David Lodge, the erudite author of academic comedy and a wide-ranging literary critic, died on Wednesday in Birmingham, England. He was 89.
His death was confirmed by his literary agent, Jonny Geller.
The author of 15 novels and more than a dozen nonfiction books as well as plays and screenplays, Mr. Lodge was twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and his work has been translated into dozens of languages. His best-known work, “Campus Trilogy,” dramatized the brief heyday of English literature as a discipline and the jet-setting lifestyle of its professoriate.
Mr. Lodge’s university novels took place not in the rarefied world of Oxford, Cambridge and the Ivy League but at middle-class schools, like the fictional Rummage, a “grimy, provincial” place full of thwarted ambition and backbiting. Ingeniously plotted, his fiction teems with unlikely romance and strange coincidence.
The first of these novels, “Changing Places” (1975), became famous for a game the character Philip Swallow invents called “Humiliation,” in which players try to name the most well-regarded book they haven’t read. In his first attempt, Howard Ringbaum, a pretentious English professor, keeps missing the point by listing obscure titles in attempts to impress his colleagues. Finally, desperately, he admits to never having read “Hamlet.” He wins the game but loses his job.
In the trilogy’s second book, “Small World” (1984), Morris Zapp, a slick theoretician delivering a lecture at a conference, uses the striptease style supposedly popular in the all-nude go-go bars of Berkeley, Calif., as a metaphor for what continental theory has uncovered about language:
“This is not striptease, it is all strip and no tease, it is the terpsichorean equivalent of the hermeneutic fallacy of a recuperable meaning, which claims that if we remove the clothing of its rhetoric from a literary text we discover the bare facts it is trying to communicate.”
It’s the beginning of a long and hilariously comic monologue on poststructuralist theory, all the more effective because, like the above, it is actually parsable. It is also obscene, so much so that in the course of its delivery “a young man in the audience fainted and was carried out.”
The character of Zapp was inspired by the American literary theorist Stanley Fish, who enjoyed the homage so much that he replaced the name on his own office door at Duke University with Zapp’s. (The third novel in the trilogy is “Nice Work,” published in 1988.)
Graham Greene was an early admirer of Mr. Lodge’s fiction, going so far as to send Mr. Lodge’s third novel, “The British Museum Is Falling Down” (1965), which concerns the Roman Catholic Church’s antipathy toward contraception, to Cardinal John Heenan, then the church’s highest-ranking official in England.
Anthony Burgess called Mr. Lodge “one of the best novelists of his generation,” and John Banville, writing in The New York Review of Books in 1995, described Mr. Lodge’s work as “wonderfully funny, in that rueful, lugubrious way that is characteristic of precursors such as Evelyn Waugh and Henry Green.”
As a critic, Mr. Lodge positioned himself directly between England and continental Europe. He employed structuralism (the play of signs, the role of binary oppositions), post-structuralism (a hunt for hidden complexities and contradictions), formalism (a search for what is unique in works of literature, what’s intrinsically “literary,” and what’s common to all such texts) and empiricism (seeing plainly what’s before one’s face).
He was an omnivorous and perceptive reader who constantly searched the language of fiction for patterns and hidden structures.
His critical study “The Modes of Modern Writing” (1977) sprung from the casual observation that modernists tended toward metaphor, whereas the anti-modernists of the 1930s tended to metonym. He expanded the thought into a wide-ranging typology of literature.
It was one of a dozen critical studies that Mr. Lodge wrote about the art he practiced.
His “The Art of Fiction” (1992) broke down 50 writerly techniques and examined why they worked, or didn’t. His “The Year of Henry James” (2006) dramatized the difficulties of fictional biography and, to the dismay of some critics, relitigated the troubled reception of his own novel about James, “Author, Author” (2004). (“A Man of Parts,” Mr. Lodge’s subsequent biographical fiction about the life of H.G. Wells, was greeted with wider acclaim in 2011).
James and Wells were important influences on Mr. Lodge, but even more important were Greene and James Joyce, both of whom he had read at a formative age and whose works introduced him to new moral commitments and inventive possibilities for the novel.
The narrative voice of “The British Museum Is Falling Down” is routinely hijacked by homages (or parodies) in the style of Greene and Joyce as well as Virginia Woolf and Joseph Conrad. Mr. Lodge kept up with the work of his contemporaries, too, and his 2001 novel, “Thinks …,” contains parodies (or homages) in the style of Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie.
In her review of the novel in The Times Literary Supplement of London, Joyce Carol Oates described Mr. Lodge as “a postmodernist writer in the affable guise of a reliable realist.”
David John Lodge was born in London on Jan. 28, 1935, the only child of William and Rosalie (Murphy) Lodge. His father was a musician and a singer, and his mother oversaw the family’s home in the South London suburb of Brockley.
As Mr. Lodge put it in the first volume of his memoirs, “I drew my first breath on the 28th of January 1935, which was quite a good time for a future writer to be born in England, especially one belonging to a lower-middle-class family like mine.” His father worked for a time at the Silver Slipper nightclub, where Evelyn Waugh and the Bright Young Things of the 1930s posed and reposed.
Mr. Lodge recalled his childhood as happy, one in which he felt loved and played games with the neighborhood children. During the German bombardment of London in World War II, he witnessed some of the fighting when, he wrote, “a black V1 suddenly appeared overhead pursued by a Spitfire, low enough for us to see the camouflage markings on the fighter and the orange flame coming out of the flying bomb’s jet engine.”
Mr. Lodge studied English at University College London, writing a thesis on Catholic literature, some of which he made use of in his first published book, “About Catholic Authors,” a pamphlet-size tract distributed at churches and bearing an official Catholic imprimatur certifying it as free of heresy.
Catholic teaching and life as a practicing Catholic in England remained a subject of his fiction for many years. As he wrote in his 1980 novel, “How Far Can You Go” (later published in the United States as “Souls and Bodies”): “On the whole, the disappearance of Hell was a great relief, though it brought new problems.”
While fulfilling his British national service requirement as part of the army’s Royal Tank Regiment in Dorset, a picturesque county in southwestern England, Mr. Lodge wrote much of his first published novel, “The Picturegoers” (1960), a study of lives and fantasy lives of lower-middle-class residents of “Brickley,” a fictionalized version of his own hometown.
Soon afterward, he accepted a position at the University of Birmingham, where he taught from 1960 until 1987, when he retired to become a full-time writer.
In May 1959, he married Mary Jacob, whom he had met when the two were undergraduates at University College. Mary died in 2022, according to Penguin. Mr. Lodge is survived by the couple’s three children, Stephen, Julia and Christopher.
Mr. Lodge began to lose his hearing in midlife, a source of distress but also the inspiration for a 2008 novel, “Deaf Sentence.” Toward the end of the story, Desmond Bates, a retired linguistics professor, visits the local registry office to report that his father has died and glimpses on a computer screen a list with the heading “DEATH MENU.”
He reflects on it later:
“I keep thinking of that header on the registry office computer screen, ‘DEATH MENU’, and wondering whimsically whether if such a thing were offered, like the à la carte in a restaurant, by the Angel of Death, what one would choose. Something painless, obviously, but not so sudden that you would not have time to take it in, to say goodbye to life, to hold it in your hand, as it were, and let it go.”
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