I adore the premise of John Lanchester’s latest novel Look What You Made Me Do. It’s about a grieving widow, one half of a formerly happily married elderly couple, who one day discovers that all of her marital secrets—the in-jokes and private sexual activities—have been written into a wildly popular Netflix series.
That’s catchy, right? And Lanchester really sets the trap beautifully, describing the happy marriage and the widow’s grief—and then languishing in her torment when her entire marriage seems to be exploited and wholesale transformed into an appointment-television entertainment.
But without posting spoilers, I have to say that I’m disappointed with one of the many twists and turns in this very twisty and turny book, to the point where it feels like Lanchester is letting himself off a little bit easy.
And there’s one very obvious error in the book that I can’t believe made it through editing. The Netflix series that everyone is watching is for some reason released in weekly installments, like a linear television show. If Lanchester felt it so important to dole the TV show out on a weekly basis, you’d think someone would have suggested that the show be released on one of the streaming services that actually releases shows on a weekly basis, like Apple or HBO Max, rather than Netflix, which is famous for its binge-release model.
That sounds like picking nits, but I think it gets to a problem of Look What You Made Me Do: The book never feels quite willing to bathe in the gorgeous pool of slop that it meticulously sets up for itself. It’s a nasty little dark thriller with literary airs, and so in that way it never manages to give the reader the satisfaction of living up to its glorious, tawdry title.