Customer Reviews

Deaf Sentence: A Novel

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David Lodge's "Deaf Sentence" is a seriocomic novel about a man whose quality of life is steadily declining. Desmond Bates, a former professor of linguistics, takes early retirement, mostly because of a hearing loss that began twenty years earlier. He suffers from "high-frequency deafness...caused by accelerated loss of the hair cells in the inner ear...." Since there is no treatment for this condition, Desmond resorts to hearing aids, which prove to be inconvenient and, in some circumstances, useless. As he dourly observes, "deafness is a kind of pre-death, a drawn-out introduction to the long silence into which we will all eventually lapse."

Now in his sixties, Desmond's existence settles into a boring routine. His wife, Winifred (whom he calls Fred), on the other hand, is rejuvenated, partly as a result of the flourishing new interior design business that takes up most of her time. Adding to his gloomy disposition is Desmond's concern for his eighty-nine year old father, Harry, who lives alone in London. Not only is Desmond's father also going deaf, but there are alarming signs that he is no longer able to care for himself adequately. Unfortunately, Harry refuses when Desmond offers to hire someone to look in on him and lend a hand with household chores.

"Deaf Sentence" is a deeply affecting novel that springs from the author's personal experience with high-frequency deafness. The book succeeds on many levels and is enhanced by Lodge's clever use of language, entertaining literary and cultural references, and vivid descriptive passages. One day, when Desmond is strolling across the campus where he used to teach, he encounters a horde of students pouring out of their classes. "I floated on their tide like a piece of academic wreckage," he muses with a hint of self-mockery. The author elevates the mundane by poignantly exploring the ebb and flow of marital relationships, the physical and mental decline that accompanies aging, and the toll that illness and disability take on both the victim and his family. Lodge conveys his knowledge of all these themes subtly, sensitively, and with a healthy dose of bracing humor.

Desmond is an engaging first-person narrator, who sometimes lapses into the third person, presumably to give himself a breather. Fred is a devoted and sympathetic spouse, but as the years go by, she is becoming more and more exasperated by her husband's habits, especially his increasing reliance on alcohol as an anesthetic. Desmond is beginning to feel like "a redundant appendage to the family, an unfortunate liability" who no longer commands the respect that he once took for granted. To complicate matters further, an attractive but unstable young student named Alex Loom threatens to upend Desmond's already shaky existence when she asks him to supervise her dissertation on "the stylistic analysis of suicide notes." Should he risk getting involved with this possibly predatory female?

The novel draws us in more and more as the suspense builds. We wonder how Desmond and Fred will adjust to the shift in their respective roles; what Desmond will do when his father can no longer live alone; and whether or not Desmond will give in to the lovely Alex in order to salve his battered ego. Lodge's vivid characters soon become familiar acquaintances whom we get to know so well that it is difficult to part with them. In this touching, funny, and wise book, David Lodge deftly and unsentimentally illuminates the challenges and frustrations that, sooner or later, everyone must face.

Although this novel ends with a birth and a death, for most of its pages, Deaf Sentence celebrates life, albeit one that is a little disadvantaged. Forced to retire because of his rapidly diminishing hearing, linguistics professor Desmond Bates is not exactly going through a mid-life crisis, but in the preceding months has reached a point in his life where he is subtly questioning everything. Desmond has had a fulfilling career teaching at a local northern University, and he's mostly happily married to his entrepreneurial wife Fred "Winifred" who runs a trendy design store called Décor. But even as Desmond settles into a middle-aged life, he worries about his increasingly spotty sexual performance. While Fred seems to be getting better with age, blooming into the flower of independence with a stunning new career and new look helped along by her best friend Jacci, Desmond has grown older and deafer, and subject to occasional erectile dysfunction that is exasperated by the advertisements for Viagra that daily always seem to appear in his email box.

It comes as no surprise then that Desmond, somewhat hampered by his hearing loss, falls into predictable daily routine, his communication with those around him becoming difficult at best as his family, friends and colleagues mostly stand by, confused and embarrassed most of the time and ultimately unable to relate to his misunderstandings in the conversation. With sex becoming an object of anxious rather than pleasurable anticipation, "although blindness is tragic, deafness may be comic, "Desmond receives a completely unexpected and completely disturbing call from a young and seductive student by the name of Alex Loom.

An intriguing person but a bit of an enigma. Alex is writing a thesis about suicide notes and wants Desmond to help her out. An unpredictable and frail girl with streaming blonde hair, Alex becomes ever more obsessed with obtaining Desmond's help and approval. Although Desmond makes clear moral distinctions, his life well-ordered and constricted by his marriage to Fred, he does have a darker side. The visits to Alex at her apartment, ostensibly to give her tips about her research, become ever more disturbing, with Desmond coming to the realization that she's either totally irresponsible or mentally unbalanced. Yet she seems to intuit somewhere in Desmond's psyche a fantasy lurking unsuspected and only waiting to be released.

Determined to maintain the status quo, Desmond also has his 89-year-old father, Harry once a big band musician, the responsibility for his dad's welfare lying heavily on him. He regularly travels down to London to visit Harry who lives in the old family home in the older suburb of Brickley. Living alone and dressing like a tramp, Harry lives closed up in his ramshackle house that always seems to be bathed in a sepulchral gloom. Stripped of all of his life enhancing interests, Harry's only one hobby is saving money while observing prices, and economizing on food, clothing and household bills.

While Desmond anguishes over what to do about Harry, Alex becomes his female nemesis and ultimately his arch manipulator. Indeed, Desmond curses the day that he let this unscrupulous young woman "twist him around the little finger of her flattery". To confess his dealings with her would make him look smaller in Fred's eyes even as he becomes convinced that an acknowledgement of Alex's attempted seductions would further weaken the status of his marriage. Alternating between the first and third person, Lodge's tale drifts from the serious to the humorous as Desmond tries to figure out how to get out of the dilemma of Alex. In the process this affable and kindly man ruminates and entertains the reader with his thoughts on ageing, marriage, seduction, isolation and the advantages and disadvantages of deafness. As the uncomfortable memories of Maisie, his first wife who died of cancer, whirls around him, Desmond cannot help but be a little bitter about his deafness. Even his new found new happiness with Fred has not assuaged his share of misfortunes and his sense of the discontent.

Filled with literary allusions and misunderstood irony, this novel ultimately comes across as a type of modern comedy of manners framed around the themes of life's fragility and the ease with which the marks we leave on the surface of the earth are erased. The chapters on linguistics, while obligatory for comprehending the many facets of Desmond`s character can be a bit difficult to digest, but the narrative generally moves along with sparkling dialogue that is full of guileful observations on life. Most notable for displaying for the minute and humorous details of British family life, the novel's chief pleasure lies in the familiar - a chaotic Christmas dinner with the entire family present, a new years holiday at a sexy leisure resort, a chaotic dinner in a loud Italian restaurant that is filled with irritating background noise, and ruminations on Desmond's future years of tranquility with Fred, still after all that transpires, the decisive love of his life. Mike Leonard September 08.

I just read the sweetest book. David Lodge is a British novelist and academic. Some of his very funny novels deal with visiting professors who have affairs with other professors while visiting campuses across the Atlantic. But this book wasn't like that at all. Deaf Sentence is about a retired linguistics professor who is losing his hearing. He is happily married to his second wife and dealing with an aging working class father. The book is well written and lively and I'm not giving anything away here. Sweet is actually my best description for it. Lodge lets his protagonist get into realistic difficulty but he doesn't let bad things ruin him. I really liked that.

Lodge gives a detailed picture of what it's like to go deaf in middle age and all the limitations deafness brings. The deep description of a deaf man's life feels familiar when he faces the same issues everyone does as they age and terribly sad when his hearing loss isolates him from people he cares about. The main character would be interesting even if he weren't deaf, and his deafness adds poignancy that makes this book special.

I loved the book. perhaps i am prejudiced because i am hearing impaired and wear 2 hearing aids, but i bought a copy for a friend(and wife) and both found it uproarious until it became terribly moving. my husband loved it as well and he hears perfectly. the one sentence i memorized and wrote down was"if there have been at various times in our life, trivial misunderstandings, now i see how one was unable to value the passing time". these are words i try to live by every day.

I've been a fan of Lodge's fiction ever since his second novel, _Ginger, You're Barmy,_ came out in 1962. His first few books were considered amusing but nothing special by the critics, but he hit his stride with _Changing Places_ in 1975. This latest work of fiction (because, as a professor of English, now retired, he has also written dense works on critical theory) is his fourteenth and it's an excellent example of how his early propensity for domestic comedy has evolved into commedia in almost the Dantean sense. Lodge is from southeast London but has spent all his adult academic life in Birmingham, and the present narrative, like several of his others, is set in both places. It's difficult to know how much of the detail of his books derives from his personal experiences but Desmond Bates, a retired professor of linguistics (not languages -- "it's a common mistake"), who is becoming more and more deaf, is certainly based on Lodge's own situation. In fact, the narrator's explicit puns on deafness (including the title) and the implicit frustration it causes him are very much the focus of the story. Though he's helped by high-tech hearing aids, and though more theaters are making wi-fi headphones available for deaf patrons, deafness makes social intercourse extremely difficult -- and yet it's not as dramatic and sympathy-drawing as blindness. It's hardly worth it to Desmond to try to teach, or to attend public functions or even dinner parties, since he misses so much now of what's going on. And since his somewhat younger second wife is becoming very successful with an upscale home decor business even as Desmond is entering the downside of his life, he feels even more isolated and frustrated. Then he's approached by a personable and blondely attractive American graduate student seeking advice (apparently) on her doctoral dissertation, the focus of which is a textual analysis of suicide notes. Desmond was a teacher for too long not to be aware of the pitfalls of becoming involved -- or even appearing to become involved -- with female students, and he doesn't even have official standing with the university any longer, but his loneliness seduces him into going beyond what his good sense warns him about. Still, he never does anything that quite stoops to B-movie farce, though he worries that he might have. Especially as he realizes that the girl is even weirder than he at first thought. Lodge is a master of the British art of drollery and wry self-observation and Desmond's interior monologues -- the only sort of conversation he's really comfortable with these days -- are smoothly developed in a complex way that seems effortless. That's the mark of a first-rate writer. Two of his novels have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize (Lodge himself chaired the committee one year), and I wouldn't be surprised if this one were as well.

David Lodge's style is a delight - beautifully simple and natural, without straining after effect, ideally suited to humour, but also to more reflective passages. And this book has plenty of both.

I have to use a hearing aid myself, though I am not as severely afflicted by deafness as is Desmond Bates, and therefore I don't mishear as hilariously as he does; but I also have to laugh wryly at his spot-on descriptions of the rituals connected with hearing aids, and the trials and tribulations at parties, at the theatre, or in restaurants. And he is so right that having to ask people to repeat themselves is exasperating for all concerned.

Desmond's family relationships are beautifully conveyed: the love he had for his first wife and now has for his second (a pretty strong, healthy and no-nonsense character) and the exasperated affection he has for his even deafer old father, who lives a lonely life of self-neglect. Desmond himself, a retired Professor of Linguistics, is in his sixties, and is experiencing other signs of advancing years apart from deafness, for example a reduced potency, until ... Well, no: a subplot - rather more substantial, actually, than a subplot - about a flaky young American woman student at his university keeps you pleasantly on tenterhooks, but promises more, I think, than it delivers.

Linguistics is one of those typically modern subjects in which, through theoretical analysis of texts (is a particular suicide note a locutionary, illocutionary or perlocutionary utterance?), `we murder to dissect'. Lodge/Bates describes it in a deadpan way in all its dry absurdity. (Apologies to linguisticians and perhaps to Lodge himself.)

In the last part of the book, the humour, which has pervaded most it, fades away in moving episodes which seem to suggest that the afflictions of being hard of hearing need to be kept in proportion. What, after all, according to the life-affirming David Lodge, is a deaf sentence when compared with a death sentence?

Having worked with the hearing impaired, I found this story of a aging man with high frequency hearing loss a howl. It so aptly described the pains and pleasures of hearing loss and the tendency to live in one's own world, creating sentences from what must have been said, rather than actually understanding what was said. This was a small story without major drama, the sort of drama we create contrived from faulty perceptions, imaginings and lapses. The characters were deftly drawn, the relationships real, the prose was fresh and amusing.

David Lodge is not a flashy writer, but he is an extremely good one. Superficially, his predilection for working the same, relatively narrow, ground (he is a master of the academic novel) might seem constricting. But each of his novels delivers fresh insights, with his signature blend of intelligence, wit, and genuine affection for his characters.

"Deaf Sentence" is no exception. Although it's not as hilariously funny as some of his earlier books, it is - like all of his work - compulsively readable, and ultimately very moving, in an understated kind of way. Lodge's description of the various indignities that deafness brings is hilariously funny and so utterly convincing that you know it has to be based on first-hand experience. There is far more wisdom about aging in this unassuming story by Lodge than, for example, in Julian Barnes's recent, migraine-inducing, bloviation about his own mortality.

When I think of the trio of Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, and David Lodge (I try to think of Christoper Hitchens as little as possible), restaurant analogies come to mind. Amis is the risk-taking molecular gastronomist, brashly confident of his own genius, and hey - if the diners don't always appreciate the flashiness, that's not his problem. To his credit, when he's on target, he can be sublime. But the brilliance is hit-or-miss. Barnes is closer to Amis than he might care to admit, thought perhaps not writ quite so large. In general, the quality of his work doesn't fluctuate quite as much, but he is still capable of succumbing to navel-gazing, and cleverness (or perhaps his consciousness of his own cleverness) is definitely his Achilles heel. You'll be served some extraordinary meals chez Barnes, but there will be an occasional inedible mess. At the risk of beating this analogy to death, David Lodge, perhaps at the cost of never reaching the Olympian heights attained sporadically by the others, never disappoints, reliably serving hearty nourishing comfort food that leaves the reader satisfied and looking forward to the next visit.

That might sound like damning with faint praise, but is actually meant as the highest compliment. I can think of very few novelists working today who are consistently such a delight to read. He joins a very short list of authors (Margaret Drabble in early and mid-career, Anne Tyler) whose work is reliably intelligent, thought-provoking and interesting without being flashy. Such craftsmanship is rare and not something one should take for granted. I look forward to each new novel by Lodge, and thus far have never been disappointed.

There is something appropriate about David Lodge writing on the ruefully comic trials and tribulations of deafness. He is a master chronicler of the seriocomic frustrations of daily life, whether it be the sexual frustrations of young Catholics post Vatican II in "How Far Can You Go," or the family frustrations of a beleagured grad student juggling the demands of home life and academia in "The British Museum is Falling Down."

"Deaf Sentence" is a work of fiction, but Lodge admits in a postscript that he drew on his own experience with hearing loss, as well as that of his father's, to tell the tale of Desmond Bates, a retired professor of linguistics attempting, with mitigated success, to navigate the world minus one reliable sense. The subject suits Lodge because "deafness is comic, as blindness is tragic," in the words of Bates (whose namesake is the hard-of-hearing Miss Bates from Jane Austen's "Emma"), and Lodge specializes in that particularly British brand of wry, dry humor, that is more appropriate to the mishaps of deaf-induced misunderstandings than the arguably bleaker fate of all-encompassing darkness.

"Deaf Sentence" touches on weighty topics like suicide, mortality, and bodily degeneration, but Lodge never lets the gloom overwhelm his highly cultivated taste for slapstick, wordplay, and the comic hijinks of a hapless hero. Lodge's Desmond is a humane, sympathetic portrait of a sixty-something man struggling to find meaning in his unstructured retirement, and human connection in spite of his isolating deafness. A visit to Auschwitz during a lecture tour reminds Desmond of the true nature of silence, that overpowering silence that is the silence of the tomb, or the silence of God. He writes, "Deafness is a kind of pre-death, a drawn-out introduction to the long silence into which we will all eventually lapse."