Home Invasions

John Lanchester is so adept at explaining political and economic catastrophes that it is easy to forget he has written six novels and a collection of tech-infused ghost stories. His capacious essays—on the global financial crisis, Greek debt, Brexit, the pandemic—have an almost soothing quality, as he sketches out the underlying questions, glosses technical terms, and calmly conveys how bad things might be. “The story of Northern Rock was a fuck-up,” he wrote in the London Review of Books in January 2008, a few months after the British bank collapsed and half a year before Lehman Brothers fell. “The trouble is that it may turn out to be a harbinger of meltdown too.” This is typical Lanchester: easygoing, but blunt; colloquial, but precise; deeply informed, yet detached, even placid. He doesn’t argue so much as observe. “It’s going to be interesting—to put it very, very mildly,” he wrote in October 2008, mid-meltdown, “to see if the bail-out works.”His most celebrated novel, Capital (2012), shares some of the appealing features of his essays. While the novel is richly populated with distinctive characters—ranging from the insufferable, genteel banker Roger Yount to his sociopathic d...