John Lanchester & Hattie Crisell: Look What You Made Me Do
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to the London Review Bookshop podcast. To find out about our upcoming events, visit londonreviewbookshop.co.uk forward slash events
Good evening and welcome to the London Review Bookshop, where tonight we're delighted to welcome John Lanchester to talk about his latest book, Look What You Made Me Do, published today by Faber. He'll be in conversation tonight with freelance journalist and podcaster Hattie Cressel. They'll talk for about 45 minutes, after which there'll be time for questions from the audience. Join me in giving them a very warm welcome.
Well, that was lovely. Thank you. And so nice to be here with all of you and especially with you, John, to talk about this very smart, very funny novel, which was published today. So I'm sort of assuming that most people won't have read it, but maybe a show of hands of anyone who has managed to already read it. OK, that's one, two, three, four. OK, great.
What is John Lanchester’s new novel Look What You Made Me Do about?
Well, we're going to try very hard not to give away any spoilers, aren't we? But to start off, John, do you want to do your reading now so everyone's got a bit of a flavour of what we're doing here?
Get the boring bit out of the way at the beginning. So it's a novel with two narrators, Kate, who's a woman in her late 50s, and Phoebe, who's a young screenwriter in her 30s. And Kate, who's narrating this first bit, would be what Bridget Jones calls a smug married. And it's her and her husband Jack out for a dinner party with some friends. Michael did the introductions. The husband Al worked in TV. The wife Katrina did a job share at the Guardian. There was no way on earth their salaries could have let them afford an address in this part of town, so there must be private money somewhere in the background. This was something Jack would complain about when he was in his mode of pretending to be a Marxist, but had a convenient tendency to forget when he was dealing with clients.
Tanya came through from the kitchen with another tray of small things on sticks, olives, chunks of pineapple. Our eyes met. I'm going through a 70s thing, she said. Prawn cocktail, coronation chicken, steak Diane, Black Forest Gato, onion soup, quiche Lorraine, veal escalopes. Done properly, they're all delicious. Where's all that kind of food gone? You'll get him started, I said. But it was too late. Jack had reached for a vol-au-vent, swallowed it whole in one bite, rinsed it down with a glass of champagne, and seized centre stage, all in one action. I couldn't agree more, he said. It's like this. Yota Motolenghi, he said. Lovely bloke, I'm told. Colleague of yours, yes? To Katrina, who gave a complicated half nod.
Literally the nicest man in the world, everybody says. And yet the fact is that you have to say, objectively, that he has done more damage to this country than the Luftwaffe. I'd heard this before, and marriage involves compromise, settle down for the ride. I'm not sure, Michael said. It's completely true to say that Ottolenghi has caused more damage to Britain than the Luftwaffe. It's to do with the net destruction of competence. You go to someone's house for supper, not here, obviously, Tanya, and you come in the door and you can see from the other side of the room, 20 feet away, that it's Ottolenghi. You see the pomegranate seeds strewn all over everything, and you know what's coming. Here we go again.
A random assembly of ingredients thrown together by someone who spent 10 hours shopping and 10 minutes, open quotes, cooking, close quotes, i.e. throwing things together. And the crucial point is that they have no idea what it's supposed to taste like, but it has no relationship to any food they actually know about or have eaten before, except at the houses of other people who use the same cookbooks in the same way and therefore have exactly the same level of total cluelessness. Sumac, nobody has a clue how to use it. Zatar. Nobody knows what that is. Is it a leaf? Is it a terrorist movement? Is it the main villain in 1001 Nights? Pomegranate molasses. What? And they all chuck it together and it looks pretty if you're photographing it and it tastes like God knows what.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:02–1:09
2
What is John Lanchester’s new novel Look What You Made Me Do about?
1:09–31:24
3
How did the idea for the novel first arrive and what personal experiences inspired it?
31:24–48:08
4
How did Lanchester plan the book and how much did the draft change from his plan?
48:08–58:26