Recently in Lodge, David Category

This is basically a book about English professors getting laid. If you're into that sort of thing, well, then this is the book for you. Granted, if I were an English professor, like David Lodge, that's just the sort of thing I would want to write about too. Note to self: Add more sex to novel about college administrators.

Okay, I'm being a little too flippant about a book that I actually did enjoy. Lodge always sucks me in. This is the second novel in the Rummidge trilogy, and I've now accidentally read all three. I like Lodge, so I just keep picking up his novels, and gradually I've read a trilogy without knowing it. I started with the third book, then read the first book, thinking that the characters all seemed rather familiar, and now I've read the second book. I don't think there are any more in the series, but who knows?

The book also seems rather Dickensian in that it's full of coincidences. Pretty much everyone is running into everyone all over the world. I can go several days without running into my roommate, and yet these characters are constantly running into each other in Switzerland, Turkey, Amsterdam, Hawaii, and all sorts of other exotic locales. Just as with Dickens, there seem to be about 50 people in the entire world, and they are always bumping into each other.

Not so much like Dickens: they're screwing each other lots too.

This was the novel about academia I decided to read while trying to write a novel about academia. Well, reread, as I had read this first about seven years ago.

It's an entertaining book, and I've always loved David Lodge's novels. There's something so relaxing about reading his books, even if they are not about anything relaxing. My only quarrel is that everything wraps up so quickly in the novel. It's as if Lodge suddenly realized he had hit his word count, and decided it was time to tie up all the loose ends and get the book to the publisher.

I suppose I'm thinking like this because I just finished up Nanowrimo for a second year. (That's the main reason there wasn't a whole lot of reading being done around these parts lately.) I know my 50,000 word novel came to a sudden end once I had hit my word count. I had no more patience for character development as I neared the very end. It was time to finish up the plot, and get the thing over with. I get the feeling Lodge felt the same way. 

Disturbing thing I learned about this book: Morris Zapp, a smaller character here who plays a larger role in other Lodge novels, was played on television by John Ratzenberger. Great, now, whenever I come across Morris in other novels, I'm going to envision Cliff Clavin. 

I find David Lodge to be a rather comforting author to read, so it was nice to read this as a break from "War and Peace," which I'm also trying to tackle. In his latest, Lodge again is writing about an academic, although this academic is a retired professor who is going deaf. There are some interesting insights into deafness here. And some funny ones too. Lodge's narrator, who is constantly fumbling with hearing aids, likes to claim that while blindness is tragic, deafness is comic.

For me, the most interesting part was a stylistic one. Lodge tended to switch his story from the first to the third person, and for someone who is trying to write a first person novel, this was fascinating. Mostly, the book is told in the first person, but occasional sections are done in the third person. For my taste, he's a little too clever with this ("I feel a fit of the third person coming on."), but it did help the novel.

When I started writing a novel, I never thought of doing it in anything but the first person, but now I constantly find myself asking, "Well, how the hell did my narrator know that?" It does get maddening occasionally, so I've begun to focus on the voice that novelists use.

Here, Lodge seems to use the third-person to explain extremely embarrassing moments for the protagonist. Our protagonist is constantly getting into awkward situations because of his deafness, and the third person is a much more civilized way to handle these situations.

This is a strange book. It's probably the only book in existence whose plot hinges on an attractive 27-year-old woman marking up a library book with a highlighter. In this case, our fussy narrator is highly agitated by this piece of vandalism and tells the woman exactly how horrible her behavior was.

Eventually, this leads to a suggestion from her that he should punish her by spanking her, while she's naked from the waist down, which is just the sort of thing that doesn't happen when I complain about someone writing in a book -- no matter how fussy I might get. Still, this is David Lodge's world, and apparently sometime while seeing yet another library book vandalized, he thought up this rewarding plot twist. His is a creative mind, no doubt.

All in all, it's a very enjoyable book -- and not bad at all for a fifty-cent purchase at a yard sale.

Here's another book I reread in order to help my writing, so it was fitting that at one point David Lodge quoted from an imaginary (well, I assume imaginary) 1927 book called "Let's Write a Novel" by an A.J. Bemish. The excerpt contained some remarkably simplistic yet wonderful advice, which I feel compelled to quote in its entirety:

Every novel must tell a story. And there are three types of story, the story that ends happily, the story that ends unhappily, and the story that ends neither happily nor unhappily, or, in other words, doesn't really end at all.

The best kind of story is the one with a happy ending; the next best is the one with an unhappy ending, and the worst kind is the story that has no ending at all. The novice is advised to begin with the first kind of story. Indeed, unless you have Genius, you should never attempt any other kind.

Well, make of that, what you will.

I've always liked David Lodge. His novels are mesmerizing, and they suck me in, even when the material doesn't seem overly exciting. This one, however, does get exciting. It's a comedy about two Professors of English, one from England and one from the West Coast of America, who trade jobs for a semester and end up trading just about everything else, including their wives. It takes place in 1969, a time of upheaval on the campuses of both universities. What seems mundane at first gradually becomes anything but mundane.

As a college administrator, I may have a weakness for books about academia. There was one point where it looked like someone was about to fill out some paperwork, and I was quite excited. I do have to say, however, that the administrative details of appointing a visiting professor were sorely lacking in this book, an opportunity clearly missed by the otherwise dependable David Lodge.

Having said that, I do have a serious piece of criticism. This book often gets far too clever for its own good. One chapter is told as a series of letters, another is made up of clippings from the newspaper, and it ends with chapter done as a film script. Lodge is a great writer, but this book feels rather gimmicky at times, and for me the stylistic flourish often detracts from the story itself.

I'm guessing that A.J. Beamish would not have approved. Actually, considering the book "doesn't really end at all," Beamish would have likely hated this one.