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.
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.
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.
A gleamingly accomplished black comedy ... Skewed scenarios and retaliatory stratagems are craftily deployed in a novel that’s a kaleidoscope of tilting perspectives.
A return to the dark, sinuous mode of his earliest fiction, but sharpened by everything he has learned since ... 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.
Abounds not only with a fine-grained knowledge of the world it inhabits but also with sharp, aphoristic observations ... Although the novel is essentially an entertainment, rather like Cheating it’s a deliciously ruthless one that has smart and apposite things to say about money and power. While the final shift into thriller territory comes dangerously close to feeling slick, for the most part the novel’s constant wrong-footing of the reader’s assumptions is hugely enjoyable.
Tremendously good, uncomfortable, accurate fun ... The novel reveals itself, halfway through, to be a revenge story with a generational inflection – Millennials versus Boomers – and the two narrators grow less likable, and therefore more fun, as events unfold. But long before that halfway point, the reader’s suspension of disbelief starts to lurch dangerously close to the ground. Put simply, the plot makes no sense ... On the other hand, there is Lanchester’s eye for the material trappings of bourgeois life, and his ear for the sinuous ways in which Kate and Phoebe recast their sins as justified gestures ... Who needs a logical plot, when you can sit back and luxuriate in pleasures such as these?
Full of acute observations about everything from housing to dining ... This is an entertaining book, with an unflinching ending, which makes powerful points about the ways in which boomers have screwed millennials and continue to do so. But its far-fetched plot prompts more incredulity than contemplation and means that the blend of state-of-the-nation meditation, literary thriller and black comedy lands awkwardly.
Adultery and betrayal have always been richly rewarding subjects in fiction, as John Lanchester’s Look What You Made Me Do confirms ... Lanchester captures the spiky inner voices of his two female narrators with considerable success ... Not since Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier has there been such a nasty little tale about a marriage ... Shimmers with the author’s characteristic black humour ... The thriller plot takes over and, despite the satisfactions of a cruel revenge, the ending feels rushed as well as unjust to the one innocent person in the story ... Those of us who admire the author’s non-fiction as well as his fiction will hope that next time he is slightly less dazzling and digs deeper into the human heart.
Skewering the metropolitan elite is such a popular blood sport that the barbs must be lethally accurate ... The horses have been flogged, and the novel’s genre-hopping revenge plot is not satisfying enough to make up for it. Perhaps this would be more fun if it had come out ten years ago.
A darkly funny vision of bitter London professionals ... This latest work is soaked in signifiers of wealth ... 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 ... Wicked, good fun.
The twists and turns make for compelling reading ... Wry and darkly comic, Lanchester uses the revenge trope to focus on generational luck, selfishness, and entitlement, then creates a startling conclusion that expertly ties together the shocking events.
An enthralling, entertaining dark comedy ... Lanchester reaffirms his rep as a masterful storyteller ... The perfect combination of humour and escapism, this is one to enjoy in a sitting – and would be well suited to a TV adaptation.
Lanchester is an eminently skilled storyteller with a gift for laying in bits of backstory along the way that subvert what we think we know is going on—which we really don’t, and neither do most of the players in this delightfully mean-spirited tale ... A splendidly twisted tale of love and vengeance.
