Review by New York Times Review
In "Capital," a modern offshoot of juicy social satires like Trollope's novel "The Way We Live Now," John Lanchester puts two of his characters in a compartment of the London Eye, the Ferris wheel that went up on the south bank of the Thames to celebrate the millennium. Its the spring of 2008, a sunny day for once, and a Polish builder named Zbigniew and a Hungarian nanny named Matya are on a date. Though Britain is reeling from the double whammy of global economic woes and terrorism jitters, Zbigniew and Matya take in their bird's-eye view with no special feeling of unease, apart from a twinge of motion sickness. On terra firma, both work for wealthy homeowners on a gentrified street called Pepys Road in the up-and-coming South London neighborhood of Clapham. At the beginning of the 21st century, before the bursting of the real estate bubble, property values on Pepys Road had soared - even for the modest end house, owned by a Muslim family, that holds a corner shop, and even for the crumbling terraced house owned by an elderly grandmother, which hasn't had a change of linoleum, wallpaper or electrical wiring in 50 years. Owning property there, Lanchester writes, "was like being in a casino in which you were guaranteed to be a winner." Lately, though, all is not well on Pepys Road. The high rollers' holiday bonuses aren't secure, cash in hand is getting scarce, and ominous postcards have been arriving in every mail slot, reading: "We Want What You Have." If that weren't alarming enough, a young man in a hoodie has been seen lurking in the dawn hours. We all know what that means. Lanchester, a brainy, pleasure-loving polymath, is a novelist, memoirist and journalist who writes sagely and elegantly about food, family, culture, technology and money. He's still best known for his delectably wicked first novel, "The Debt to Pleasure," which blends murder with gourmandise. But he has also written a well-reasoned nonfiction book entitled "I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay," which closely analyzes the current financial collapse. Now, with "Capital," he readjusts his sights and zooms out, framing a larger, more inclusive picture that shows how the easymoney era affected not just greedy speculators but the society that fattened around them. Lanchester's assured, detailed overview of today's Britain recalls another London eye - not the Ferris wheel but Private Eye, the satirical publication that has taken the pulse of the country's body politic for half a century. If the task of a well-meaning newspaper (as it's often said) is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, then the mission of Private Eye is broader: to afflict anyone, famous or obscure, who seems to deserve scrutiny, censure or mockery. Journalists and politicos can't help reading the magazine, even when they themselves are skewered in its pages. Its regular features carve British behavior into attackable, overlapping compartments: real estate (Nooks & Corners), banking (In the City), politics (HP Sauce and Rotten Boroughs), journalism (Street of Shame) and so on. Lanchester's novel integrates all these spheres and more. Reading "Capital" is like getting a crash course in the transformation of British mores and class distinctions, which otherwise might require a decade of remedial Private Eye-reading to decode. The regulars on Pepys Road include the Younts (a rich banker and his spoiled wife); the Kamals (the Muslim shopkeepers): Freddy and Patrick Kamo (a teenage soccer star and his protective father, scooped out of Senegal and deposited in a luxurious house for Premier League players); Petunia Howe (a little old lady of the Ealing Studios variety, whose grandson, Smitty, is an underground art provocateur); and a Zimbabwean traffic warden, Quentina Mkfesi, "the most unpopular woman in Pepys Road," who seeks out expensive cars to ticket in order to win bets with her colleagues at Control Services (the flashiest one nabbed wins a pint or a £5 note). How can such disparate characters possibly be connected? Like it or not, they all share in the aura and onus of the real estate that surrounds them in a neighborhood where, Lanchester writes, "the houses were now like people, and rich people at that, imperious, with needs of their own that they were not shy about having serviced." All the characters have something to lose; many also have something to hide. At 40, Roger Yount, a financier in the City, is just old enough to be mystified by the number-crunching tricks the younger staffers at Pinker Lloyd perform with ease. His ignorance and bluff good nature can't shield him from risk. Roger's venal wife, Arabella, spews a litany of complaints that evoke the Private Eye column "Polly Filler," in which a fatuous twit moans about her useless husband and her lazy au pairs. In a similar vein, Arabella derides Roger as a "clueless husband who had no idea what she did." Nevertheless, Lanchester makes it clear that in a London that lacks self-indulgent people like the Younts, struggling people like Zbigniew and Matya would be jobless. Arabella, he allows, was "in her way resilient. She had the toughness of her obliviousness." He has more sympathy for Ahmed and Rohinka Kamal, humble, hardworking immigrants whose tender regard for their children, kindness to their customers and struggles with Ahmed's hotheaded relatives give the novel its greatest tension and heart. When Ahmed's younger brother goes into a devout phase (faked, in Ahmed's opinion), hiding the alcohol in the family shop because "Muslims were not supposed to blah blah," Ahmed fumes: "As if everybody in the family were not well aware of these facts and also well aware of the economic necessities at work." Patrick and Freddy Kamo respond differently to London's economic ambience. The father loathes its strident materialism and yearns to return to Africa, but Freddy finds it "delightful" that the shop windows teem with covetable objects, "bought, and placed, and groomed, and shaped, and washed clean, and put on display as if the whole city was for sale" - including the citizens themselves, who dress at all times as if they are in costume, "even the beggars." FREDDY is on to something. Pepys Road's oldest inhabitant. Petunia Howe, dons her granny get-up daily without a notion that anyone would think of it as a costume, but her grandson, a Banksy imitator, wears a suit and tie as a disguise so he can infiltrate art parties unrecognized. Even for an aesthetic mischief maker like himself, he reflects, "art was a business," so "it was good to sniff around, to look at the players." At least Quentina, the traffic warden, can't be accused of sartorial artifice; her job demands that she wear a uniform. In the eventful year the novel spans, the residents of Pepys Road stagger from one trial to another and the postcard onslaught increases in frequency and nastiness, bringing with it fears that the campaign might sink everyone's property values . . . and might have a link to Islamoterrorism. Even as the homeowners find it increasingly ludicrous that anyone would covet their precarious security, a mood of suspicion mounts. Early on, Petunia Howe had joked to Ahmed Kamal, who walked her home after she fainted in his shop, "When you're my age, nobody wants what you have." Ahmed had laughed, but her question lingers throughout the pages of this nuanced portrait of a country in flux. What does anyone on Pepys Road possess that can be defended? And what can anyone, anywhere, be sure of in an age when "safe as houses" has lost all its meaning? Owning a property on Pepys Road 'was like being in a casino in which you were guaranteed to be a winner.' Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 15, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Renowned for his sharp humor and impeccable style, British writer Lanchester, winner of the E. M. Forster Award, presents an exceptionally capacious and involving tale about disparate lives in turmoil on London's Pepys Road. Originally a working-class enclave, by 2007 Pepys Road's property values have vaulted sky-high, accompanied by feverish gentrification, most lavishly at Number 51, where banker Roger Yount shrugs off his angry wife's exorbitant spending. While Arabella keeps Zbigniew, a Polish builder, busy redecorating, nothing visible has changed in decades at Number 42, home to the street's oldest resident, widowed Petunia Howe. A young soccer prodigy from Senegal is staying at Number 27. Pakistani Ahmed Kamal owns the shop on the corner. Meter maid Quentina Mkfesi is a Zimbabwean refugee. Smitty, a guerrilla street artist in the mode of the real-life Banksy, keeps his ties to Pepys Road secret. These separate lives gradually converge with profound consequences as each Pepys Road residence begins receiving unnerving postcards carrying the anonymous message, We Want What You Have. Lanchester makes us care deeply about his imperiled characters and their struggles, traumatic and ludicrous, as he astutely illuminates the paradoxes embedded in generosity and greed, age and illness, financial crime and religious fanaticism, immigration, exile, and terror. A remarkably vibrant and engrossing novel about what we truly value.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Lanchester (The Debt to Pleasure) follows on the heels of 2010's I.O.U., a nonfiction dissection of the great recession, by covering much of the same territory in this barely allegorical study of class conflict and reversal of fortune. The affluent residents of London's Pepys Road suburb are a handy cross-section of late-2007 types: Roger Yount, a banker riding high and counting on his bonus to cover mortgages and the needs of his spoiled wife; Shahid, the son of Pakistani immigrants working the family shop; the 17-year old soccer prodigy Freddy Kamo; Quentina Mkfesi, an educated Zimbabwean refugee turned traffic warden; the elderly Petunia Howe, living repository of Pepys Road's postwar rise; and Petunia's grandson, a Banksy-type artist named Smitty. This is just a sample of the cast, most of whom begin receiving mysterious cards reading "We Want What You Have." Like clockwork, the quality of life on Pepys Road goes south, with arrests, injuries, illnesses, and financial undoing. But it's hard to care, with predictable and seldom insightful plot threads, and Lanchester reducing his characters to their socio-economic parameters as surely as the market itself. The result is an obsequious, transparent attempt at an epochal "financial crash" novel that is as thin as a 20-dollar bill. Agent: Caradoc King, AP Watt. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The elderly Patricia Howe has a grandson named Smitty who does famously anonymous artworks in the public sphere that border on vandalism. Roger Yount, who works in the City, will likely go broke if he doesn't get an expected million-pound bonus, even as his shallowly consumerist wife plans her own Christmas getaway and hires ambitious Polish worker Bogdan (really named Zbigniew) to do more home improvements. Michael "Mickey" Lipton-Miller rents a house to a promising young football star from Senegal and his dad, while down the street Ahmed Kamal runs a shop with the help of family that includes dreamy pretend-rebel brother Shadid. Meanwhile, Quentina, an educated woman from Zimbabwe, hands out parking tickets but as an illegal keeps her head down. What do they have in common? They're all associated with Pepys Road in South London, where residents have been receiving vaguely ominous postcards saying "We Want What You Have." And their stories crash together in painful ways, sometimes because of the cards. VERDICT Lanchester (The Debt to Pleasure) weaves together multiple stories in an uncanny microcosm of contemporary British life that's incredibly rich and maybe just a bit heavy, like a pastry. Yet definitely worth a look. [See Prepub Alert, 12/5/11.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
