John Lanchester is so adept at explaining political and economic catastrophes that it is easy to forget he has written six novels and a collection of tech-infused ghost stories. His capacious essays—on the global financial crisis, Greek debt, Brexit, the pandemic—have an almost soothing quality, as he sketches out the underlying questions, glosses technical terms, and calmly conveys how bad things might be. “The story of Northern Rock was a fuck-up,” he wrote in the London Review of Books in January 2008, a few months after the British bank collapsed and half a year before Lehman Brothers fell. “The trouble is that it may turn out to be a harbinger of meltdown too.” This is typical Lanchester: easygoing, but blunt; colloquial, but precise; deeply informed, yet detached, even placid. He doesn’t argue so much as observe. “It’s going to be interesting—to put it very, very mildly,” he wrote in October 2008, mid-meltdown, “to see if the bail-out works.”
His most celebrated novel, Capital (2012), shares some of the appealing features of his essays. While the novel is richly populated with distinctive characters—ranging from the insufferable, genteel banker Roger Yount to his sociopathic deputy Mark to a Senegalese soccer prodigy to a Zimbabwean meter maid awaiting her asylum hearing—it proceeds methodically, like a work of journalism. It makes the most of Lanchester’s powers of explication, slowly presenting the pieces of its central puzzle. (In this case: Who has been sending disturbing postcards to each resident of one very expensive street in London?) And like many of his LRB articles and two of his nonfiction books, How to Speak Money (2014) and IOU: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay (2010), it revolves around finance, as it traces how capital inflates and punctures the hopes of ordinary people who are making art, falling in love, getting arrested, getting divorced, getting deported, or dying in the months leading up to the 2008 crash.
Capital was a doorstopper work of realism—an examination of a knowable, mostly rational world (albeit one on the brink of implosion). Lanchester’s subsequent fiction has departed sharply from that mode, incorporating the increasingly eerie features of tech and the intrusion of irrational politics into our lives. The Wall (2019) is a pared-back dystopia in which citizens of a paranoid xenophobic state are periodically pressed into service as border guards. Political euphemisms abound, initiative is forbidden, the rule of the land is unquestioned authority—a society whose brutality is all on the surface, without subtexts to parse.* The short stories in Reality (2020) feel warmer: many of them thrum with the cozy rhythms of middle-class life (children asking parents how soon they can request the Wi-Fi password when visiting a family friend’s house; an academic grousing about the caliber of papers at an obscure conference), until a shiver of the unexplained intrudes. The characters are undone in part by supernatural disturbances, and in part by their life-sapping obsessions with their phones (“Cold Call,” “Signal”), with themselves as reflected in their phones (the death-portending selfies of “Charity”), or with soul-sucking reality TV (the title story, “Reality,” which originally ran in the LRB as “Love Island”). Behavior that passes for normal in the twenty-first century in fact leads us on a descent into hell.
His new book, Look What You Made Me Do, falls somewhere between Capital and Reality: it begins like a conventional realist novel, a beautifully observed portrait of a marriage shattered by grief and infidelity, with subtle, original things to say about those timeless ordeals. But less than halfway through it turns into something more sensational and disorienting. A series of plot twists whisks us into the realm of Black Mirror. A smart-home hack, a hit Netflix show that uncannily resembles real life, and a crypto fraud subplot—these nightmarish turns are presented not as self-conscious excursions into the Twilight Zone, as the stories in Reality are, but as a plausible continuation of events. And though they might not always land gracefully, they evoke quite accurately a tech-poisoned form of cracking up. This could have been a novel solely about the private world of a middle-aged couple; instead, Lanchester is more interested in how privacy can be distorted and deranged, obliterated or weaponized, at the click of a button.
Kate and Jack Hittlestone are a perfectly nice middle-class couple who are also acutely aware that if their friends could hear the way they spoke behind closed doors, they might lose a few of them. “Every successful marriage has its own private language,” Kate, the narrator, muses in the opening line. A couple’s lexicon of running jokes, catchphrases, and allusions would at best make little sense to outsiders; at worst, they’d sound “cruel, or mean spirited, or at the very least unfair and inappropriate.” To Jack, Kate’s friends are “the hags” and “the enormous great big hairy lesbians”; he jokes that their neighbor, “the Poisoner,” killed her ex and buried him under the patio. The way the couple talks about sex is equally colorful and mystifying. “Christmas Eve and Ho Chi Minh’s birthday” do not sound all that kinky, but these are the special occasions on which the Hittlestones hire an escort to have sex with Kate while Jack watches. Meanwhile, one of Jack’s favorite expressions—“Want your body, disco doll”—does not mean he is horny; it’s something he says when they’re running late and he needs Kate to come downstairs so they can leave.
That these private things remain private is essential not only to the Hittlestones’ marriage but also to their social standing. Jack is an architect who earns so much that Kate has quit her job teaching art history and devotes herself to volunteer work, counseling prisoners. The friends they visit in the first chapter are also architects, whose impeccably renovated town house has swallowed the one next door, showing an extreme commitment to the craze for knocking through walls and opening up floor plans. There are deliciously petty distinctions in class and taste among these well-to-do Londoners. The friends’ house is a little too neat and camera ready, Kate thinks: “It’s not Hello! vulgar, but on the other hand it is Architectural Digest vulgar.”
Still, Kate is a better-than-average guest, a peaceable, likable person who wryly accepts the responsibility to keep conversation going over dinner. Sensing a lull, she provides a series of polite questions that allow the other guests to talk endlessly about themselves. “What I really wanted to do was sit there in silence and wait for someone to ask me a question, show some interest, engage with me, see me,” she thinks. “What I did instead, with a heavy internal sigh, was turn to the TV person and say: ‘Have you ever done a cooking show?’” You get the sense that when she enjoys a mean thought or two about her hosts, she is simply giving herself a short break from the thankless social obligations that come with being a basically nice woman in her fifties.
Obligations have little hold over Jack. He treats the other guests as his audience and doesn’t hesitate to try out his most provocative material on them: a diatribe about people who cook Yotam Ottolenghi recipes for dinner parties (“You see the pomegranate seeds strewn all over everything and you know what’s coming”), and those who pretend to like it (“And everybody says ooh yummy Ottolenghi”), clearly desperate for someone to take offense. For Kate, there’s something familiar and comforting about these mildly abrasive social commentaries, and they’re also a large part of the novel’s appeal, as they needle the reader’s narrow cultural preferences. (Who among us has not attempted Plenty?) When Kate first laid eyes on Jack, in a college bar at Oxford, he was doing a similar bit, riffing on the name “Virgin” airlines and claiming that he’d like to start a company with the even more out-there name “Anal Sex.” A speech that some might find tiresome Kate found irresistible.
So a sense of the scale and complexity of her loss is clear when Jack dies suddenly, even though she can say little about her grief itself. Kate professes that she has undergone a period of dissociation in the months after her husband’s death, insisting that for her the phrase “I don’t know how I got through it” is literally true, and that she retains no memory of the early stages of bereavement. Though she expected grief to manifest as “a terrible roaring…from the air,” Kate feels only an intense absence, Jack’s “not there-ness, the hole where my life had been.” No more in-jokes, no more Ho Chi Minh’s birthday, no more doting on the parts of Jack’s character that everyone else could do without. It is a desolation like that Siri Hustvedt describes in Ghost Stories, her recent memoir of the loss of her husband, Paul Auster: “I am mourning Siri and Paul. I am mourning AND. I am mourning how the AND made me feel in the world.”
Yet Kate’s loss mutates into something more unstable, potent, and singular when she hears of a new Netflix show called Cheating, which portrays a man exactly like Jack, who uses their own private language in intimate scenes with a young woman, and reveals to the other woman the deepest secrets of a marriage exactly like Jack and Kate’s. The only explanation Kate can think of is that shortly before he died, Jack had an affair with the writer of the show, and the writer turned it all into material. She had trusted that these were “the things we kept entirely for each other. Our private space. But it turned out that this was just Jack’s way of carrying on, and he was as capable of doing it with another woman as he was with me.” Her husband was not the man she thought he was, a sickening realization that prevents her from mourning and finding a way to go on. How do you grieve when you do not know the person you are grieving?
Cheating is a violation of Kate’s privacy, but not in the way she thinks. An affair is an individual betrayal. But as Kate comes to discover, the showrunner—an up-and-coming writer named Phoebe Mull, a woman they barely knew—did not gather Kate’s deepest secrets by sleeping with Jack. A far more pervasive and impersonal network of surveillance allowed Phoebe to listen in on Jack and Kate chatting away to each other inside their home. She simply hacked their smart home (gaining access to everything that was said there, thanks to the system’s voice activation) and then refashioned their conversations into saucy dialogue for Jerry, his mistress, Tina, and his oblivious wife, Charlotte. Why subject the Hittlestones in particular to this treatment? It would spoil the layers of mystery Lanchester builds around this relationship to say more than that long ago they opened a wound Phoebe is still tending. Her revenge is to produce a TV show that will make Kate suspect infidelity and wreck her marriage, which might have worked if Jack hadn’t died before the show aired.
Nonetheless, she succeeds in torturing Kate. A weakness of the novel is that Kate never seems to register any relief once she realizes that her beloved Jack was in fact faithful to the end. She is too consumed with the rage and humiliation of seeing her life twisted and turned into cheap entertainment. The novel alternates between Kate’s first-person narrative and Phoebe’s, with excerpts from the Cheating screenplay and other interludes here and there. Lanchester delights in the thinness of Phoebe’s script, the plunk with which Jerry’s “want your body, disco doll” lands during an assignation with Tina, who spits back, “Is that one of the things you say to her? One of your lines?” Even Jack’s Ottolenghi bit is overdone in Cheating, whose stage directions tell us that Jerry “looks at the cookbooks on display. He picks one up for Charlotte’s inspections.” Guess what? “It’s by Ottolenghi.”
The hype around Cheating—the “one TV show that everyone’s consuming at the same time”—means that Kate’s friends unknowingly join in trampling all over her private life. Ads for the show are appearing on billboards and the sides of buses. Phoebe may be guilty of a gross invasion of privacy, but there’s also a sense in which the public is complicit for bingeing on this kind of dreck, and flattering it and themselves by pretending it’s a form of art. You can guess exactly where Cheating sits in the streaming pantheon by the way people in the novel ask each other, “Do you think Cheating is better than Succession, White Lotus… Sopranos?” (It’s not.)
Phoebe’s attack on Kate is just one piece of a bigger assault on private life, namely the way that technology has eroded long-standing distinctions between personal, often intimate spaces and the public sphere. As Kate reflects, “Perhaps the boundaries between people are more porous today, since we have full access to all the information known to humanity, everywhere, all the time; we blur into the world around us and our stories leak out too.” And isn’t this also Jack’s fault, for delegating so many of his daily tasks to a computer? Kate thinks Jack’s habit of asking his weather app if it’s raining outside, instead of looking out the window, is cute; ditto his delight in their home’s voice-controlled appliances. In retrospect, the price turned out to be a tech company recording their every utterance every day.
Though Phoebe has little compunction about raiding Kate’s life, she tries not to reveal too much of her own, aware that a voyeuristic public will devour any scrap of scandal around a semifamous writer, an easy target. One of the most fun passages in Look What You Made Me Do is a complete chapter written with spiky flair as a newspaper profile of Phoebe, of the sort that Decca Aitkenhead used to write for TheGuardian. A huge reason for the success of Cheating, as the profile makes clear, is that people assume Phoebe is laying bare her own sexual history in the show, that she—“author of this summer’s most talked-about TV, a steamy, sexy, bitter, nasty, devastating piece full of self-confessedly autobiographical detail”—must be the show’s Other Woman character, Tina. After snooping through Phoebe’s fridge and assessing the hotness of her boyfriend, Tony, the interviewer decides the conversation is too friendly and tries to inject some tension by taunting her, “You’re not very nice, are you?”
Phoebe’s defense mechanism involves acting as if she doesn’t care what people think. Her agent advises her to present an edgy persona to the world: “dark,” “fascinated by amorality,” “the other side of cancellation and virtue signalling.” At the heart of her act, however, lies a deeply conventional sense of what should be kept private, what is sacrosanct. This isn’t lost on the newspaper interviewer, who calls Phoebe an example of “that modern kind of candour, a woman who is willing to talk at length about sex and money but won’t say a word about more private subjects such as family or love.” The sections Phoebe narrates are a little flat compared with Kate’s, in part because her concerns are more mundane: she is a striver, touchy about success and the pressure to produce more of it, touchy around her difficult mother and absentee twin brother, and later (rightly) touchy when she becomes the target of a campaign of online and then offline harassment.
The alternating voices work well to contrast each woman’s point of view. Phoebe’s self-fashioning as a star TV writer, in “a scallop-topped pink shirt and red Izzy Marant trousers,” is undercut when Kate describes her as “gobby and over-made-up, with dyed red hair.” And the alternation between Phoebe, Kate, screenplay, and profile works to create an impression of everyone’s business being made too widely available to everyone else. There is no omniscient narrator here who has sole custody of the plot, as in Capital. Phoebe and Kate both know their own story and more than they should know about others’ too. They cannot stop oversharing and in the process “telling on themselves,” as social media parlance would have it.
Streaming, surveillance, and the Internet more broadly have reshaped the rhythms of entertainment and social life for most people, whether they’re enthusiastic about them or not. The consequences, when negative, are often insidious; a small convenience or guilty pleasure becomes a barrier to authentic connection with actual humans in real life, and so on. Crypto, however, is a niche pursuit—in the UK, only about 8 percent of people own cryptocurrency—and is often used in deliberately criminal enterprises, a subject Lanchester has written about several times in the LRB.
In the novel’s final third Kate gets her revenge on Phoebe through crypto, framing her boyfriend, Tony, for a heist and setting him up for a harrowing criminal trial. There’s a strong symmetry in this conclusion: Phoebe used her streaming show to create a fake secret life for Jack; now Kate has created a fake online life for Tony and planted it on his computer. Yet the act of framing someone for a crime is far-fetched, to say the least, and so logistically and technically complicated that it makes for a strange departure from the story of two women locked in psychological warfare.
The hardest thing to believe is that Kate is sadistic enough to inflict such a brutal punishment on anyone, let alone Tony, who was completely innocent of Phoebe’s Cheating scheme. This is conscientious and empathetic Kate, who wondered to herself, at the architects’ dinner party,
if any men ever feel that they are picking up the burden of social obligation like a huge bag of other people’s laundry; laundry that you don’t want to do, that in an ideal world you wouldn’t have to do, and yet that in this world, somehow, without your ever having volunteered for the task, is your responsibility.
Maybe her treatment of Tony is a punishment that one might idly fantasize about inflicting, or make threats about from the safety of an anonymous social media account, full of anger and self-righteousness. But it’s hard to believe that, even after the psychic rupture of losing her husband, this character would develop the deviousness and lack of remorse required to jeopardize an innocent person’s freedom.
This ending, with its disregard for innocence and guilt, reminded me of “Which of These Would You Like?,” the most stylized, almost fable-like story from Reality. The unnamed narrator is a prisoner in an unnamed country, possibly a state that does not yet exist, in some dystopian future. He does not know what his offense was, and the guards won’t tell him. Every day they ask him to choose a number of items from a brochure—which mask would he like, which gown, which cuffs, which scaffold—until you realize he is being asked to choose the manner of his own execution, daily, until the actual day arrives. He can decide how much resistance to show during this ritual, but he cannot change his fate.
By the end of Look What You Made Me Do, Kate resembles one of the guards in the story. She has resumed her volunteer work as a prison visitor after a bereavement leave, and she visits Tony, not to help him but to enjoy seeing with her own eyes that he is in jail. She has become less of a character and more of an agent of punishment, inflicting the curse of technology on a powerless victim. The focus of the novel is no longer personal betrayal or individuals harming other individuals; it is the great collective experiment we are unwittingly running, in turning over every detail of our lives to tech and leaving ourselves vulnerable to all manner of unanticipated attacks. Not everyone will suffer the worst consequences, and it may not matter if those who do did anything particularly wrong. As Kate remarks in the prison visiting room, “Everyone in here is innocent.”