A bitter feud

Look What You Made Me Do, John Lanchester’s latest novel, has all the elements of a Shakespearean play — love, hate, betrayal, revenge — plus technology to ratchet it all up a notch.

The bard would have been impressed.

Two of Lanchester’s earlier books — the non-fiction Whoops!: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay and the novel Capital — were scathing in their social commentary about class, money and modern British life. Here, the former journalist adds generational resentment to that list.

Look What You Made Me Do pits Kate, an affluent Londoner in her 50s, against Phoebe, a screenwriter in her 30s who has the TV hit of the season on her hands. When Phoebe’s show, Cheating, begins to include intimate details of Kate’s 30-year marriage, leading Kate to think her husband Jack has cheated on her, it kicks off a competition between these two very different women.

Lanchester alternates his narrator, first Kate and then Phoebe, chapter by chapter, each telling their story in the first person. The reader must pay attention to the heading on the chapters to keep straight which “I” is talking.

The effect is to stress the adversarial relationship between the women, offering the sense of a court case. One side presents their truth, as the prosecution might, and the reader accepts that. Then the other character, the defence if you will, refutes that info and presents their version, and the reader is swayed in that direction.

Intertwined throughout are backstories and flashbacks that slowly expose the women’s secrets. It’s a bit of a shock that the refined Kate was a shoplifter who plotted to steal her best friend’s boyfriend in college. Ditto that Phoebe has no patience with her life partner, Tony, the gentle teacher who longs to be a musician.

That both women are unreliable narrators adds to the growing mystery of what is really happening and why.

Lanchester employs an array of storytelling techniques that keep things vibrant. There are a couple of scripts of Cheating. There’s a revealing magazine profile of Phoebe. The reader sees the story from even more angles, and their sympathy switches back and forth as the negative traits of each of woman are exposed.

What becomes clear is there is no “good guy” here. Lanchester is not afraid to present two characters who, in the end, are thoroughly unappealing. The viciousness in their treatment of one another is stunning.

And yet this novel is very funny. Lanchester’s trademark wit continues to amuse which serves to blunt the nastiness until there’s no hiding it.

He has also brilliantly drawn some fascinating minor characters. Phoebe’s mother might be the meanest person ever to grace the page. Conor is the wrongly convicted person Kate visits in prison, then discards when she no longer needs him. Phoebe’s agent, Aloysius, the parent of two kids under three, is the snapshot of parental fatigue.

The writing is clever. As Phoebe prepares to testify in court and muses about the nature of the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, for example, Lanchester gathers it all in a 262-word sentence you might expect to leave the reader exhausted. Instead, it illustrates Phoebe’s swirling thoughts while expressing cynicism about what exactly is the whole truth.

There’s a little stab of disappointment at a plot twist added after Jack’s supposed affair. It feels like a murder mystery that didn’t know when to stop.

The ending may reveal something about themselves to readers. If you’re evil, you’ll probably find it satisfying.

That should make some interesting discussions at book clubs, which would likely delight the author.

Julie Carl is a freelance journalist living in Toronto. She did not find the ending satisfying.