A black comedy of love, trust, resentment, and entitlement, Look What You Made Me Do is the story of two very different women from two very different generations, entangled in a battle only one of them can win.
Twisty ... Mr. Lanchester is a magnetic writer who combines the skills of a social realist with this penchant for Nabokovian black humor and narrative trickery ... But the realism in this book is comparatively undercooked. The revenge schemes are so elaborate that every aspect of the novel is part of their mousetrap-like designs. The result is a diversion ... There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, so long as Mr. Lanchester hasn’t betrayed any confidences in writing it.
Begins like a conventional realist novel, a beautifully observed portrait of a marriage shattered by grief and infidelity, with subtle, original things to say about those timeless ordeals. But less than halfway through it turns into something more sensational and disorienting ... This could have been a novel solely about the private world of a middle-aged couple; instead, Lanchester is more interested in how privacy can be distorted and deranged, obliterated or weaponized, at the click of a button ... The focus of the novel is no longer personal betrayal or individuals harming other individuals; it is the great collective experiment we are unwittingly running, in turning over every detail of our lives to tech and leaving ourselves vulnerable to all manner of unanticipated attacks.
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?
