Look What You Made Me Do: John Lanchester’s ‘bracingly satisfying’ novel

In his “superb non-fiction” and in his media appearances, John Lanchester “comes across as a thoroughly decent chap”, said James Walton in The Times. Yet his fiction has often hinted at “something darker” – a capacity for “almost gleeful nastiness”. That side was to the fore in his brilliant debut, “The Debt to Pleasure”; and it’s here again in his latest novel, the “bracingly satisfying” “Look What You Made Me Do”.

Fifty-something Kate enjoys a “comfortable life” as part of the “Oxbridge-educated middle class”, said Amanda Craig in The Spectator. Long married to Jack, a successful architect, she’s an “almost stereotypical” baby boomer. Yet when she watches the latest “hit TV series”, “Cheating”, her life is “cast into turmoil”. For the show, about a younger woman’s affair with a west London architect, contains details that make it clear that Jack has been unfaithful. As Kate plots her revenge upon its scriptwriter, what had seemed “perilously close” to being “that dread thing, a Hampstead novel”, morphs into a gripping “high-wire act between literary and commercial fiction”.

Many of the set pieces are “tremendous fun”, and “Lanchester gleefully skewers the chattering classes, from the ubiquity of Ottolenghi to the faux-rural money bubble of Soho Farmhouse”, said Clare Clark in The Guardian. Yet the novel is let down by its plotting, which is “variously implausible and clunkingly predictable”. I disagree, said Peter Kemp in Literary Review. Lanchester has written of his admiration for Agatha Christie, and she would have applauded the many “ingenious” twists on display here. “Superbly well-crafted and immensely funny”, this is a “gleamingly accomplished black comedy”.

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