Lodge: campus novel

Stefan Collini reviews ‘Quite a Good Time to Be Born’ by David Lodge and ‘Lives in Writing’ by David Lodge · LRB 19 February 2015

Still, it may be his fate to be celebrated as a contributor to the sub-genre now known as the ‘campus novel’ since his two best-known books must be Changing Places and Small World (1984). In the former, a British and an American academic exchange jobs (and much else) for a semester, while the latter takes the form of a grail quest pursued through a series of international scholarly conferences; both depict academic life largely in terms of comedy, sex and self-importance. Indeed, so little do the serious concerns of the scholarly world feature in these novels that some commentators have seen them as contributing, along with works such as Bradbury’s somewhat darker The History Man (1975), to the decline in public regard for universities and academic life in the 1970s and 1980s. Significantly, Lodge himself has discussed the campus novel more in terms of literary form than social effect. In a 1982 essay, he described the genre as ‘a form of stylised play … a modern, displaced form of pastoral’. That may be a helpful way to see his own campus novels (there are three if one includes Nice Work, published in 1988), while bearing in mind that pastoral usually functions as a vehicle for social criticism. It would be a mistake, however, to define his work exclusively in terms of this sub-genre: his fictional achievements are far more diverse and, in some respects, weighty than that.

Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs.

Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud. Goodreads.

Nora Eldridge, a 37-year-old elementary school teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is on the verge of disappearing. Having abandoned her desire to be an artist, she has become the "woman upstairs," a reliable friend and tidy neighbour always on the fringe of others' achievements. Then into her classroom walks a new pupil, Reza Shahid, a child who enchants as if from a fairy tale. He and his parents--dashing Skandar, a half-Muslim Professor of Ethical History born in Beirut, and Sirena, an effortlessly glamorous Italian artist--have come to America for Skandar to teach at Harvard.

But one afternoon, Reza is attacked by schoolyard bullies who punch, push and call him a "terrorist," and Nora is quickly drawn deep into the complex world of the Shahid family. Soon she finds herself falling in love with them, separately and together. Nora's happiness explodes her boundaries--until Sirena's own ambition leads to a shattering betrayal.