How I struggled through this. I like John Lanchester's writing in the LRB, but his fiction leaves me cold. This was particularly depressing. Mr Phillips is a man in his 50s, who has been made redundant from his accountancy job but hasn't told his wife or anyone else yet - and like the Japanese salarymen who might perhaps have inspired the book, he gets dressed for work and heads out for his usual train as if he was going to work. Then he wanders around London all day, thinking about his life, and thinking a lot about sex, and having some interesting and some dull experiences.
He reflects on the pleasures and frustrations of modern life - this book was published in 2000, but it already feels like ancient history...this is a world with compact disc shops in railway stations. There are no smartphones - there may have been one mobile phone mentioned. There's no internet, no online anything.
And Mr Phillips, who is eight years older than me, feels like a person from another era. I know he's supposed to be a big dull and emotionally sclerotic, but none of the people I know who are eight years older than me are like this.
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