The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Mr. Phillips by John LanchesterPhilip Landon
John Lanchester. Mr Phillips. Putnam, 2000. 292 pp. $24.95.
John Lanchester’s cookbook/novel The Debt to Pleasure, a formal experiment in the tradition of Nabokov’s Pale Fire, poked fun at English elitism and Francophilia and gave us the soul of a snob to taste. In his second book, by deliberate contrast, Lanchester serves up a member of the middle class, Mr. David Phillips, philistine, mediocrity, and ogler of girls. Mr Phillips has a certain affinity with Nick Hornby’s fiction of male infantilism, and the influence of Nicholson Baker may be discerned in Lanchester’s connoisseurship of the mundane. In writing a novel about a day in the life of a middle-aged London accountant, Lanchester affords his audience tingly pleasures of recognition, but the effect is far from complacent. The restrained precision of the third-person narration blends the appalling with the wonderful, as the habitual privacy of a lifelong commuter is punctured, in turn, by an accosting pornographer, a Jehova’s witness, and a nutcase in the Tate Gallery, to mention some of the eccentrics who buttonhole Lanchester’s flâneur. The tired male in Cool Britannia has little to shout about: “[T]he city is inhabited by people 99.999 per cent of whom will never have a monument built to them, and who know it, and who repay the compliment by ignoring all the monuments and memorials to toffs and nobs and heroes and famous victories.” The knife is out for postimperialist complacency. Lanchester’s generous humor draws on the wholesome, cleansing traditions of urban fiction in English: echoes here of Mrs. Dalloway, Mr. Pickwick, and Leopold Bloom. [Philip Landon]