![]() The books are always skillful and lively, up to a point, but they lack the crispness I associate with, say, Michael Frayn or Penelope Fitzgerald or, to cite a contemporary American novelist of whom you don’t seem wholly to approve, Philip Roth (who is just about my favorite). ![]() And yet I tend to come away from Lodge feeling slightly let down. He’s exactly the sort of writer in whom I usually delight–comic-ironic, British (I’m a sucker even for half-Brits like Wilfrid Sheed), and engaged in the Life of the Mind. My own experience of Lodge, based on reading three of his books ( Nice Work and Therapy are the other two), is one of frustrated expectations. One would hardly guess, judging from the clumsy narrative tangle Lodge writes himself into, that he is the author of 11 previous novels, most of them held in fairly high esteem. David Lodges novels have earned comparisons to those of John Updike and Philip Roth and established him as 'a cult figure on both sides of the Atlantic' (The New York Times). You’re exactly right that the ham-handed plotting in Thinks … continues–indeed, gets worse–as the novel races to its conclusion. ![]()
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