Tom Fleming
On the Street Where They Live
John Lanchester’s last book, Whoops! (2008), was a typically clear-sighted, witty guide to the credit crunch for the general reader. It grew, he has said, out of the research for this, his fourth novel. Billed as a ‘state-of-the-nation’ epic – Lanchester calls it his ‘big, fat London novel’ – Capital is certainly his most ambitious work so far.
Set in London during the years of the recent financial crash, the novel follows the lives of dozens of characters, all of whom have a connection to Pepys Road, a fictional street of terraced houses. Over the years it has become a prestigious address, populated almost exclusively by the wealthy. Recently, identical cards have been dropped through each of the houses’ letterboxes: ‘We Want What You Have’, they read. They are followed by more cards, then photos and DVDs showing footage of each house from various angles. Who is responsible, and do they have any purpose more sinister than mild harassment?
Four of the street’s houses provide the novel’s focal points. Number 51 is owned by Roger Yount, a strapping, privately educated, forty-year-old banker ‘to whom everything in life had come easily’; when we meet him, in December 2007,
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Things began to go wrong between Mr and Mrs Eliot almost immediately. Ostensibly the problem was Vivien’s mysteriously fluctuating health. It would be easy to reduce the Eliot marriage simply to a catalogue of Viv’s medical crises.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/marriage-made-in-hell
'The trouble seems to be that we are not asked to read this author, reading being a thing of the past. We are asked to decode him.'
From the archive, Derek Mahon peruses the early short fiction of Thomas Pynchon.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/rock-n-roll-is-here-to-stay
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions