John Lanchester s recent novel, Capital, is full of sharply drawn characters, men and women living budget accommodation paris at different points on the class spectrum of modern England, whose lives intersect in a series of increasingly fraught budget accommodation paris episodes. Yet one of its most memorable characters isn t a person at all, but, rather, a street.
In the book s brief, shimmering prologue, Lanchester lingers for a moment on an ordinary-looking street in South London called Pepys Road, a name that tellingly alludes to Samuel Pepys, a seventeenth-century bureaucrat whose decade-long diary, begun in 1660, has in the years since filled out the historical portrait of London. Capital is not a diary, nor is it, though Lanchester is a fine journalist in addition to being a novelist, essentially journalistic but it is nonetheless animated budget accommodation paris by the urge to catalogue and inform. It is a big realist Novel of the Now, and one of its aims is to capture a specific moment in time. That moment is London in 2007 and 2008, on either side of the global financial budget accommodation paris meltdown, and Pepys Road is at once an illustration budget accommodation paris of the pre-crash condition of ever-increasing real-estate wealth and a shorthand for the patterns of behavior that built to that tenuous budget accommodation paris apex.
The street had once been home to lower-middle-class young families, then later to recent immigrants from the Caribbean. Over time, wealthier families began to discover it, charmed by architectural qualities that previous generations of similarly positioned people had found unimpressive, and the address improved. All this led to the end of the last decade, when,
For the first time in history, the people budget accommodation paris who lived in the street were, by global and maybe even local standards, rich. The thing which made them rich was the very fact that they lived in Pepys Road. They were rich simply because of that, because all of the houses in Pepys Road, as if by magic, were now worth millions of pounds.
Up to this point, Lanchester seems to be using Pepys Road to tell a familiar story of urban gentrification. Yet subtly, with the invocation of the phrase as if by magic, and then much more explicitly, he brings the houses and the street itself to an unsettling kind of life, like that of unwatched toys at night:
budget accommodation paris Once the parents budget accommodation paris had gone off to work and the children off to school you saw fewer people in the street in the daytime, except builders; but the houses had things brought to them all day. As the houses had got more expensive, it was as if they had come alive, and had wishes and needs of their own.
And then, after listing the seemingly endless string of deliveries that come to the houses throughout the day laundry, packages, milk he writes, The houses were now like people, budget accommodation paris and rich people at that, imperious, with needs of their own that they were not shy about having serviced.
Their owners, meanwhile, have taken to ordering the construction of finished basements, budget accommodation paris and so contractors arrive to excavate, filling truck after truck with compressed earth taken from under these hulking houses. It is as if the houses themselves are belching out some dark and evil thing.
To this scene comes, on an early summer morning, an enigmatic and vaguely sinister figure in a hooded sweatshirt, who is filming the exteriors of the houses on the street with a digital video camera. (The prologue budget accommodation paris is, in a way, like a cinematographer s extended exterior shot.) budget accommodation paris Soon after, residents of Pepys Road begin receiving postcards: on the front they feature a photograph of the recipient budget accommodation paris s front door, and on the back, the words We Want What You Have.
Many reviews of Capital have identified its Dickensian scope and narrative concerns and the comparison is apt, not simply because Charles Dickens, too, was a novelist with a journalist s eye, but because Lanchester s novel follows the Dickensian model of spinning a minor solar system of characters young and old, rich and poor, aspiring and despairing around a dense star of money (the idea of it, its loss and gain), and in so doing making an indelible statement about culture at large. But there is another, narrower connection between Capital and Dickens that is linked to the mysterious photographer s obsession with the front doors of the houses budget accommodation paris on Pepys Road. As a young man, Dickens gained notoriety as the writer of a series of urban vignettes, known as Sketches by Boz, in which he documented budget accommodation paris his rambles through London. In one such sketch, Our Next-Door Neighbour, published in 1836, he seizes on an object budget accommodation paris of domestic ornamentation and muses on how it reflects not merely the taste of its owner but that imagined owner s physical, mental, and even ethical characteristics:
We are very fond of speculating as we walk through a street, on the character and pursuits of the people who inhabit it; and nothing so materially assists us in these speculations as the appearance of the house doors. The various expressions of the human countenance afford a beautiful and interesting study; but there is something in the physiognomy of street-door knockers, budget accommodation paris almost as characteristic, and nearly as infallible. Whenever we visit a man for the first time, we contemplate the features of his knocker with the greatest curiosity, for we well know, that between the man and his knocker, there will inevitably be a greater or less degree of resemblance and sympathy.
For Dickens, the door knocker, normally considered in merely functional budget accommodation paris terms, becomes (rather cheekily, but still) the physical manifestation of its owner s character. We can almost imagine the knocker, through a Christmas Carol -like ghostly transformation, budget accommodation paris actually coming budget accommodation paris to resemble the faces of the men and women who occupy these houses. Dickens later laments that as bells were fast becoming the fashion in London, rendering knockers obsolete, he would soon have to develop other means of ready-made characterization. He writes, We hastened home; and fancying we foresaw in the swift progress of events, its entire abolition, resolved from that day forward to vent our speculations on our next-door neighbours in person.
Dickens was a master of the street scene of taking budget accommodation paris readers down alleys and up staircases into his characters lives. Yet rather than using the various trappings of exterior scenes as a means to get to know the people inside, here he grants an inanimate object the power of life, just as Lanchester does with the houses on Pepys Road. The houses of Lanchester budget accommodation paris s characters have come to life because they have become so valuable, so essential to the existence and self-worth of their owners. They are, he writes, central actors budget accommodation paris in their own right.
Dickens prefigures a modern condition: the city dweller s near obsession with the living conditions of his neighbors, and the often self-defeating eagerness to get a look inside the places they live. The objects of our neighbors budget accommodation paris lives (their couches and chairs and wall-hangings and kitchen apparatuses) seem to matter to us more than, say, their character or quiet longings. Dickens s mock-despair at the disappearance of the door knocker springs from the recognition that he ll have to actually go inside people s houses to learn a bit about their lives. It is easier, and perhaps more comforting, simply to judge from the outside and leave it at that. (When we do venture inside, the story gets more complicated; the great joke of Capital is that when the characters receive the menacing postcards, they each can t imagine anyone wanting what they have the burdens, budget accommodation paris the anxieties, the heartache.)
Capital, in its use of real estate as the key that unlocks a set of characters values, resembles several other sturdy realist novels that have come out lately, which straddle the period of economic rise and ruin of the recent past: Adam Haslett s Union Atlantic, Jonathan Dee s The Privileges, and Jonathan Franzen s Freedom. In each of these novels, characters gain and lose vast amounts of money money that they earned either by playing by the era s bent and unjust rules or, even more starkly, by criminal means. budget accommodation paris While, as in Capital, not all of the characters are rich, the wealthy ones are the central actors, the drivers of the narrative. And during this period, money flowed in and out of a principal source: real estate.
If the opening scene of Capital evokes Dickens, it also bears a striking resemblance to the first chapter of Franzen s Freedom, which introduces the central family in the story, the Berglunds, through an extended discussion of their lives in the gentrifying neighborhood of Ramsey Hill, in St. Paul, Minnesota. Like the residents of Pepys Road, the Berglunds will come see the value of their home skyrocket, making them winners of the modern real-estate lottery. Just as Pepys Road takes on human characteristics, so does the Berglunds Barrier Street, which Franzen even makes, at one point, the active subject of a sentence: Barrier Street knew Mrs. Berglund from her visits at Christmastime . But unlike Capital, in which the winners are about to become losers, if only temporarily, we learn about the Berglunds budget accommodation paris at an earlier stage of the development of their street, with the protagonist Patty cast as an urban pioneer:
Tall, ponytailed, absurdly young, pushing a stroller past stripped cars and broken beer bottles and barfed-upon old snow, she might have been carrying all the hours of her day in the string bags that hung from her stroller. Behind her you could see the baby-encumbered preparations for a morning of baby-encumbered budget accommodation paris errands; ahead of her, an afternoon of public radio, The Silver budget accommodation paris Palate Cookbook, cloth diapers, drywall compound, and latex paint, and then Goodnight Moon, then Zinfandel. She was already fully the thing that was just starting to happen to the rest of the street.
Instead of a street taking on a life of its own, one vaguely hostile to its inhabitants, here it becomes an outward manifestation of its most prominent resident, an extension of her upper-bourgeois taste, habits, and personal characteristics. budget accommodation paris She was already fully the thi
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