explaining what that is: it’s someone who is routinely and deliberately unpleasant, who says mean things, makes nasty observations, uses the people around her as a scratching post and punch bag.
When you finish any exchange with a vampire, from the most fleeting encounter to the maximum unspeakable horror of a full family Christmas, there is less of you at the end than there was at the beginning. Not just less energy, joy, life et cetera, but less of your fundamental matter.
Do you know someone who makes you aware that they feel terrible, makes you feel that this is your fault, and makes you feel that there’s nothing you can do about it? Know then that you are in the presence of a squid.
Further plot outline would spoil the fun if you enjoy the kind of interaction referred to as being “best served cold”. I did suspect what might be going on but was surprised by its full revelation. And true to Lanchester’s epigraph above the final scene was for me fully unexpected.
A sharp cut above summer beach-reading best sellers. Highly recommended for what it is.
9.2/9.2
