David Lodge and the Tradition of the Modern Novel by J. Russell Perkin (review)

It comes as a shock to those of us who read David Lodge’s campus novels as they appeared in the 1970s and 1980s to realize that Lodge is now, at 81, a grand old man of English letters himself. This new study of his work by J. Russell Perkin is a timely reminder of the range and quality of a literary career spanning over half a century, in which Lodge distinguished himself equally as one of Britain’s foremost novelists and as a ground-breaking critic. Full-length studies of his work have been surprisingly thin on the ground up until now: Merritt Moseley’s David Lodge: How Far Can You Go? covers Lodge’s career up to the early eighties;¹ Daniel Ammann’s David Lodge and the Art-and-Reality Novel is a highly technical attempt to apply the theories Lodge expounded in his critical work to his novels;² Bernard Bergonzi’s brief Writers and their Work volume expands the range to include the novels up to the publication of Therapy;³ and Bruce K. Martin’s volume in Twayne’s “English Authors” series takes the reader still further, to 1999.⁴ These are the only English-language monographs solely devoted to Lodge’s fiction before Perkin’s, so this volume is timely, coming at about the same time as Lodge’s memoir, Quite A Good Time to Be Born, was published.⁵ It is also able to reflect on the fiction that Lodge has produced since the turn of the millennium, in particular, the fictionalized biographies of H. G. Wells and Henry James in A Man of Parts and Author, Author.⁶

Where Perkin distinguishes himself from his predecessors is in firmly locating the discussion of Lodge, as the title of the volume implies, within the context of the development of the novel in the twentieth century. Perkin takes the long view, so James, Wells, Graham Greene, and Evelyn Waugh, for example, are prominently featured, alongside Lodge’s near-contemporaries such as Muriel Spark, Margaret Drabble, and Kingsley Amis. Lodge’s relationship with a later generation (Martin Amis, Peter Ackroyd, Ian McEwan, and Hilary Mantel) is also touched upon. For Joyceans, doubtless one of the key elements of the book is Perkin’s devoting a whole chapter to Lodge’s relationship with Joyce, a connection established by the former’s declaration that Joyce is “of all modern writers, the one I revere the most” (62). This chapter takes its place in a sequence that methodically examines the development of Lodge’s writing, with a nod to Harold Bloom’s theory of the “anxiety of influence” as a guiding principle,⁷ derived from Lodge’s own use of the term in a talk about his own debt to Greene (35).

Perkin begins with the premise that Lodge’s liberalism is the lifeblood of his work and goes on to show how that quality was influenced by a succession of literary mentors, beginning with Greene, the subject of an early critical work,⁸ and continuing with Joyce, James, and Wells. To these chapters is added an account of Lodge’s formative development as a writer and critic in the 1950s, in which the context of his particular identity as a chronicler of life in the English provinces is discussed. This structure gives Perkin the opportunity to examine not only Lodge’s career as a novelist, but also his concomitant rise as an important literary critic. Perkin is a useful guide to the ways in which Lodge’s critical work can be illuminated by his novels and vice-versa. The book is pointedly careful in its approach to its subject, and despite the breadth of the range of reference, it is thoroughly grounded in a thought-provoking and revealing close reading of the texts. Perkin is particularly adept at teasing out correspondences and echoes of Lodge’s predecessors in the novels. These...