“Capital,” John Lanchester’s too-big-to-fail novel about the financial crisis, sounds like an opportunity any sharp reader should invest in. Past performance is no guarantee of future results, of course, but this 50-year-old writer has been an illuminating chronicler of capitalism’s seizures.
In the London Review of Books, among other venues, he has written on everything from the global expansion of Kraft Foods to the future of newspapers (please, God). His greatest asset may be that he has no formal economic training. Dedicated to writing for people “who don’t speak finance,” he never assumes we know how a reciprocal currency arrangement should work. Two years ago, he published “I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay,” which provided a global tour of rapacity and stupidity. Blending brilliant financial reporting with irresistible British wit, it was a profitable merger of Michael Lewis, James Surowiecki and Kingsley Amis. Collateralized debt obligations were never so much fun.
(W.W. Norton) - \"Capital” is John Lanchester’s latest novel.
But Lanchester is also an accomplished and daring novelist (his first, “The Debt to Pleasure,” won a Whitbread Book Award), and now he has combined his fiction-writing artistry with a reporter’s expertise to capture the financial biodiversity of London in 2008.
From that prospectus, “Capital” seems to be positioning itself as a competitor to Tom Wolfe, even Charles Dickens. The opening chapters rotate through a fantastic variety of characters who live on the same street. The plain houses along Pepys Road were constructed during the late 19th century for middle-class residents, but the 21st-century property boom has raised prices to hysterical levels. “It was like Texas during the oil rush,” Lanchester writes, “except that instead of sticking a hole in the ground to make fossil fuel shoot up from it, all people had to do was sit there and imagine the cash value of their homes rattling upwards so fast that they couldn’t see the figures go round.” As the still-stunned buyer of a tiny house in Bethesda, I was all over this satire like green on cash.
In vivid, short chapters, we meet London residents who have no idea that by the end of the year, a bank in New York will collapse and throw the economy into chaos: They’re young and old, whites and blacks, Englishmen and immigrants (legal and illegal). Clusters of characters cohere around each house on the street, from No. 42, owned by an 82-year-old widow getting knocked through modern medical care, to No. 68, where a Pakistani family runs a small shop and tries to avoid association with radical Muslims. There are African meter maids and Polish handymen, beautiful nannies and jealous assistants, lazy relatives and gifted soccer players — the whole vast complex of people rubbing against one another in a big city, and Lanchester seems to know the colorful minutiae of everybody’s business. He swings from deep sympathy for a Zimbabwean refugee waiting for asylum to tart satire of a financier anticipating his bonus. The effect is like one of those cut-away illustrations that show the interior of every room in an apartment complex.
These books offer keen insights into leadership and management challenges, which on a day-to-day basis can bring their own dramas, twisting plot lines and, in this city, political intrigue.
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