Mr Phillips

Rating:
Summary: Horsemeat and Chips
Review: I liked the voice of the novel, but unfortunately I lost interest very quickly at page 140.

Rating:
Summary: Shlub City, here we come
Review: I still haven't gotten around to MRS DALLOWAY. (I'm too busy debating particle physics with Jeanette Winterson via her ouija board.) As far as I can tell, MR PHILLIPS is the fictional equivalent of the desultory "observational humor" that stand-up comedians do. (The stand-up material that invariably gets introduced with the phrase "Have you ever noticed that...?".) The main difference between this and THE DEBT TO PLEASURE seems to be that PLEASURE'S recipes have been replaced with tedious statistical calculations and sexual disquisitions.

Here's my fave line: "Karen's accent, East London verging on Essex, is sexy too, but in a more straightforwardly sluttish way. And there is something about the limitless reserves of indifference she can express, the thrilling estuarine boredness of her 'Yeah'."

Rating:
Summary: Ordinary people have extraordinary lives too (3.5 stars)
Review: Lanchester's A Debt to pleasure was one of the best first novels by an English writer in recent years. The central character was beguiling, witty, snobbish, urbane, and seemed to have fallen from the pages of a Nabokov novel.

Mr Phillips is not as satisfying, but it is still enjoyable. It is a day in the life of a man that has lost his job, but cannot face telling his family. He gets the train, he walks about, he stares at pretty girls, he thinks about sex, he stalks, (the humdrum normality of suburban English lives. Anyway, you get the idea)...

The prose is understated, and consciously mundane. In its own way the novel is as stylised as A Debt to pleasure.

From the mundanity Lanchester works (Sometimes too hard) at deriving humour. Sometimes, the humour is heavy handed, at other times - when it stems from the character's foibles - it works wonderfully. As the eponymous anti-hero has an accountancy background much of the humour stems from his obsession with numbers. For example, his consideration of sex is based around numbers, statistics, and percentages.

The mundanity does not work as well as in books such as The Diary of a nobody. However, Lanchester does make tedium fun. Despite the humour the central character is well drawn, with a human side (although Lanchester occasionally totters on the brink of mawkish senitmentality in relation to him).

Mr Phillips is an enjoyable book, and is easily read. It feels, though, as if this is an exercise by Lanchester in ventriloquism (reminding me in parts of the short stories of Candia McWilliam). Now that he has tried on a couple of voices, could the real John Lanchester step forward please. Because when he does, the signs are that he will produce something great.

People who like Martin Amis (his pre-dental work stage) should enjoy this.

Rating:
Summary: lovely
Review: There is something very organic about John Lanchester's Mr. Phillips. The descriptions of his daily life are filled with sights, sounds, and even smells, so meticulously detailed the reader can easily put himself (whether or not you want to is another story) in Phillips' place. An accountant let go from his position due to redundancy this book is a day in Mr. Phillips' new life. Filled with sexual commentary, calculations, and the occasional adventure, it's hard to say that this is a truly original work in plot, but Lanchester creates such a clear picture you can't help but be fascinated by the inner workings of a man whose life is thrown in such disarray.

Rating:
Summary: A Day in the Life of an Everyman
Review: This semi-homage to Mrs. Dalloway follows the title character as he wanders around London on the first Monday after being fired from his longtime job as an accountant. Dressed and accesorized for work as usual, he walks, takes buses, and the subway, encountering performance artists, porno publishers, tennis players, museum goers, tourists, a TV presenter, his eldest son, a neighbor or two, and some bank robbers. These ambulatory and mental meanderings are recounted in a witty and restrained tone with deceptively simple precision. His lone quirk is an accountant's love of translating everything into numerical values, percentages, and probabilities. Lanchester is careful not to overuse this device, and thus it remains amusing and playful throughout.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Phillips spends a great deal of his time musing about sex, death, sex, love, sex, life, and soforth. The middle-aged, middle-class Londoner is clearly meant to be an everyman, a sympathetic type recognizable to all readers. So, although he has no particular "deep thoughts" or epiphanies over the course of his day, his interactions still leave one with a benevolent sense of humanity. It's a much more gentle and embracing book (despite some reader's prudish reactions to certain sexual details) than his well-received, if overly clever, debut, The Debt to Pleasure. This novel can almost be seen as the flipside to that one, totally different, but equally good. Not great, but good.

Rating:
Summary: A fast enjoyable read, but nothing startling
Review: Two things I really liked about this book were the straight-forward language and the way Lancaster clearly calls up contemporary, everyday London. It made for a quick, refreshing read.

One thing I'm not sure I liked about this book was Lancaster’s sort of "riffing" on the quirky and unremarkable people, sights, and events of Mr. Phillips' day. I often have trouble with this kind of thing (see The Pharmacist's Mate, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, or Life After God). One thing that made Lancaster's shtick better than other writers' is that he's fifty-something, rather than twenty-something, so he sometimes takes the joke beyond its simple, odd-ball punch line. Still, all the "sums" business in this book was too gimmicky and I didn't find the running "wonder what sex would be like with her" theme very interesting either.

Why so much about Martin and so little about Thomas? Who cares about the former school teacher's widow, let alone her fish? And why did he stand up in the bank? I got the sense Lancaster was trying to make that a kind of turning-point for Mr Phillips, but I don't think there was any build-up or believable motivation and nothing seemed to "turn" after the "point".

Still, I did enjoy this book. A couple parts made me laugh out loud and sometimes Mr Phillips made some thoughtful observations. I found this to be a real page-turner (it sure made my bus rides pass quickly this week!), but I'm not sure that I'd read another of Lancaster's books.

Rating:
Summary: Enjoyable entry in the 'day in the life' genre
Review: When you boil it down, nothing much happens in this engrossing little novel. It chronicles a day in the life of Mr. Phillips, an accountant who was recently laid off and, afraid to tell his wife about the predicament, spends his days wandering through London. As he rambles from bus to train, from museum to restaurant to church to bank, and then back home again, he keeps up a continuous internal narrative, thinking about his past and the women he'd like to sleep with and the statistical probability of dying before you could cash in a winning lottery thing, among many other things.

While it doesn't sound like a very exciting plot, the story catches hold of you and keeps you enthralled. Mainly, it's the writing; the words are so precise, and the writing style rolls you right along with Mr. Phillips through his day. But it's also the character of Mr. Phillips himself. At first glance, he is merely a rather unassuming middle-aged man, like you see around you in cities and suburbs every day, but the swirl of thoughts inside his head are a fascinating mix of the mundane and the startling -- one minute he's fantasizing about sex, the next he's doing sums in his head. By the end of the book, you have not just traveled around London with Mr. Phillips, you have practically become him.

Rating:
Summary: My day in London....
Review: Whew. It's good to be back in my own consciousness. John Lanchester's "Mr Phillips" is the literary equivalent of that wonderfully quirky film "Being John Malkovich" a few years ago. From the first sentence, we are dropped in medias res into the curiously cool mindset of just fired ("made redundant" in his accountant's patois) Mr Phillips. It is Monday morning as we lie in bed with slumbering Mrs Phillips and drift into our various fantasies of other women, each meticulously "rated" in a manner befitting an ob-com CPA. Thus are the two central motifs ignited: women (and sex generally) and descriptive numeracy of all sorts.

From here, fiftyish Mr Phillips, who has decided not to reveal his employment situation to his wife (or two grown sons,) goes through the typical work-a-day motions and finds himself wandering aimlessly for the first time in over thirty years. His observations and analyses place us squarely in London, which, as usual, becomes an outsized character per se, one which shapes and effects its teeming international amalgam. Throughout, we are treated to"number/probability/odds" rants about any and all things. Regarding the lottery frenzy, for example, we find that "proper" actuarial tables show that "in order for the probability of winning the jackpot to be greater than the odds of being dead by the time of the draw, one would have to bet no earlier than three and a half minutes before the draw." Put another way, death has a greater chance of finding us than does the lotto fairy. This is but one of hundreds of revelations, all put forth with a completely straight-face.

The tics, eccentricities, inner symbols, fears, joys, memories, and fantasies - both light and dark -crowd the currents of this odd stream of consciousness. But, honestly, I now need to go shower to get the Underground's grimy Tube air off myself. Good to have been there, but also good to be home. A wonderful artistic accomplishment with the added treat of enabling one to take a holiday in London for a mere pence an hour (depending, of course, on your reading rate, the current rate of inflation, the cost of your book, the....)