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John Lanchester has distinguished between his nonfiction and his novels as the line between “things happening in the world” and “the things that won’t leave you alone”. Over the last decade and a half that gap appears to have narrowed. His 2012 bestseller, Capital, used the global economic crisis (explained with characteristic verve and lucidity in the nonfiction Whoops!) to lend a sharply moral edge to a sprawling Dickensian story about the London property bubble, told through the class cross-section of a newly affluent south London street. His 2019 follow-up, The Wall, was a dystopian near-future tale in which rising sea levels have exacted a catastrophic toll: a heavily guarded sea wall encircles a Britain determined to fortify its vanishing coastline and keep out the refugees desperately seeking asylum. In 2019, global sea levels reached a record high.
Lanchester’s satirical chops are on full display in his latest, Look What You Made Me Do, but this time his focus is more personal than political. Set in a recognisably professional – for which read excruciatingly smug – north London peopled by architects and agents, Lanchester’s sixth novel is billed by its publishers as a black comedy.
Kate and Jack have been married for 30 years. Like many long-term couples they have evolved a shared private language, an exclusive and often unkind vernacular of nicknames, references and in-jokes. Phoebe Mull is a generation younger and the writer behind the year’s runaway hit TV show, Cheating, an unapologetically amoral depiction of intergenerational adultery. Their lives appear to be unconnected, until Kate discovers that the details and intimacies that give Phoebe’s series its dark bite bear a striking resemblance to her own life.
It is hard to say more without risking spoilers, but if the novel has a state-of-the-nation agenda, it lies in the inequity between the boomers who have helped themselves to everything and the millennials who must live with the consequences. This is not new territory for Lanchester. In Capital, the battle lines are drawn between those who have profited – mind-bogglingly and usually by dumb luck – from spiralling property values, and those for whom home ownership has become an impossible fantasy. Cold and hungry, the beleaguered young soldiers guarding The Wall know exactly who to blame for their predicament: “the world hadn’t always been like this and … the people responsible … were our parents – them and their generation”.
The generation gap in 2026 shows no sign of narrowing, but Lanchester’s target in Look What You Made Me Do is more opaque. That he has little affection for smug boomers, “an entire generation driving the metaphorical Volvo of self-awarded entitlement”, is very clear. Kate is resolutely and bracingly unlikable: she dismisses female solidarity as “complacent longsuffering sorority masochism”, her closest friend Daphne is a woman she doesn’t really like (though “liking doesn’t really come into it”), and, with no children or job, she has few occupations in her life but her husband (“according to Jack, most of the nicest people don’t do anything much”). The ghastly Jack, boorish, arrogant and the mansplainer to end all mansplainers, is considerably worse. That such people might get their comeuppance is a gratifying notion, except that the alternative proves just as bad. While Phoebe’s withering gaze and mordant wit make her the much more entertaining companion, she is no less self-absorbed and heartless than they are.
Perhaps the central question of the novel is to be found in a discussion of Phoebe’s TV show, Cheating. “Is there a single person in it you don’t hate or is that part of the point?” runs the water-cooler chat. “Are the boomers worse than the millennials or is it the other way round? Who’s more oblivious and spoilt?” These are all questions that make for some tremendously fun set pieces. Lanchester gleefully skewers the chattering classes, from the ubiquity of Ottolenghi to the faux-rural money bubble of Soho Farmhouse. His decision to write in the first person voices of his two female lead characters works mostly, even if the uncomfortable sense that Kate’s happy marriage depends much more than she realises on her willingness to bend herself to Jack’s selfish desires does sit a little uneasily with a male boomer writer at the helm.
Lanchester’s difficulty comes in binding these characters and scenes into something greater than the sum of its parts. His plot is variously implausible and clunkingly predictable, groaning with coincidence. “Anger is more fun than grief. And revenge is better still,” one character gloats late in the book, an aphorism more than proven by centuries of literature. A novel can manage very well without state-of-the-nation themes, but it must add up, on its own terms, to a satisfactory whole. Revenge can be fun or futile, cathartic or self-defeating, but it needs to be earned, to make sense. For all its sharply observed pleasures, Lanchester’s novel fails to give that satisfaction.
