Look What You Made Me Do
Lanchester’s satirical chops are on full display ... Lanchester’s difficulty comes in binding these characters and scenes into something greater than the sum of its parts. His plot is variously implausible and clunkingly predictable, groaning with coincidence ... A novel can manage very well without state-of-the-nation themes, but it must add up, on its own terms, to a satisfactory whole. Revenge can be fun or futile, cathartic or self-defeating, but it needs to be earned, to make sense. For all its sharply observed pleasures, Lanchester’s novel fails to give that satisfaction.
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This is a vol-au-vent of a book ... Look What You Made Me Do has its sights trained on intergenerational animus, but it offers little beyond the usual gripes ... Devolves into a petty revenge comedy ... This novel works best when it stops trying to be trendy and ironic and simply serves things up straight.
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I won’t reveal the details of an increasingly twisty plot ... Every scene, however apparently tangential, turns out not only to overlap with the rest, but also to have been studded with artful clues and foreshadowings ... The result isn’t just bracingly satisfying, it also has another bracing quality that Lanchester’s work hasn’t shown since that brilliant debut — namely, an almost gleeful nastiness. ... This is both his finest and his most unpleasant book since The Debt to Pleasure.
