8 April 2026

John Lanchester’s personal venom

John Lanchester’s new novel offers a darkly funny vision of bitter London professionals

Photo by Juno Calypso. All Rights Reserved 2026 / Bridgeman Images

At the beginning of Look What You Made Me Do, Kate, one of the novel’s two narrators, recounts a dinner party she attended with her husband, Jack. Upper-middle in both age and class, they dressed up, told their smart home to dim the lights and whizzed off in their Audi. Their hosts, like Jack, were well-heeled architects catering to rich foreigners; the other guests were younger media types. The “very fancy double-sized” Notting Hill home where the dinner party took place had often been loaned out to act as a perfectly curated backdrop for adverts and magazine spreads; Jack had speculated that the hosts were so desperate for their home to be photographed that they’d even allow it to play a scenic role in a porno. Kate describes their style as “Architectural Digest vulgar”, turning her nose up at everything arranged just so. “I’m a bad person for thinking those thoughts,” she tells us.

This is a neat bit of introductory work from John Lanchester, who sets his dark comedy in motion with the assurance of a waiter silently and imperceptibly refilling a wine glass. A few pages later, Kate finds Jack “dead on the toilet seat at three o’clock in the morning” and is thrown into a spiral of grief. In the midst of mourning, she is horrified to discover the Netflix show of the moment, Cheating, is brimming with the private jokes, secret habits and embarrassing nicknames she had assumed were only hers and Jack’s. How could someone else know about the threesomes they had occasionally paid for, or the New Yorker cartoon-inspired phrase they would toss up the stairs at each other? Is the affair depicted onscreen based on a dalliance she didn’t know Jack had indulged in?

The show’s creator, Phoebe, is the other narrator. There is a lot about her hyper-critical mother, whose “brain is the equivalent of a top-of-the-range supercomputer, constantly scanning and assessing data to find out whether something will make life easier or better for anybody else, and if so, instantly vetoing it”. Phoebe is also acidly funny on Soho Farmhouse (“Butlin’s for c**ts”), her agent’s style (“the bow tie, as bow ties always do, made him look like somebody who had to sign the sex offenders register”) and her slightly feckless boyfriend. We learn through a magazine profile that Cheating is a “steamy, sexy, bitter, nasty, devastating piece full of self-confessedly autobiographical detail”. Phoebe tells the amusingly obsequious journalist that “niceness is overrated”; it’s a sentiment that Lanchester embraces. As he unspools his plot, it becomes clear hatred and self-interest are his characters’ main motives.

This is familiar territory. The narrator of Lanchester’s celebrated debut, The Debt to Pleasure (1996), is as loquacious as he is homicidal. The novel is structured as a series of recipes, but the real action happens in the interstices; the self-named Tarquin performs erudite riffs on everything from the correct way to use a surveillance device to the “erotics of dislike”. Lanchester isn’t just interested in horrible people – his focus is the relationship between evil and creativity. Near the end, Tarquin expounds on the ego of artists: it “is not that the megalomaniac is a failed artist”, he explains, “but that the artist is a timid megalomaniac”. That would perhaps be a bit strong as a description of Phoebe, whose ambitions seem closer to those of a different Lanchester character. In Capital (2012), a sprawling epic following the residents of a single south London street, Smitty is a Banksy-like provocateur famed for his 9ft-high concrete dildo. “That was a big part of what art was about,” Smitty muses: “getting into people’s heads.”

Like Capital, this latest work is soaked in signifiers of wealth: a Cotswolds members’ club, Isabel Marant trousers, a therapist off Cavendish Square and a Chelsea restaurant with a “thirteen-course small-plate tasting menu concept”. Lanchester deploys with restraint the financial expertise he demonstrates in his essays for the London Review of Books, explaining just enough about cryptocurrency where it’s needed to keep the intricate plot moving at pace.

Phoebe notes that her screenplay came “straight from the spleen, or bile duct”; much of her bitterness reflects the widespread millennial resentment of the ease with which boomers bought large houses in posh postcodes. But it’s a darker, more personal venom here that makes Look What You Made Me Do such wicked, good fun.

Look What You Made Me Do
John Lanchester
Faber & Faber, 304pp, £20