David Lodge and the Tradition of the Modern Novel by J.

Russell Perkin (review)

Rob Spence

James Joyce Quarterly, Volume 51, Number 4, Summer 2014, pp. 741-744
(Review)

Published by The University of Tulsa

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jjq.2016.0019

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/634265

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 10 See, for example, Frank O’Connor, The Big Fellow: Michael Collins and the
Irish Revolution (Dublin: Clonmore and Reynolds, 1965).
11 See, for instance, Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare

Life (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1995).

12 According to Derek Attridge, responsible reading is a non-instrumental

critical approach that seeks to do justice to the specificity and singularity of

literary writing and to the unpredictability of the literary accomplishment
shown in its deployment of form—see Attridge, The Singularity of Literature
(London: Routledge Publishers, 2004), p. 11.
13 Alfred Jarry, Gestes et Opinions du Docteur Faustroll Pataphysicien (Paris:

Stock, 1923).
14 Recent work in the field includes Anthony Adams’s discussion of the

proximity of O’Brien’s writing to pataphysics and attribution of the founding

of the genealogy of steampunk to The Third Policeman—see “Butter-Spades,
Footnotes, and Omnium: The Third Policeman as ‘Pataphysical Fiction,’” Flann
O’Brien: Centenary Essays (pp. 106-19), and Brooker’s tentative comparison
of O’Brien’s and Vladimir Nabokov’s metafictions in “‘That Carousel Inside
and Outside My Head’: Flann O’Brien and Pale Fire,” Flann O’Brien: Centenary
Essays (pp. 120-33). Not even the obvious connections—to Borges, one of
O’Brien’s earliest reviewers, and to Italo Calvino, who paid homage to him
in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, trans. William Weaver (London: Secker &
Warburg, 1981)—have so far been exhaustively dealt with, not to mention the
possible range of (Central) European writers whose work bears some signifi-
cance, or resemblance, to O’Brien’s: Karel Čapek’s for instance, whose Insects
he adapted for the stage—see “And so ad infinitum” (The Life of the Insects):
An Entomological Review in Three Acts, a Prologue, and an Epilogue, trans. Paul
Selver (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1923)—or Karl Kraus who may well be,
as Hopper suggested in his keynote address at the Vienna conference, the
reference behind the “credulous Kraus,” one of De Selby’s commentators in
The Third Policeman (p. 325).

DAVID LODGE AND THE TRADITION OF THE MODERN NOVEL,

by J. Russell Perkin. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press,
2014. xii + 225 pp. $77.00.

I t comes as a shock to those of us who read David Lodge’s cam-

pus 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 fore-
most 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

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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 millen-
nium, 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 guid-
ing 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 life-
blood of his work and goes on to show how that quality was influ-
enced 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 examples prove
his point, of course, and demonstrate the close attention to detail that
characterizes Perkin’s work.

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 Perkin is expansive and thorough when discussing Joyce and his
influence on Lodge. He notes the fact that Lodge repeatedly returns
to Ulysses as a touchstone, not only in his critical work but also in the
novels. Perkin points out that Lodge, coming from what he himself
called the “Catholic ‘ghetto’” of 1930s England (62), first encountered
Joyce not as a representative of high modernism, but as a chronicler
of his own socio-cultural world. Perkin’s detailed account of the ways
in which Joyce’s worldview influenced Lodge’s is illuminating. The
parade of eccentric priests in Lodge’s oeuvre is just one example of the
continuing parallels between the two authors’ fiction.
Perkin dwells on Lodge’s most recent work, in particular, the two
novels that take other (historical) writers as their subject: the “bio-
grafictions” on James and Wells. In the James novel, Author Author,
Perkin is on solid ground as he shows how James provides Lodge
with an example of how to control the public perception of his work,
so it is an irony not lost on Lodge that his James volume should have
been mired in controversy since it appeared after Colm Tóibín’s simi-
larly themed The Master.9 Perkin offers a scrupulous account of the
affair and its aftermath, and that leads him to his final major focus
on Wells. Perkin points out that Wells has been a constant in Lodge’s
fictional world since the 1960s and that, therefore, A Man of Parts rep-
resents a continuation of that thread and also signifies that, as he says,
Lodge at 80 “remains in the second decade of the twenty-first century
. . . a novelist at the crossroads” (178).
This is an excellent primer on Lodge, written in a scholarly yet
accessible style. It does its subject justice and provides a detailed and
unified account of his major work set in the context of the social and
cultural history of his times. The book should become the major cri-
tique of Lodge for the current generation, and it goes a long way to
cementing the author’s place in the canon of twentieth-century and
contemporary literature.

Reviewed by Rob Spence

Edge Hill University

NOTES
1 Merritt Moseley, David Lodge: How Far Can You Go? (San Bernardino,
Calif.: Borgo Press, 1991).
2 Daniel Ammann, David Lodge and the Art-and-Reality Novel (Heidelberg:

C. Winter, 1991).
3 Bernard Bergonzi, David Lodge (Plymouth, U.K.: Northcote House in

association with the British Council, 1995), and David Lodge, Therapy: A Novel
(New York: Viking Press, 1995).
4 Bruce K. Martin, David Lodge (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1999).
5 Lodge, Quite a Good Time to Be Born: A Memoir (London: Harvill Secker,

2015).
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 James Joyce Quarterly 51.4 2014
6 Lodge, A Man of Parts: A Novel (London: Harvill Secker, 2011), and
Author, Author (London: Secker & Warburg, 2004).
7 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York:

Oxford Univ. Press, 1973).

8 See Lodge, Graham Greene (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1966).
9 Colm Tóibín, The Master (New York: Scribner’s Publishers, 2004).

THE PROSE ELEGY: AN EXPLORATION OF MODERN AMERICAN

AND BRITISH FICTION, by John B. Vickery. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 2009. xvii + 191 pp. $32.00.

T he Prose Elegy is a problematic book, particularly in regard to

Joyce’s work. It was preceded by John B. Vickery’s The Modern
Elegiac Temper,1 which argued that modern poetic elegies must
address a broader sensibility toward a variety of losses than earlier
ones that dealt mainly with an individual’s death and the triad of
lamentation, confrontation, and consolation. Although there is little
discussion of W. H. Auden and less of W. B. Yeats in Modern Elegiac
Temper, it provides a perceptive treatment of elegies by Ezra Pound,
Theodore Roethke, Dylan Thomas, Allen Tate, Edith Sitwell, and
Louis MacNeice, among others. Vickery’s primary concerns in The
Prose Elegy are family and love, followed by cultural and philosophi-
cal issues. The book is meant as a companion volume and is format-
ted in the same manner as his previous work. Narrative prose is
very different from lyric poetry, however, and its text cannot sustain
the focus, concentration, heightened language, and style of lyric
poetry for very long due to its length, bulk, and mission of telling an
extended story.
Vickery puts his best foot forward when starting with James
Agee’s A Death in the Family and John Updike’s The Centaur.2 Both
involve child narrators who, over time, come to terms with the loss
of their fathers and provide the writer with a clean and uninter-
rupted canvas on which to focus. The elegiac treatment cannot be
sustained with Virginia Woolf’s The Years,3 though, which comes
next. Vickery feels that concentration on individual character is lost
here, and the reader should look at the family as a “group entity”
(42). He does not view Eleanor Pargiter as the main character hold-
ing the narration together, nor does he see Woolf’s novel as a family
saga, a durable and commendable genre, rather than an elegy. These
missteps skew the interpretation of Woolf’s work; characters die, and
generations succeed each other in the novel, but this is the extent to
which it could be considered an elegy.
Vickery turns to Joyce and Dubliners to show what he calls

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