Nice Work

by David Lodge

(New York: Penguin Books, 1990)

Trade Paperback, 277 Pages, Fiction

ISBN: 9780140133967, US$15.00

ABCD Rating: BACKLIST

From the Cover: Vic Wilcox, a self-made man and managing director of an engineering firm, has little regard for academics, and even less for feminists. So when Robyn Penrose, a trendy leftist teacher, is assigned to “shadow” Vic under a government program created to foster mutual understanding between town and gown, the hilarious collision of lifestyles and ideologies that ensues seems unlikely to foster anything besides mutual antipathy. But in the course of a bumpy year, both parties make some surprising discoveries about each other’s world—and about themselves.

My Reveiw: This semester I am taking a class on Contemporary British Literature and David Lodge’s Nice Work is the first novel that we read, and it is a very interesting one. A number of the blurbs in the book compare Lodge to Philip Roth, and I can kind of see the similarities, but the little bit of Roth that I have read was more serious and less “tongue-in-cheek” than what Lodge has created in Nice Work.

I enjoyed this book a lot, the intertextual allusions that Lodge uses to connect his book to its 19th Century counterparts are wonderful, and his characters, especially Vic and Robyn, are beautifully created, and as I said, I enjoyed this book a lot, until—that is—I got to the end. I understand that Lodge is working under certain conventions most notably those found in 19th Century “Condition of England” or “Industrial” novels) but by the time I got to the end of Nice Work, I felt that Lodge had painted himself into a corner and invoked not one, not two but three deus ex machinas in order to get himself out of the corner he wrote himself into. His characters don’t learn anything, all the growth that they have achieved in the previous chapters is gone and they even go so far as selling-out their principles—at least I thought so; I started a very heated argument in my class when I expressed this opinion—with Vic buying German instead of “England First” as is his mantra through the novel and Robyn giving into the lures of capitalism and money, which she railed against all through the novel.

Don’t get me wrong, though, this is a very good novel. Exceptional even. One of the best I’ve read this year, it’s just that I had some issues with the ending, but that doesn’t mean that you will; I mean, in a class of 30+ students I was the only one with these issues regarding the end. David Lodge’s Nice Work is a great book if you can get it.