John Lanchester’s warped generational satire

John Lanchester’s novels have always had the restless curiosity of his journalism, each one an immersion in a new world, a new register. From the arch postmodern satire of The Debt to Pleasure through his state-of-the-nation panorama Capital to the politically charged dystopia of The Wall, he has never risked writing the same book twice. Look What You Made Me Do is perhaps the most interesting pivot of all: a return to the dark, sinuous mode of his earliest fiction, but sharpened by everything he has learned since. It is a novel about marriage, ambition and revenge in the age of social media, and it feels like the work of an author who has decided to enjoy himself as much as possible.

The novel begins with the portrait of a marriage: Kate and Jack, boomers sealed within a rarefied north London bubble. The book’s first line – “Every successful marriage has its own private language” – is both pleasingly Tolstoyan and important for the plot. Jack is a successful architect, Kate volunteers teaching offenders in a local prison. Their world is one of dinner parties and book groups, fancy holidays and good wine. Then, after one particular dinner party – Lanchester has a lot of fun with the archness of the conversation, the in-jokes and secret snideness – Jack sits on the toilet, has a heart attack and dies.

We then meet Phoebe, the millennial screenwriter of “this summer’s most talked-about TV”, as a journalist puts it. The Netflix show, Cheating, is “a steamy, sexy, bitter, nasty, devastating piece full of self-confessedly autobiographical detail”. Phoebe lives in a modest maisonette in Acton with her partner, a primary school teacher called Tony. Her life is dominated by her career and her relationship with her needy and controlling mother. Lanchester presents Phoebe from a number of different perspectives – we meet her on the bus, sweltering on the way to meet her slick agent, Aloysius; we read an interview with her, in which she confesses to being “not very nice”; we get the script of Cheating, which is also not very nice. What’s more, the show seems to contain a number of the phrases and endearments that Jack used with Kate – that “private language” from the book’s opening.

It takes a while for Kate to catch on – she is, after all, dealing with the death of her husband – but she finally realises that Phoebe and Jack appear to have been close. Close enough for Jack to have initiated the younger woman in the jokes and pet names that he used with his wife. What was a vast but manageable sorrow becomes something darker, Kate’s memories and mourning tarnished by the revelation of her husband’s apparent infidelity.

This is a novel about entitlement, about the way that one generation, having enjoyed fruits that felt earned, but were actually more to do with the interaction of demographics and macroeconomics, then pulled the ladder up after them. Phoebe is an awful person but we can’t help but see her actions as a reflection of the resentment she feels at being denied the material gains that her popularity and professional success would have earned in a previous generation.

It feels fitting that Jack and his circle are architects. Lanchester, who has always been very good on money and its trappings, has explored the financial system in his essays and reviews for the London Review of Books and his own books Whoops! and How to Speak Money. In Look What You Made Me Do, property valuations act as a kind of index of intergenerational estrangement. One friend, on hearing that Jack is renovating a Thames-side penthouse for a Qatari investor, asks him if he ever has “any, you know, British clients”.

I said earlier that this novel feels like a return to the warped satire of Lanchester’s earliest work, but it’s also clearly in communion with his nonfiction. Phoebe recognises that one of the reasons that she puts up with her ghastly mother is financial: “Flat worth £1 million or thereabouts.” That this will not – after sharing it with her brother, and taxes – be sufficient to live the life that she believes she is owed is, depending on how you read it, a terrible indictment of Phoebe, or contemporary London, or both.

The final act is a whipsaw of twists and revelations, the ground shifting and shifting again, provoking the slightly vertiginous pleasure of knowing the author is a step ahead of you. It would be criminal to say more. What I can say is that this may be the darkest and most satisfying novel you’ll read this year, and that Lanchester, who has spent much of the past two decades explaining the world to us in his nonfiction, here reminds us that fiction is where he is most brilliant and dangerous.

Look What You Made Me Do is published by Faber (£20). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £17. Delivery charges may apply

Photography by Andy Hall for The Observer