#john lanchester

THIS IS MY LAST POST FOR 2025! SEE YOU NEXT YEAR!

I'm at the end of my tour for my new book, the international bestseller Enshittification. My last two stops are CCC in Hamburg, Dec 27-30 and the Tattered Cover in Denver (Jan 22). Hope to see you!

I'm about to sign off for the year – actually, I was ready to do it yesterday, but then I happened upon a brief piece of writing that was so perfect that I decided I'd do one more edition of Pluralistic for 2025.

The piece in question is John Lanchester's "For Every Winner A Loser," in the London Review of Books, in which Lanchester reviews two books about the finance sector: Gary Stevenson's The Trading Game and Rob Copeland's The Fund:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n17/john-lanchester/for-every-winner-a-loser

It's a long and fascinating piece and it's certainly left me wanting to read both books, but that's not what convinced me to do one more newsletter before going on break – rather, it was a brief passage in the essay's preamble, a passage that perfectly captures the total social uselessness of the finance sector as a whole.

Lanchester starts by stating that while we think of the role of the finance sector as "capital allocation" – that is, using investors' money to fund new businesses and expansions for existing business – that hasn't been important to finance for quite some time. Today, only 3% of bank activity consists of "lending to firms and individuals engaged in the production of goods and services."

The other 97% of finance is gambling. Here's how Stevenson breaks it down: say your farm grows mangoes, averaging about 100 mangoes per year. You need money before the mangoes are harvested, so you sell the future ownership of the harvest to a broker at $1/crate.

The broker immediately flips that interest in your harvest to a dealer who believes (on the basis of a rumor about bad weather) that mangoes will be scarce this year and is willing to pay $1.10/crate. Next, an international speculator (trading on the same rumor) buys the rights from the broker at $1.20/crate.

Now come the side bets: a "momentum trader" (who specializing in bets on market trends continuing) buys the rights to your crop for $1.30/crate. A contrarian trader (who bets against momentum traders) short-sells the momentum trader's bet at $1.20. More short sellers pile in and drive the price down to $1/crate.

Now, a new rumor circulates, about conditions being ripe for a bounteous mango harvest, so more short-sellers appear, and push the price to $0.90/crate. This tempts the original broker back in, and he buys your crop back at $1/crate.

That's when the harvest comes. You bring in the mangoes. They go to market, and fetch $1.10/crate.

“This is not a conventional cookbook,” writes Lanchester’s hero Tarquin Winot in this thriller-masquerading-as-foodie memoir. Over a variety of “seasonal” chapters, Winot weighs in about his various relatives and friends, “the many extant batter, waffle and pancake dishes” from “Swedish krumkaker” to “Polish naleśniki” and his convictions in relation to fish (“lemon sole is a very underrated fish, much closer in quality to its more highly regarded Dover cousin than wisdom normally permits”). Lanchester crafts Winot-as-author to be infuriating – he’s pompous, tricksy and pedantic – but a fancy prose style soon turns out to be the most innocent of his vices. A dark, funny and exquisitely crafted book.

JOMP BPC | December 2: Currently Reading

Owned: No, library Page count: 276 My summary: It’s Kavanagh’s time patrolling the Wall. It’s important work. It’s only two years. Everyone has to do it. And once his time is up, he’ll have so many opportunities open to him. The only thing he needs to do is survive. If the Others come, they will kill him. So he has to make sure that doesn’t happen. My rating: 4/5

Well, this is an interesting piece of political commentary. No prizes for guessing what the titular Wall is inspired by. This is set in a dystopian future England, where the sea level has risen and refugees from around the world are trying to get into the country for, you know, refuge. Kavanagh’s job is to stand on the Wall and shoot people if they’re trying to get in. It’s a chilling look at the mundanity of prejudice and hate, and the kind of culture that fosters said hatred. I thought it was very effective, though I have to admit the ending kind of petered out.

Audiobook Review: Reality and Other Stories

Reality and Other Stories by John Lanchester (audiobook) I’ve really been trying to read (listen to?) more audiobooks, and what better than a bunch of horror stories? The narrators chosen for these tales were all great, really immersing you in the story. While I wouldn’t call most of these stories horror exactly, a couple did have decidedly creepy elements. The narration certainly added to this…