David Lodge

The British writer known for his comic novels died a couple weeks ago - I only just stumbled across the news - a month before his 90th birthday.

It was about 1982, I was in grad school, and one day walking through the portion of the university library stacks devoted to modern British literature, my eye was caught by the title of a novel on the shelf. The British Museum Is Falling Down. Intrigued, I took it down and found a very funny book about a hapless grad student in English, studying books at the British Museum, fretting about his inability to complete his thesis and about the rising number of children he and his wife are having, because they're good Catholics relying on the Rhythm Method.

It was amusing enough, full also of sly references to other modern lit, including passages of comic pastiche, that I took note of the author's name - David Lodge - and looked for more of his novels. The next one I found was his best-known, Changing Places, in which two professors of English exchange positions for a term: one from a thinly-disguised University of Birmingham in England, where Lodge himself taught, and one from an equally thinly-disguised University of California at Berkeley, where Lodge had spent a year and which was my own undergraduate school. The level of humor, subtle but dorky, is shown by the fictionalized Berkeley's English Department being located in a building called Dealer Hall. So what, unless you know that the real Berkeley's English Department is in Wheeler Hall.

I've kept reading Lodge's novels, most of which are actually more serious than those two, because I liked his style and offbeat approach, though I drew the line at the one about Henry James. It was more than obvious that Lodge drew most of his material from his own life, though he used it creatively. The problems of literary study, academic politics, and Catholic hangups about sex were his continuing themes, although gradually as he aged his contemporary novels began being less about sex and more about the plague of Lodge's own later years, deafness. None of these, except to a small extent literary study, have any personal resonance for me: what I liked was the way Lodge wrote about them.

Much of his nonfiction is academic and technical, but he did write some books for the general reader. I particularly liked The Art of Fiction, a collection of newspaper columns in a series exploring aspects of fiction-writing from Lodge's combined practitioner's and critic's viewpoint, with the aim of gently introducing technical concepts such as unreliable narrators and aporia, each column starting with a brief excerpt from a different novelist. A more miscellaneous collection called The Practice of Writing, about his experiences doing it, reveals that he'd wanted to call that first novel I'd read The British Museum Had Lost Its Charm, but he couldn't get permission to quote the Gershwin lyric. I wonder if the book would still have caught my eye as it did if he'd succeeded in using the other title. Without that piece of serendipity, I would probably never have found what became for me a favorite author.