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Summary
Summary
Celebrated novelist John Lanchester ("an elegant and wonderfully witty writer"--New York Times) returns with an epic novel that captures the obsessions of our time. It's 2008 and things are falling apart: Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers are going under, and the residents of Pepys Road, London--a banker and his shopaholic wife, an old woman dying of a brain tumor and her graffiti-artist grandson, Pakistani shop owners and a shadowy refugee who works as the meter maid, the young soccer star from Senegal and his minder--are receiving anonymous postcards reading "We Want What You Have." Who is behind it? What do they want? Epic in scope yet intimate, capturing the ordinary dramas of very different lives, this is a novel of love and suspicion, of financial collapse and terrorist threat, of property values going up and fortunes going down, and of a city at a moment of extraordinary tension.
Author Notes
John Lanchester was the deputy editor of the London Review of Books and the restaurant critic for the London Observer.
He is the author of a second novel, Mr. Phillips, and his work has appeared in The New Yorker.
He lives in London.
(Publisher Provided)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Lanchester (The Debt to Pleasure) follows on the heels of 2010's I.O.U., a nonfiction dissection of the great recession, by covering much of the same territory in this barely allegorical study of class conflict and reversal of fortune. The affluent residents of London's Pepys Road suburb are a handy cross-section of late-2007 types: Roger Yount, a banker riding high and counting on his bonus to cover mortgages and the needs of his spoiled wife; Shahid, the son of Pakistani immigrants working the family shop; the 17-year old soccer prodigy Freddy Kamo; Quentina Mkfesi, an educated Zimbabwean refugee turned traffic warden; the elderly Petunia Howe, living repository of Pepys Road's postwar rise; and Petunia's grandson, a Banksy-type artist named Smitty. This is just a sample of the cast, most of whom begin receiving mysterious cards reading "We Want What You Have." Like clockwork, the quality of life on Pepys Road goes south, with arrests, injuries, illnesses, and financial undoing. But it's hard to care, with predictable and seldom insightful plot threads, and Lanchester reducing his characters to their socio-economic parameters as surely as the market itself. The result is an obsequious, transparent attempt at an epochal "financial crash" novel that is as thin as a 20-dollar bill. Agent: Caradoc King, AP Watt. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Renowned for his sharp humor and impeccable style, British writer Lanchester, winner of the E. M. Forster Award, presents an exceptionally capacious and involving tale about disparate lives in turmoil on London's Pepys Road. Originally a working-class enclave, by 2007 Pepys Road's property values have vaulted sky-high, accompanied by feverish gentrification, most lavishly at Number 51, where banker Roger Yount shrugs off his angry wife's exorbitant spending. While Arabella keeps Zbigniew, a Polish builder, busy redecorating, nothing visible has changed in decades at Number 42, home to the street's oldest resident, widowed Petunia Howe. A young soccer prodigy from Senegal is staying at Number 27. Pakistani Ahmed Kamal owns the shop on the corner. Meter maid Quentina Mkfesi is a Zimbabwean refugee. Smitty, a guerrilla street artist in the mode of the real-life Banksy, keeps his ties to Pepys Road secret. These separate lives gradually converge with profound consequences as each Pepys Road residence begins receiving unnerving postcards carrying the anonymous message, We Want What You Have. Lanchester makes us care deeply about his imperiled characters and their struggles, traumatic and ludicrous, as he astutely illuminates the paradoxes embedded in generosity and greed, age and illness, financial crime and religious fanaticism, immigration, exile, and terror. A remarkably vibrant and engrossing novel about what we truly value.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
In "Capital," a modern offshoot of juicy social satires like Trollope's novel "The Way We Live Now," John Lanchester puts two of his characters in a compartment of the London Eye, the Ferris wheel that went up on the south bank of the Thames to celebrate the millennium. Its the spring of 2008, a sunny day for once, and a Polish builder named Zbigniew and a Hungarian nanny named Matya are on a date. Though Britain is reeling from the double whammy of global economic woes and terrorism jitters, Zbigniew and Matya take in their bird's-eye view with no special feeling of unease, apart from a twinge of motion sickness. On terra firma, both work for wealthy homeowners on a gentrified street called Pepys Road in the up-and-coming South London neighborhood of Clapham. At the beginning of the 21st century, before the bursting of the real estate bubble, property values on Pepys Road had soared - even for the modest end house, owned by a Muslim family, that holds a corner shop, and even for the crumbling terraced house owned by an elderly grandmother, which hasn't had a change of linoleum, wallpaper or electrical wiring in 50 years. Owning property there, Lanchester writes, "was like being in a casino in which you were guaranteed to be a winner." Lately, though, all is not well on Pepys Road. The high rollers' holiday bonuses aren't secure, cash in hand is getting scarce, and ominous postcards have been arriving in every mail slot, reading: "We Want What You Have." If that weren't alarming enough, a young man in a hoodie has been seen lurking in the dawn hours. We all know what that means. Lanchester, a brainy, pleasure-loving polymath, is a novelist, memoirist and journalist who writes sagely and elegantly about food, family, culture, technology and money. He's still best known for his delectably wicked first novel, "The Debt to Pleasure," which blends murder with gourmandise. But he has also written a well-reasoned nonfiction book entitled "I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay," which closely analyzes the current financial collapse. Now, with "Capital," he readjusts his sights and zooms out, framing a larger, more inclusive picture that shows how the easymoney era affected not just greedy speculators but the society that fattened around them. Lanchester's assured, detailed overview of today's Britain recalls another London eye - not the Ferris wheel but Private Eye, the satirical publication that has taken the pulse of the country's body politic for half a century. If the task of a well-meaning newspaper (as it's often said) is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, then the mission of Private Eye is broader: to afflict anyone, famous or obscure, who seems to deserve scrutiny, censure or mockery. Journalists and politicos can't help reading the magazine, even when they themselves are skewered in its pages. Its regular features carve British behavior into attackable, overlapping compartments: real estate (Nooks & Corners), banking (In the City), politics (HP Sauce and Rotten Boroughs), journalism (Street of Shame) and so on. Lanchester's novel integrates all these spheres and more. Reading "Capital" is like getting a crash course in the transformation of British mores and class distinctions, which otherwise might require a decade of remedial Private Eye-reading to decode. The regulars on Pepys Road include the Younts (a rich banker and his spoiled wife); the Kamals (the Muslim shopkeepers): Freddy and Patrick Kamo (a teenage soccer star and his protective father, scooped out of Senegal and deposited in a luxurious house for Premier League players); Petunia Howe (a little old lady of the Ealing Studios variety, whose grandson, Smitty, is an underground art provocateur); and a Zimbabwean traffic warden, Quentina Mkfesi, "the most unpopular woman in Pepys Road," who seeks out expensive cars to ticket in order to win bets with her colleagues at Control Services (the flashiest one nabbed wins a pint or a £5 note). How can such disparate characters possibly be connected? Like it or not, they all share in the aura and onus of the real estate that surrounds them in a neighborhood where, Lanchester writes, "the houses were now like people, and rich people at that, imperious, with needs of their own that they were not shy about having serviced." All the characters have something to lose; many also have something to hide. At 40, Roger Yount, a financier in the City, is just old enough to be mystified by the number-crunching tricks the younger staffers at Pinker Lloyd perform with ease. His ignorance and bluff good nature can't shield him from risk. Roger's venal wife, Arabella, spews a litany of complaints that evoke the Private Eye column "Polly Filler," in which a fatuous twit moans about her useless husband and her lazy au pairs. In a similar vein, Arabella derides Roger as a "clueless husband who had no idea what she did." Nevertheless, Lanchester makes it clear that in a London that lacks self-indulgent people like the Younts, struggling people like Zbigniew and Matya would be jobless. Arabella, he allows, was "in her way resilient. She had the toughness of her obliviousness." He has more sympathy for Ahmed and Rohinka Kamal, humble, hardworking immigrants whose tender regard for their children, kindness to their customers and struggles with Ahmed's hotheaded relatives give the novel its greatest tension and heart. When Ahmed's younger brother goes into a devout phase (faked, in Ahmed's opinion), hiding the alcohol in the family shop because "Muslims were not supposed to blah blah," Ahmed fumes: "As if everybody in the family were not well aware of these facts and also well aware of the economic necessities at work." Patrick and Freddy Kamo respond differently to London's economic ambience. The father loathes its strident materialism and yearns to return to Africa, but Freddy finds it "delightful" that the shop windows teem with covetable objects, "bought, and placed, and groomed, and shaped, and washed clean, and put on display as if the whole city was for sale" - including the citizens themselves, who dress at all times as if they are in costume, "even the beggars." FREDDY is on to something. Pepys Road's oldest inhabitant. Petunia Howe, dons her granny get-up daily without a notion that anyone would think of it as a costume, but her grandson, a Banksy imitator, wears a suit and tie as a disguise so he can infiltrate art parties unrecognized. Even for an aesthetic mischief maker like himself, he reflects, "art was a business," so "it was good to sniff around, to look at the players." At least Quentina, the traffic warden, can't be accused of sartorial artifice; her job demands that she wear a uniform. In the eventful year the novel spans, the residents of Pepys Road stagger from one trial to another and the postcard onslaught increases in frequency and nastiness, bringing with it fears that the campaign might sink everyone's property values . . . and might have a link to Islamoterrorism. Even as the homeowners find it increasingly ludicrous that anyone would covet their precarious security, a mood of suspicion mounts. Early on, Petunia Howe had joked to Ahmed Kamal, who walked her home after she fainted in his shop, "When you're my age, nobody wants what you have." Ahmed had laughed, but her question lingers throughout the pages of this nuanced portrait of a country in flux. What does anyone on Pepys Road possess that can be defended? And what can anyone, anywhere, be sure of in an age when "safe as houses" has lost all its meaning? Owning a property on Pepys Road 'was like being in a casino in which you were guaranteed to be a winner.' Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
Guardian Review
Capital - a big name for a big, fat London novel - arrives in the bookshops with a fair wind behind it, looking like the book John Lanchester was born to write. Lanchester is probably still best known as a novelist for his funny and exhaustingly brilliant 1996 debut The Debt to Pleasure, the confessions of a homicidal foodie, cast in the form of a series of menus; his hero, Tarquin Winot, was a kind of Humbert Humbert reinvented in a broader comic key. But over the years Lanchester has made the surprising transition from Nabokovian warbler to all-seeing finance nerd. Since 2008 he has been writing excellent journalism about the banking crisis. His last book, Whoops!, was a primer on the subject for people who don't read the business pages. That isn't a dismissive description: on the contrary, it was so good largely because it explained things from first principles; his outsider's perspective meant that he described the issues clearly without the usual obscuring jargon, and reiterated the vital bits you'd forgotten just as your mind began to boggle. Lanchester, who is the son of a banker, is extremely clever, and has a great talent for understanding the ways in which the world works. He predicted "a financial disaster of global-systemic proportions" in early 2008, long before most civilians, and his calls since then have been consistently, gloomily, accurate. All this, though, was merely a subject that he "stumbled across" while researching his latest fiction, described by his publishers as a "post-crash state-of-the-nation novel". In the prologue of Capital, a hooded figure is seen moving "softly and slowly along an ordinary-looking street in south London", filming the houses in which the large cast of main characters live or work: Roger Yount, an investment banker; Zbiegniew, a Polish builder; Matya, a Hungarian nanny; Freddy Kano, a young Senegalese professional footballer; the Kamals, a British Pakistani family who run the corner shop; Quentina, a Zimbabwean traffic warden; and Petunia, an elderly working-class woman - the last of the aborigines. The story begins just before Roger's bonus is revealed to him in December 2007; it ends in November 2008, with the world economy grinding to a halt. The opening of Capital is strikingly original. It seems that the real protagonists are not the people but the Victorian houses on Pepys Road. An omniscient narrator traces their history - built by a Cornish developer and Irish labourers in the late 19th century; first inhabited by clerks and other members of the "aspiring not-too-well-off". Next the Caribbean immigrants arrive, then the upper-middle classes with their open-plan kitchens and loft conversions and, finally, the bankers. The effect is a little like a Larkin poem ("Many, many people had fallen in and out of love; a young girl had had her first kiss, an old man had exhaled his last breath, a solicitor on the way back from the Underground station after work had looked up at the sky, swept blue by the wind, and had a sudden sense of religious consolation . . .") - but "fluent in money", as the book has it: "For the first time in history, the people who lived on the street were . . . rich. The thing which made them rich was the very fact that they lived in Pepys Road." The early chapters are equally exciting, if more conventional. In an entertaining scene with a debt to The Bonfire of the Vanities, we see Roger totting up his outgoings - weekday nanny, weekend nanny, Lexus, old vicarage in Wiltshire, and so on - and concluding that "if he didn't get his million-pound bonus this year he was at genuine risk of going broke". In another, we're given a bracing tutorial on the parking tickets racket. Meanwhile, the inhabitants of Pepys Road start receiving postcards of their houses, bearing the menacing message: "We Want What You Have". At this point, the reader starts to think that this might be it: the novel of the great asset bubble, of London's disastrous love affair with funny money. But then, gradually, the disappointment sets in. There is a constant clamour for novelists to "take on big contemporary questions", as a recent Guardian opinion piece put it - to leave the Hampstead dinner parties and the safe historical settings behind, and write the Novel For Our Times. Actually, these books get written all the time, from Margaret Drabble's schematic portraits of the 1970s to Jonathan Coe's of the 1980s and Blake Morrison or Richard T Kelly's uneven sagas of the New Labour years, right up to the recent flood of credit crunch literature. The problem is that they're not usually very good, for quite straightforward reasons: creating and managing a large, varied and realistic cast of characters is very hard for an individual novelist to do, particularly now that society is so diverse. When working outside their own experience, novelists tend to fall back on recycled journalism, contrivance and cartoon. Even Tom Wolfe, with his prodigious eye for resonant detail and ear for spoken language, has a lot of trouble producing rounded characters. Of course good novels do paint memorable portraits of the societies in which they're set; but they tend to work much better when they're anchored in a distinctive individual sensibility or subculture - as books as varied as American Pastoral, Trainspotting, The Line of Beauty, Money or Disgrace show. The panoramic novel, by contrast, is extremely hard to do well. Lanchester's own career bears this out: his second book, Mr Phillips (2000), about a sacked accountant wandering around the capital, is wonderful - an inspired daydream about sex, statistics and the strangeness of ordinary London life. Whereas his mini-epic about Hong Kong, Fragrant Harbour (2002), is interesting and likeable but in some crucial respects lifeless. At any rate, the recent fashion for neo-Victorian condition-of-England novels in the vein of Little Dorrit or The Way We Live Now - featuring a range of emblematic intersecting lives and at least one City villain - looks unlikely to produce any great works of art. These books seem basically programmatic and unoriginal, fatally in hock to the news agenda. It's depressing that both Capital and Sebastian Faulks's effort, A Week in December, feature such a similar cast of characters: one rogue trader; one Asian male suspected of terrorism; one footballer. Lanchester has an illegal Zimbabwean immigrant, a human rights lawyer and an eastern European nanny; so does Amanda Craig in her London novel, Hearts and Minds. Half an hour's state-of-the-nation brainstorming, you feel, might have produced these dramatis personae. Capital is, like most of these books, seriously undertaken and solidly researched. Lanchester has a decent stab at describing what it must be like to run a corner shop, or to be detained under terrorism laws, or to leave a shack in Senegal to play alongside world-famous footballers. The banking sections are the most enjoyable; but fiction, as Lanchester himself has pointed out, has been beggared by reality in this area, and his story isn't a patch on, say, Michael Lewis or Andrew Ross Sorkin's non-fiction versions. The main problem is that his characters never really transcend their origins; they play whatever structural role is allotted to them, and do little more than that. At best, they have substance without vitality: as Virginia Woolf said of Arnold Bennett, he tries "to hypnotize us into the belief that, because he has made a house, there must be a person living there". At worst, they are caricatures. Roger's wife Arabella, for instance, is a lady who lunches - a spa-obsessed harpy who seems to be starring in her own slightly mirthless episode of Absolutely Fabulous There's a creeping mood of aesthetic defeatism about the whole project. Lanchester's writing generally tends towards the bathetic: "Actually it was a good sandwich," runs a typical sentence. But though this can be very effective, there's a drone about the prose here, with too much free indirect style in which the characters' thoughts sound like the novelist's. And there's a lot of slightly lazy repetition: "Parker, the boy she had been going out with ever since they kissed at a sixth-form dance on a hot June night back at sixth-form college." Plotwise, Lanchester has chosen not to have the staple set-piece of the panoramic novel: the climactic scene where all the disparate characters meet. This has the advantage of being true to London - where the paths of neighbours often never cross - but it leaves him with an episodic, soapy story whose meaning always threatens to become clear, but never quite does. All in all, Capital is a diverting read. It holds your attention all the way to its strangely inconsequential ending, and will probably sell well (Faulks's state-of-the-nationer took more than pounds 4m). But if you want to read John Lanchester's great London novel, then read Mr Phillips To order Capital for pounds 12.49 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop - Theo Tait Capital - a big name for a big, fat London novel - arrives in the bookshops with a fair wind behind it, looking like the book John Lanchester was born to write. Lanchester is probably still best known as a novelist for his funny and exhaustingly brilliant 1996 debut The Debt to Pleasure, the confessions of a homicidal foodie, cast in the form of a series of menus; his hero, Tarquin Winot, was a kind of Humbert Humbert reinvented in a broader comic key. But over the years Lanchester has made the surprising transition from Nabokovian warbler to all-seeing finance nerd. Since 2008 he has been writing excellent journalism about the banking crisis. His last book, Whoops!, was a primer on the subject for people who don't read the business pages. That isn't a dismissive description: on the contrary, it was so good largely because it explained things from first principles; his outsider's perspective meant that he described the issues clearly without the usual obscuring jargon, and reiterated the vital bits you'd forgotten just as your mind began to boggle. Lanchester, who is the son of a banker, is extremely clever, and has a great talent for understanding the ways in which the world works. He predicted "a financial disaster of global-systemic proportions" in early 2008, long before most civilians, and his calls since then have been consistently, gloomily, accurate. All this, though, was merely a subject that he "stumbled across" while researching his latest fiction, described by his publishers as a "post-crash state-of-the-nation novel". In the prologue of Capital, a hooded figure is seen moving "softly and slowly along an ordinary-looking street in south London", filming the houses in which the large cast of main characters live or work: Roger Yount, an investment banker; Zbiegniew, a Polish builder; Matya, a Hungarian nanny; Freddy Kano, a young Senegalese professional footballer; the Kamals, a British Pakistani family who run the corner shop; Quentina, a Zimbabwean traffic warden; and Petunia, an elderly working-class woman - the last of the aborigines. The story begins just before Roger's bonus is revealed to him in December 2007; it ends in November 2008, with the world economy grinding to a halt. There's a creeping mood of aesthetic defeatism about the whole project. Lanchester's writing generally tends towards the bathetic: "Actually it was a good sandwich," runs a typical sentence. But though this can be very effective, there's a drone about the prose here, with too much free indirect style in which the characters' thoughts sound like the novelist's. And there's a lot of slightly lazy repetition: "Parker, the boy she had been going out with ever since they kissed at a sixth-form dance on a hot June night back at sixth-form college." - Theo Tait.
Library Journal Review
The elderly Patricia Howe has a grandson named Smitty who does famously anonymous artworks in the public sphere that border on vandalism. Roger Yount, who works in the City, will likely go broke if he doesn't get an expected million-pound bonus, even as his shallowly consumerist wife plans her own Christmas getaway and hires ambitious Polish worker Bogdan (really named Zbigniew) to do more home improvements. Michael "Mickey" Lipton-Miller rents a house to a promising young football star from Senegal and his dad, while down the street Ahmed Kamal runs a shop with the help of family that includes dreamy pretend-rebel brother Shadid. Meanwhile, Quentina, an educated woman from Zimbabwe, hands out parking tickets but as an illegal keeps her head down. What do they have in common? They're all associated with Pepys Road in South London, where residents have been receiving vaguely ominous postcards saying "We Want What You Have." And their stories crash together in painful ways, sometimes because of the cards. VERDICT Lanchester (The Debt to Pleasure) weaves together multiple stories in an uncanny microcosm of contemporary British life that's incredibly rich and maybe just a bit heavy, like a pastry. Yet definitely worth a look. [See Prepub Alert, 12/5/11.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
