David Lodge Died Last Week

 Who was David Lodge? An English writer that you probably never heard of, but should read.

'Masterful' novelist David Lodge dies aged 89 (BBC)

Born and raised in London, Lodge published his first novel in 1960 but made his real breakthrough with Changing Places in 1975.

He won the Whitbread Book of the Year award in 1980 with How Far Can You Go?, about young Catholics and their response to the Vatican's policy on contraception.

Changing Places was followed by sequels Small World: An Academic Romance in 1984 and Nice Work in 1988, both of which earned Booker Prize nominations.

In 2018, the Times said Lodge was "probably the most distinguished novelist of his generation not to win it".

Two examples of the man follow. First, his own explanation of how he came to write Small Things.

In the 1970s, when I was a senior lecturer at Birmingham University, I began to do lecture tours of universities in foreign countries at the invitation of the British Council and to give papers at international conferences in foreign cities. The latter were usually much more enjoyable than similar events in England, with their spartan accommodation in student halls and canteen food to match. Abroad you stayed in hotels, ate in restaurants and did some sightseeing in congenial company.

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The idea was to superimpose a satirical comedy of modern academic manners on a pattern of mythic motifs and romantic archetypes, the interlacing of several plotlines in traditional romance licensing an extravagant use of coincidence to contrive connections between my numerous characters and their fortunes or misfortunes. Since academics love to talk shop, my characters could plausibly provide a kind of commentary on the proliferating literary echoes and allusions for readers unfamiliar with their sources, but I tried to make the novel also simply enjoyable as a narrative combining suspense, mystery and comedy.

Small World by David Lodge 

I ran across him by accident while in prison. His novel Therapy showed I was not alone in thinking of writing as a form of therapy.

3. Therapy (1995)
Tubby, a sitcom writer who’s a bit too keen to tell us how successful he is, seems to have “lost the knack of living without being anxious or depressed”. On top of that he’s suffering from what doctors call Internal Derangement of the Knee (“IDK — I Don’t Know”). So he tries everything: psychotherapy, acupuncture, aromatherapy. When his wife very sensibly kicks him out, it drives him back to his past, and his first love. Good idea? Of course not. Entertaining? Very.

A tribute to David Lodge — ‘a great comic writer on sex and its complications’ (The Times) 

Secondly, a review essay he wrote for The New York Review of Books, The Prime of Muriel Spark. I include this because, thanks to the prison's interlibrary loan program, I read one of his academic books, and found it lacked the usual dull, dead prose of academia. 

She was, it must be admitted, a difficult as well as fascinating woman to know personally or professionally. She was mercurial in temperament, restless and demanding, quick to take offense, chameleon-like in appearance, capable (as I found myself on the only occasions when I met her, one weekend in Rome) of seeming to be two different women on successive days. Some acquaintances regarded her as a kind of white witch gifted with preternatural insight. Most found her eccentric and unpredictable, and some thought she was a little mad—an insinuation that, if she ever found them out, would cause their excommunication from her friendship. Some of these character traits also pervade her fiction, which is more challenging than ingratiating. But as the heroine of Loitering with Intent, a portrait of the young Muriel Spark as aspiring writer, observes: “I wasn’t writing poetry and prose so that the reader would think me a nice person, but in order that my sets of words should convey ideas of truth and wonder.” That aim the mature Spark triumphantly achieved

Another novel read mentioned in his obituaries was

2. Nice Work (1988)

The last book in Lodge’s campus trilogy is the best, and the least campus-based, so it stands alone. It’s another culture clash as the industry boss Vic Wilcox meets the feminist academic Robyn Penrose (“a women’s libber, a bloody communist too I wouldn’t be surprised”). Is manufacturing better than Robyn’s “nice work” in academia? Will the two ever get on? The novel works as a state-of-the-nation novel set in Thatcher’s 1980s and a penetrating character study.

A tribute to David Lodge — ‘a great comic writer on sex and its complications’ (The Times) 

Although, after all these years, maybe even a decade later, I cannot recall the order in which I read Lodge's novels, they were all too damned funny, too full of humanity. My memory agrees fully with:

The complications were what made it funny, and serious too. A recurring theme — in his novels The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965) and How Far Can You Go? (1980) — was the conflict between the human desire to get down to it and the Catholic church’s limitations on sex as recreational sport. In British Museum a couple desperate not to have more children go through a pregnancy scare, leading the husband to worry that they might have accidentally had sex while sleeping. “The ultimate insult,” he reflects gloomily. “Having another child and not even enjoying it.” 

Lodge’s other great comic driver was the clash of cultures. His “campus trilogy” of novels — Changing Places (1975), Small World (1984) and Nice Work (1988) — remain his best-known works, set in and around the university in the fictional city of Rummidge (a thinly veiled version of Birmingham; Lodge taught at the University of Birmingham for 27 years). 

A tribute to David Lodge — ‘a great comic writer on sex and its complications’ (The Times)

 There is nothing wrong with the comic novel, except it is very, very hard to write well. ‘It’s largely thanks to him that the British comic novel remains in good health’: David Lodge remembered by Jonathan Coe (The Guardian):

Fundamentally he was a very serious person – to the occasional surprise of those who expect comic writers to turn up wearing a red nose and a revolving bow tie. This seriousness emerges most strongly in his 2008 novel Deaf Sentence: an extremely funny book in many ways, but one which does not end with the expected comic set-piece. Instead, we find a sombre chapter involving a visit to Auschwitz, undertaken by a hero who reflects: “I don’t think I have ever felt so pessimistic about the future of the human race.” There was only one big novel after that, almost as if Lodge had lost faith in the consolatory power of humour.

It’s largely thanks to him, however, that the British comic novel remains in such good health, whether in the work of Nina Stibbe, Nicola Barker or Nussaibah Younis. What these writers, and Lodge himself, seem to have in common might be summed up in a line from Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s great anti-detective novel The Pledge: an awareness that “the only way to make a reasonably comfortable home for ourselves on this Earth is to humbly include the absurd in our calculations”. It was precisely this eye for the absurd that made Lodge not just one of the funniest but – much more importantly – one of the most truthful of postwar British novelists.

I have read a little of Martin Amis, a bit of Salman Rushdie, some of Ian McEwan. Lodge feels to me less condescending to human nature while being also a superb writer.

‘His books animated academia for me’: how David Lodge inspired my campus novel (The Guardian)

The campus novel was a serious literary genre then – Kingsley Amis, Malcolm Bradbury and Howard Jacobson were prominent names and their novels spoke to me at the time, because I was navigating that scary world myself – but within a single chapter I saw immediately that Lodge’s writing had an extra something: he was properly funny. Not just subtly clever or wryly satirical. Not somewhat amusing if you’ve read the entire works of John Milton and are up to speed on hot trends in lit crit, no – they were bright, lively and laugh-out-loud hilarious, with as many sex and toilet jokes as literary references. His characters were flawed in a real way and became entangled in farcical situations that were completely believable. I was hooked, and explored his backlist like a true fan – or like a student of English who should really have been reading the Romantics.

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It’s this humour that makes his writing so enduringly accessible, whether you recognise the world of crusty, repressed academics or if you’ve never been near an iambic pentameter or a copy of Ulysses in your life. He certainly answers a definitive “yes” to the question “can a comic novel also be literary?”

And which made a 50-year-old American understand and laugh at a world he never knew. 

The 5 David Lodge books you need to read

Here was a novelist who had a day job as a professor at the University of Birmingham and wrote comic tales about the exploits of academics, stuffed with self-referential jokes about semiotics and unreliable narrators. Naturally, such a writer was likely to appeal to literary tastemakers, and he was twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize. But such was Lodge’s gift for comedy that for the best part of 30 years his novels were also reliable bestsellers. 

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