David Lodge’s satirical novel Small World was once described as “the only work of recent fiction, with the possible exceptions of ‘Lolita’ and ‘Pale Fire,’ that has been scrutinized by virtually every professor of literature from Bangor to Berkeley.” John Banville once compared him to Graham Greene. Anthony Burgess called Lodge “one of the best novelists of his generation.” Two of his novels, Small World and Nice Work, were shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
So why don’t we read David Lodge?
Lodge, who died on New Year’s Day in Birmingham, England, at the age of 89, certainly had his fans in another era for his 15 novels. He was also a noted literary critic and theorist, someone as capable at biography and pedagogy as fiction. But for one reason or another (Was he too enamored of postmodern technique? Too provincial in his subject matter? Too, well, Catholic?), he doesn’t get the attention anymore of some of his peers or immediate predecessors.
That’s a shame: Lodge’s novels and works of nonfiction over the course of his long career, as well as plays, screenplays, three memoirs and countless book reviews and literary essays, made him an author whose work—not just the advice doled out in books like The Art of Fiction or The Practice of Writing, but everything else, from his brilliant parodies of other writers to his acid takes on modern subcultures to his experiments with fiction—still gets recommended to young writers seeking to hone their craft.
And, of course, if you’re Catholic, David Lodge will provide you with a laugh a minute—and more than a few cringes—as his spot-on depiction of life in and out of the pews after the Second Vatican Council. There’s a reason why, when Peggy Steinfels revisited “Humanae Vitae” and its impact after 50 years in a 2018 essay for Commonweal, she chose as a primary interpretive key Lodge’s 1980 novel How Far Can You Go?
Born in London in 1935, Lodge grew up in a Catholic lower-middle-class home, a rather different background from some of Great Britain’s famous Catholic novelists. “Even the fact that Evelyn Waugh was a Roman Catholic, as I was, provided little basis for identification,” he once wrote, “partly because Waugh’s romantically idealized version of Catholicism (epitomized in Brideshead Revisited) was so remote from the religious subculture of the suburban Catholic ‘ghetto’ which I knew.”
He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of London in 1955. After two years of service in the British army, Lodge returned to the University of London for a master’s degree in 1959. He married his college sweetheart, Mary Frances Jacob, that year, and a year later published his first novel, The Picturegoers. He began teaching at the University of Birmingham in 1960, where he would stay for the next 27 years. His second novel, Ginger You’re Barmy (based on his experiences in the army), was published in 1962.
In 1965, however, came Lodge’s first classic, the somewhat experimental novel The British Museum Is Falling Down. Literary critics note Lodge’s use of dissent styles as well as pastiches and parodies of other authors in the book, including James Joyce, Graham Greene and Virginia Woolf. But the book is also notable for its portrayal of everyday Catholics: No longer the more pay-pray-and-obey Catholics of The Picturegoers, the characters of The British Museum Is Falling Down are trying to square their traditional Catholic faith with the demands and mores of the modern world—with artificial birth control at the center of the maelstrom.
“Adam and Barbara Appleby [the protagonists of British Museum] are not portraits of myself and my wife, and the circumstances of our married life never, I am glad to say, corresponded very closely to theirs,” Lodge wrote many years later. “Nevertheless, it would be idle to pretend that I would have thought of writing the novel if we had not, in the early years of our married life, found (like most of our married Catholic friends) that the only method of family planning sanctioned by the Church, known as ‘Rhythm’ or the ‘Safe Method’, was in practice neither rhythmical nor safe, and, therefore, a cause of considerable stress.”
How Far Can You Go? (1980) returned to the theme of everyday Catholics finding their way in a world where the certainties of the pre-Vatican II church were no longer so set in stone—a world where you’re not sure if you should go to Communion because you’re not in a state of grace or because you’re having serious doubts about transubstantiation. That novel and others, according to the critic Daniel S. Lenoski, asked central questions of the reader: “How far can you go in aggiornamento before your religion loses definition and significance? How far can you go in your commitment to the secular world before the sacred is destroyed rather than fostered?”
“Reading [How Far Can You Go?] is a powerful experience for British Catholics above a certain age because it plays on our ambivalences,” wrote the British Jesuit Philip Endean, S.J., in 1998. “We know that the religious anxiety so common among the pious a generation ago was just silly. Yet still, deep down, it can exert a captivating force on us.”
“David Lodge writes comic novels about middle-class English Catholics that are striking because his Catholic characters are so ordinary,” wrote Marian Crowe in First Things in 2007. “They are not aristocrats or tortured souls undergoing spiritual crises in exotic or seedy places. Lodge’s ebullient comic spirit catches all the ridiculous aspects of Catholic life, often focusing on the vast discrepancies between the descriptions of the human situation in the carefully formulated pronouncements of Catholic theology and the unpredictable, sometimes absurd circumstances in which human beings often find themselves.” And indeed, Lodge’s themes made him a popular author in the pages of America in the post-Vatican II period, when almost every new novel was reviewed.
Though he described himself as an “agnostic Catholic,” a play on Graham Greene’s self- description as a “Catholic agnostic,” Lodge remained a practicing Catholic even as his novels took on a progressively more demanding treatment of the perils of religious belief. Later in life, he wrote two essays for Commonweal: a roundup of new books for Christmas in 2015 and a reflection on the experience of raising a child with Down syndrome in 2016.
Lodge had many other interests, of course: academic culture, which he roasted in Changing Places, Small World and Nice Work; Joyce, Greene, Nabokov and Henry James (he wrote a novel about James that unfortunately came out at the same time as Colm Tóibín’s critically acclaimed novel about the same author); literary theory; marriage and sexuality and more. Lodge also kept abreast of new developments in fiction: Readers of his later works like Thinks… will notice that the parodies in his writing soon incorporated Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie.
He also spent enough time in the United States that he was able to satirize American culture in the style of Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One. In Changing Places, for example, a professor teaches at “Euphoric State,” a university located in a sunny American state that has elected “Ronald Duck, a former movie actor,” as governor.
Writing this from California, I am stung—and laughing.
Why did David Lodge choose comic novels when his topics were so serious? Perhaps for just that reason. Comedy, he once wrote, is “not just entertaining but performs a very valuable hygienic cultural function: it makes sure that institutions are always subject to a kind of ridiculing criticism.”
•••
Our poetry selection for this week is “Joy of My Youth,” by Paul Mariani. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
Members of the Catholic Book Club: We are taking a hiatus while we retool the Catholic Book Club and pick a new selection.
In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other Catholic Book Club columns:
The spiritual depths of Toni Morrison
What’s all the fuss about Teilhard de Chardin?
Moira Walsh and the art of a brutal movie review
Father Hootie McCown: Flannery O’Connor’s Jesuit bestie and spiritual advisor
Happy reading!
James T. Keane
