Road to Nowhere: John Lanchester’s Big Novel of the Financial Crisis Focuses on a Single Street in London
In 2010, the English novelist and critic John Lanchester published a book about the credit crisis of 2008. It’s called I.O.U. Presented as a guidebook to the dark side of fiscal complexity, I.O.U. also covers simpler terrain. Half of its usefulness lies in the author’s talent for unraveling the deviousness of modern finance, but the other half lies in his willingness to explain, and then punctually re-explain, the basics of how money works. The pyrotechnic frauds and cutting-edge ruses that impelled the credit crunch are exposed—and sometime before that there’s a set of instructions about how to draw up a balance sheet. This was a winning formula; I.O.U. became a bestseller. It can’t have hurt that Mr. Lanchester is a witty and likeable writer, and that his conclusions are so passionately fair-minded. After three decades of the rough-and-tumble of laissez-faire boom and bust, Mr. Lanchester proposed we smarten up and just shrink: “We in the West can do something that no people in history have done: we can show the world that we know when we have enough.” Read More
