Rating: 
Summary: Nicholson Baker meets John Cleese
Review: The concept of Mr Phillips is not really a new idea. As another reviewer pointed out, its very similar to Nicholson Baker's early work (i.e,the description of daily minutia that spirals into bigger themes). What makes Mr Phillips a winner is the humor - british and otherwise- that others of this genre didn't have. He's actually a grown up Holden Caufield hiding out in a big city without telling his family of recent events. What brings it all together is the author's easy writing style. This is a light read that I would recommend to anyone who enjoys good prose with a subtle bite.
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Summary: A Day In The Life...
Review: The novel that John Lanchester has devised is an interesting snapshot of a man's life after he has been made redundant, yet he's afraid to tell his family and thus goes through the motions of going to work only to wander around London all day. Lanchester has done a wonderful job of making Mr. Phillips a unique and complete character. At times, however, Mr. Phillips thinks to much and the narrative can get slightly tedious. All-in-all, Mr. Phillips is a joy to read.
Rating:
Summary: A day in the lifeï
Review: There is something very organic about John Lanchester's Mr. Phillips. The descriptions of his daily life are filled with sights, sounds, and even smells, so meticulously detailed the reader can easily put himself (whether or not you want to is another story) in Phillips' place. An accountant let go from his position due to redundancy this book is a day in Mr. Phillips' new life. Filled with sexual commentary, calculations, and the occasional adventure, it's hard to say that this is a truly original work in plot, but Lanchester creates such a clear picture you can't help but be fascinated by the inner workings of a man whose life is thrown in such disarray.
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Summary: A solid follow-up
Review: This book is not going to jump out at you, or bowl you over, and probably won't leave a lasting imression on you. But that is not really Mr. Lanchester's style, is it? Like his characters, he highlights the fine details in the otherwise mundane. Another reveiwer stated that Lanchester had set out to write a serious book. I don't agree with that at all. I got the sense that he mearly wrote about what took his fancy at that time, be it statistics, pubilc transportation, or bodily functions. It's a unique style, and that's the most important thing. And one more thing, if you do get this book (and you should), do yourself a favor and read it through in one sitting.
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Summary: J. Alfred Prufrock Phillips
Review: This book is thinner -- in subject matter, in prose, and in narrative substance -- than Debt to Pleasure, but it is engaging and funny nonetheless. I carried it with me to jury duty and caught myself laughing aloud several times. In a real sense, Mr Phillips is less a novel than a compendium of set pieces, witty observations, character sketches and jokes. There is, for example, an exchange between Mr Phillips and a publisher of pornography that seems straight out of Monty Python. Though his main themes are sex and death from the perspective of middle age, Lanchester maintains a light touch.
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Summary: An extraordinary novel about ordinary life
Review: This novel falls under the currently popular theme of a day in an ordinary life. The danger of such a theme is that, even if it is well told, it will essentially represent an ordinary novel. Mr Phillips is an ordinary man who has been made redundant in his accounting job but hasn't the heart to tell his family he's been fired. So he pretends to go to work and wanders the streets of London until he determines how best to handle his professional demise. He is a rotund man in his fifties who wonders what lies ahead for him in the balance of his life. His mind is distracted by illusions and visions as he struggles to overcome the ordinary travails of working in a big city. We really get inside the head of Mr Phillips as we learn his sensual fantasies and proclivities. Other readers seem to have found his preoccupation with this subject rather too graphic; however, we must peel away the inedible leaves of the artichoke to get to the edible heart. Mr Phillips succeeds because this novel shows us the fullness and heart of a 20th century Everyman. We can identify with him in his struggle because Mr Phillips is many of us. Although many novels about ordinary life, like Joyce's Ulysses or Lowry's Under the Volcano, use stylistic innovation, even with the straight-ahead narrative technique of Lanchester, the novel vividly depicts one man's struggle to make sense of his life. There are some great gems in this novel: the writing is tight, densely packed and immensely readable. I look forward to the subsequent work of Mr. Lanchester -- I think he's onto something true and powerful and real in the scope of his work. I recommend Mr Phillips to you: it's only a little shy of great.
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Summary: A Day in the Life of an Everyman
Review: This semi-homage to Mrs. Dalloway follows the title character as he wanders around London on the first Monday after being fired from his longtime job as an accountant. Dressed and accesorized for work as usual, he walks, takes buses, and the subway, encountering performance artists, porno publishers, tennis players, museum goers, tourists, a TV presenter, his eldest son, a neighbor or two, and some bank robbers. These ambulatory and mental meanderings are recounted in a witty and restrained tone with deceptively simple precision. His lone quirk is an accountant's love of translating everything into numerical values, percentages, and probabilities. Lanchester is careful not to overuse this device, and thus it remains amusing and playful throughout. Not surprisingly, Mr. Phillips spends a great deal of his time musing about sex, death, sex, love, sex, life, and soforth. The middle-aged, middle-class Londoner is clearly meant to be an everyman, a sympathetic type recognizable to all readers. So, although he has no particular "deep thoughts" or epiphanies over the course of his day, his interactions still leave one with a benevolent sense of humanity. It's a much more gentle and embracing book (despite some reader's prudish reactions to certain sexual details) than his well-received, if overly clever, debut, The Debt to Pleasure. This novel can almost be seen as the flipside to that one, totally different, but equally good. Not great, but good.
Rating: 
Summary: A fast enjoyable read, but nothing startling
Review: Two things I really liked about this book were the straight-forward language and the way Lancaster clearly calls up contemporary, everyday London. It made for a quick, refreshing read. One thing I'm not sure I liked about this book was Lancaster’s sort of "riffing" on the quirky and unremarkable people, sights, and events of Mr. Phillips' day. I often have trouble with this kind of thing (see The Pharmacist's Mate, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, or Life After God). One thing that made Lancaster's shtick better than other writers' is that he's fifty-something, rather than twenty-something, so he sometimes takes the joke beyond its simple, odd-ball punch line. Still, all the "sums" business in this book was too gimmicky and I didn't find the running "wonder what sex would be like with her" theme very interesting either. Why so much about Martin and so little about Thomas? Who cares about the former school teacher's widow, let alone her fish? And why did he stand up in the bank? I got the sense Lancaster was trying to make that a kind of turning-point for Mr Phillips, but I don't think there was any build-up or believable motivation and nothing seemed to "turn" after the "point". Still, I did enjoy this book. A couple parts made me laugh out loud and sometimes Mr Phillips made some thoughtful observations. I found this to be a real page-turner (it sure made my bus rides pass quickly this week!), but I'm not sure that I'd read another of Lancaster's books.
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Summary: Enjoyable entry in the 'day in the life' genre
Review: When you boil it down, nothing much happens in this engrossing little novel. It chronicles a day in the life of Mr. Phillips, an accountant who was recently laid off and, afraid to tell his wife about the predicament, spends his days wandering through London. As he rambles from bus to train, from museum to restaurant to church to bank, and then back home again, he keeps up a continuous internal narrative, thinking about his past and the women he'd like to sleep with and the statistical probability of dying before you could cash in a winning lottery thing, among many other things.
While it doesn't sound like a very exciting plot, the story catches hold of you and keeps you enthralled. Mainly, it's the writing; the words are so precise, and the writing style rolls you right along with Mr. Phillips through his day. But it's also the character of Mr. Phillips himself. At first glance, he is merely a rather unassuming middle-aged man, like you see around you in cities and suburbs every day, but the swirl of thoughts inside his head are a fascinating mix of the mundane and the startling -- one minute he's fantasizing about sex, the next he's doing sums in his head. By the end of the book, you have not just traveled around London with Mr. Phillips, you have practically become him.
Rating: 
Summary: My day in London....
Review: Whew. It's good to be back in my own consciousness. John Lanchester's "Mr Phillips" is the literary equivalent of that wonderfully quirky film "Being John Malkovich" a few years ago. From the first sentence, we are dropped in medias res into the curiously cool mindset of just fired ("made redundant" in his accountant's patois) Mr Phillips. It is Monday morning as we lie in bed with slumbering Mrs Phillips and drift into our various fantasies of other women, each meticulously "rated" in a manner befitting an ob-com CPA. Thus are the two central motifs ignited: women (and sex generally) and descriptive numeracy of all sorts. From here, fiftyish Mr Phillips, who has decided not to reveal his employment situation to his wife (or two grown sons,) goes through the typical work-a-day motions and finds himself wandering aimlessly for the first time in over thirty years. His observations and analyses place us squarely in London, which, as usual, becomes an outsized character per se, one which shapes and effects its teeming international amalgam. Throughout, we are treated to"number/probability/odds" rants about any and all things. Regarding the lottery frenzy, for example, we find that "proper" actuarial tables show that "in order for the probability of winning the jackpot to be greater than the odds of being dead by the time of the draw, one would have to bet no earlier than three and a half minutes before the draw." Put another way, death has a greater chance of finding us than does the lotto fairy. This is but one of hundreds of revelations, all put forth with a completely straight-face. The tics, eccentricities, inner symbols, fears, joys, memories, and fantasies - both light and dark -crowd the currents of this odd stream of consciousness. But, honestly, I now need to go shower to get the Underground's grimy Tube air off myself. Good to have been there, but also good to be home. A wonderful artistic accomplishment with the added treat of enabling one to take a holiday in London for a mere pence an hour (depending, of course, on your reading rate, the current rate of inflation, the cost of your book, the....)
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