The Information

At the Australian launch of “Mr. Phillips” during Adelaide Writers’ Week last month, John Lanchester retold the story of a Victorian gentleman in stovepipe hat and plump waistcoat, looking like Gladstone on the streets of London. A child, wide-eyed at the apparition of bumptious self-importance, turns to her mother and says “Mummy, what is that man for?”

It is, in the postmodern, post-feminist, postindustrial world, a question more and more men are asking themselves. No longer valued for what work they do, no longer needed by the women they desire, and never much good at the touchy-feely, warm fuzzy, belly button-gazing personal “strategies” that were all the rage in the last decades of the 20th century, men of the baby boom generation are increasingly made redundant by a culture that needs them more or less like a fish needs a bicycle.

Thus, the downsized hero of this perfectly tuned and wonderfully wrought second novel seems--like Leopold Bloom adrift in Dublin that mid-June, early in the century, looking for a lost son--like any one of us, on any given day, looking for the lost meaning of our lives. And like Bloom, he has things he cannot tell his wife. In Mr. Phillips’ case, he has not told Mrs. Phillips that he’s been sacked. And if Joyce’s masterpiece ends with his ad-man hero sleeping head to foot with his wife in Eccles Street while she dreams of men and sex and approval--”Yes!”--Lanchester’s opens thus: “At night, Mr. Phillips lies beside his wife and dreams about other women.”

What follows is an account of Monday, the 31st of July, 1995, in the life of Victor Phillips, age 50, of 27 Wellesley Crescent in South London, just let go last Friday from his senior accountancy job with the firm of Wilkins and Co. Their loss--for Mr. Phillips is good at numbers. Waiting for his train at Clapham Junction, seeing a man inspecting the pictures of naked women in the Daily Sport, Mr. Phillips begins by doing the math.

“He does a calculation: the papers publish, say, 70 pictures of girls with no clothes on a week--a highly conservative figure, given that there’s one every day in the Sun, one in the Mirror, seven in the Sport, one in the Star, plus, say, another dozen on weekends, which comes to 72. So that’s 72 times 52 naked girls a year, which is 70 times 50 is 3,500 plus 70 times 2 is 140 is 3,640, plus 2 times 52 is 104 is 3,744 naked girls in the newspapers. Then magazines, dirty magazines per se, there are dozens: Fiesta Men Only Knave Penthouse Playboy Mayfair, also specialist magazines, Asian Babes, big-tit mags, fat-girl mags, Readers’ Wives, you name it; so assume, again superconservatively, at least 25 magazines coming out every week, with say 10 girls per issue each, which would probably be more if you allow for smaller pictures in the personals, roundups, last year’s greatest hits, etc., but say 10 per issue, which is 25 times 10 equals 250 naked girls per week, times 52 is 50 times 250 is 12,500 plus 2 times 250 is 500 equals 13,000. When you add the newspaper figure this gives a very conservative estimate of 3,744 plus 13,000 equals 16,744, which is the number of British women happy to take their clothes off for money per annum.”

But the meaning behind the mathematics is for Mr. Phillips the most elusive thing: what to do with himself on the first day of a life that has lost its moorings, set adrift on a Monday in greater London. He walks through Battersea Park, considering peacocks, peahens, the double-entry bookkeeping system, two girls playing tennis. He goes to the Tate Gallery, lunches with his eldest son in Soho, watches a porn film, visits a church, wanders through Chinatown and Piccadilly Circus, then hops a bus for Knightsbridge, where he gets caught in a bank robbery not far from Harrods. Face down on the bank’s floor with the other hostages, Mr. Phillips considers the odds of winning the lotto (“fourteen million to one”) and the chances of dying in London in any given week (“one in 4,880”). And when he, literally, takes his stand, against the bank robbers’ orders, saying “I’m not doing that anymore,” he sounds an incarnation of Bartleby the Scrivener, who simply “preferred not to.” With the robber’s shotgun pointed at his belly, his odds at death mathematically improved, “Mr. Phillips feels a great sensation of lightness. It is as if his life is a crushing weight, a rucksack filled with bricks that he gradually got so used to he forgot it was there, and he has now managed to shift the burden so that the sense of ease, of release, is exhilarating.” In a world where you are what you do, not being is the bromide to having no work to do.

Lanchester, not yet 40, has given us a day in the life of our fellow man at 50--caught as we are between our vexations. Sex, numbers, wonders, sex, hopes, dreams, disappointments, sex. In constant flux between the meaning of life and the performance of it, between desire and indifference, between love and death, we are, as Mr. Phillips is, never quite sure of what comes next.

What is sure is that Lanchester is a mightily gifted fictionist, a wry humorist, a wise observer of his species and a writer of startling powers. Like the very best, he pays as much attention to the sentence as the narrative, and the language that bears his character through London, across Chelsea Bridge in the morning, along the Embankment, into the city’s imbroglios and back across Hungerford footbridge on his return, having survived a day without duty or design, can be heartbreakingly beautiful.

“Somewhere in his heart Mr. Phillips has a fantasy of a country life that is different, where the shopkeeper bored you rigid for ten minutes on the subject of how he had been swindled out of third prize for his competition turnips at the county show when you popped in to get a pint of semi-skimmed milk, and where every visit to the pub was a long, warm, bathlike soak in collective and individual grievances against outsiders, landowners, the council, the government, the European Union, in short anyone not present; a life where you nodded at and chatted to everyone you bumped into--except people with whom you were in midfeud--as a matter of course.”

“The Debt to Pleasure,” Lanchester’s debut, was greeted with such approval around the world (translated into more than 20 languages) as to make it a very tough act to follow. With “Mr. Phillips” he has given readers that rare thing: a second novel better than the first.