DAVID LODGE’S LATEST NOVEL, Thinks…, explores the long-deplored and still-continuing divide between the “two cultures” of Britain, science and the humanities. Scientific investigation is represented by Ralph Messenger, womanizing professor and director of the prestigious “Holt Belling Center for Cognitive Science” at the very new University of Gloucester. Intuition is represented by Helen Reed, a novelist suffering from writer’s block caused by the recent death of her husband. To Ralph, an atheist, the mind is a “virtual machine”; to Helen, a lapsed Catholic, it is a repository for the soul (although a soul that seems at times to have left home). The scientist Ralph regards the fundamental problem of consciousness as the fact that “we never know for certain what another person is really thinking. Even if they choose to tell us, we can never know whether they’re telling the truth, or the whole truth.” To which his beloved Helen replies, “Just as well, perhaps. Social life would be difficult otherwise….I suppose that’s why people read novels. To find out what goes on in other people’s heads.” And through the device of tape recorders and diaries (Ralph dictates, Helen writes in longhand, and each comes upon the other’s record), David Lodge does indeed let his characters—and his readers—find out what goes on in another person’s head. Ralph recollects his conquests; Helen recollects her marriage. He wants to have an affair with her (a violation of his unspoken pledge to his wife not to womanize on her home turf); she wants to contemplate her grief at her husband’s death. But, unbeknownst to them—well, unbeknownst to them, their author is unfolding in Thinks… an entirely conventional, almost melodramatic plot. And why not? What David Lodge does best is satire, after all: high satire that exposes all our foibles. Without writing autobiography, Lodge has always stuck close to the world he knows—the world of England’s postwar Baby Boomers whose opportunities were far more expansive than those available to their parents. His novels reflect his own progress from lower-middle-class, adolescent South Londoner, to young soldier doing his national service, to young husband, father, and graduate student, and finally to English professor at the University of Birmingham. Lodge started out writing under the influence of modernist fiction, particularly James Joyce, another rebellious, questioning Catholic. Lodge’s first novel, The Picturegoers (1960), published when he was twenty-five, is a “sensitive” novel about a young man’s anguish at his sexual longing and his alienation from his family. The picturegoer of the title is a young student of English literature who rediscovers his lapsed Roman Catholic faith through his longing for the daughter of the large Catholic family with whom he boards. As the daughter resists his physical advances, her faith dampens the fire of his ardor, just as she becomes interested and starts to find justification for having a sexual relationship with him. She comes to love—which causes her to lose her piety. He comes to believe—which causes him to lose his lust. She loves him and loses her faith; he loves her and regains his faith. Predictably, his obsession with the cinema and its depiction of “life”—he is a dedicated moviegoer—turns out to be “a substitute for religion.” The old symbols reassert themselves over the new artifacts, so to speak, and the novel ends as its protagonist prepares to enter the priesthood. The Picturegoers strongly recalls Joyce’s Dubliners with its symbolic artifacts and ironic choices. But Lodge has never been convincing in his depiction of spiritual anguish and conversion, even though he uses them often. More than one of his novels sees its protagonist end by undertaking a pilgrimage, to the disbelief of the reader. But even in this first, highly derivative work, Lodge proved his talent at close observation of the fashionable cant we use to justify ourselves and rationalize our behavior. He didn’t find the proper setting for his talent, however, until he turned to comedy—a comedy that often approaches farce. His satiric masterpiece came later in his classic Small World, but The Picturegoers already showed signs of his bent for witty observation. His second novel, Ginger, You’re Barmy (1962), took up the cant and folderol of the British peacetime army with a story of two young draftees, one a passive observer and the other prepared to endure hardship in order to keep his integrity in the face of official deceit and betrayal. The novel used Graham Greene’s The Quiet American as its model, but it was not convincing in its depiction of the stubborn idealist. What Lodge had to realize is that he is more effective as farceur than as narrator of serious tragedy—a realization he made with his next novel, The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965). It was with this book that Lodge came into his own. Using the structure of Joyce’s Ulysses, The British Museum Is Falling Down follows its young graduate-student protagonist through a single day full of ordinary events with symbolic meaning—each chapter in the style of a modern writer such as Conrad, Joyce, Hemingway, and Woolf. He is called upon by the institutions in his life to be a good graduate student, a good Catholic, and a good husband. He worries continually about his wife (as Bloom worries about Molly), especially about her menstrual cycle. Is she pregnant or just “late”? At the end, our hero exerts control over his life by joining the enemy. He becomes a book buyer for an American who plans to buy the British Museum for the express purpose of moving it to Colorado and making it an American institution. When Lodge ended The British Museum Is Falling Down in this fashion, he signaled that he had finally given up his ambition to write the “serious” novel, and he entered the world of satire—liberating his talent and thoroughly improving his fiction. As a professor of literature, Lodge is the author of some serious and very good academic criticism. (Most accessible to the lay reader are the short articles he wrote on fiction for the London Independent newspaper, which were collected in The Art of Fiction: Illustrated from Classic and Modern Texts.) It was through his critical work that he came to the notion that his novels could—in “pastiche, parody and travesty”—explore the farcical possibilities of “the very kind of discourse” he uses seriously and without a blush in his “capacity as an academic critic.” A major influence is Mikhail Bakhtin, whose “postmodern” observations struck Lodge with the “same effect, as that of a light bulb being switched on in one’s head.” “For the prose artist,” Bakhtin wrote, “the world is full of other people’s words, among which he must orient himself and whose speech characteristics he must be able to perceive with a very keen ear.” There followed over the next three decades a set of exceptional, pyrotechnic novels: How Far Can You Go? (1980), a novel about Catholic friends going through the changes in theology and popular thought in the 1960s after Vatican II; Paradise News (1991), about an ex-priest finding a difficult new life in Hawaii; Therapy (1995), about a television scriptwriter who is so full of anxiety and dread that he forces Lodge to put him through as many types of therapy (analytical, cognitive, sexual, water) as Lodge can bring himself to satirize. And then there are the satires written at the top of his form: the academic comedies Changing Places (1975), Small World (1984), Nice Work (1988), and this year’s Thinks…, four loosely interconnected “campus” novels about the sexual and intellectual obsessions of the professoriate. Lately, it has become fashionable, under the influence of Bakhtin, to call almost all novels “Menippean satire,” because in the novel the centrality of the author to the interpretation of the work breaks down; the narrator discovers that he “means more than one thing,” and truth becomes a possibility that arises from the conflict of ideas—the banging of ideas against each other makes the novel a kind of pinball machine of conceptual possibility. This definition of the novel is too broad to be useful, but “Menippean satire” is an effective term with which to understand Lodge, for (invented by the Hellenistic Greek Menippus) it “presents people as mouthpieces of the ideas they represent,” as Northrop Frye put it half a century ago. It is fiction populated by “pedants, bigots, cranks, parvenus, virtuosi, enthusiasts, rapacious and incompetent professional men of all kinds.” The classical form of Menippean satire uses a narrator-searcher-traveler as addlebrained as the persons he encounters—which pretty much gives us the benign farce that Lodge makes of our pretensions, for he writes the type of satire that “deals less with people as such than with mental attitudes.” Who can forget the proud mother of Nice Work who says of her page-three daughter’s bare breasts on an “art” calendar, “Nice, aren’t they?” Or the American professor Morris Zapp (said to be modeled on Stanley Fish) and the paper he gives on Jane Austen at an academic conference, “Textuality as Strip Tease”? (“The dancer teases the audience as the text teases its readers, with the promise of an ultimate revelation that is infinitely postponed.”) Or Fulvia Morgana, the hard-core Communist and rich Paduan academic in Small World, who justifies her extravagant and swinging life as one that will make the revolution come sooner? Or the two middle-aged couples who have exchanged academic positions in America and England and also exchanged spouses, staring at each other at the end of Changing Places and wondering how the author is going to resolve the plot they are in? Or the graduate student in Thinks… who blackmails her womanizing professor into nominating her for an important academic conference and signs her disingenuous e-mails with the typo “Your fiend”? Lodge’s point of view was almost exclusively male until late in his writing career. He may have come to think he looked antiquated. In the event, he very successfully made a liberal female academic the antithesis of his conservative male businessman in Nice Work. The same kind of divide is made in Thinks…, where a male, rationalistic academic is set against a female, expressionistic novelist. Of course, one does not expect the sort of comedy which Lodge writes to examine character and inner life. It necessarily deals in types and stereotypes—the obsequious servant, the braggart, the sexpot, the battleaxe, the mother-in-law, the foreigner. Indeed, Lodge has made the art of character-typing so much his own that in his pages one recognizes one’s colleagues, neighbors, lawyers, brokers, professors, baby-sitters, secretaries, and relatives. Lodge’s zest for nailing pedantry has somewhat abated. But he has not lost his ability to nail character types and to keep us turning pages to see what new lunacy will come next. It must be conceded that Lodge cannot write voices. Intrigued by Ralph’s machine analysis of thinking, Helen sets her creative writing students to writing in the style of a modern author an answer to Thomas Nagel’s famous paper about consciousness, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The students write in the style of Samuel Beckett, et al., and it is amusing. But it is not very amusing, because Lodge basically cannot write well in any style but his own. One would think that this would matter greatly, but it doesn’t. Lodge is a master organizer of plot and an unerring dissector of diseases of the intellect. He nails us all in our middle-class, middle-brow, earthly muddle. If you ever wonder what you were thinking at a certain stage in your life, go read David Lodge. He will tell you, as he does again in this delightful novel. Margaret Boerner teaches English at Villanova University.
