Customer Reviews

Nice Work

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

OK, we all know David Lodge is a very witty man, and his hilarious creations in "Changing Places" and "Small World" are some of his most famous. Well, here they are, back again, in another Rummidge Campus novel--this time the main characters are Dr. Robyn Penrose and local plant manager Vic Wilcox (with special cameos by Philip Swallow, Hilary Swallow, Morris Zapp and even a mention of Desiree, of course). They meet up when Robyn is chosen to 'shadow' Vic on an Industry Matters type scheme. Their opposing view points grate off each other for the first hundred or so pages--but halfway through the novel we get hints of something very special beginning to flower.

It's not as funny or as well-plotted as "Changing Places" or "Therapy", his two greats, but then again that's hardly much of a condemnation. The man's only mortal, after all---and this novel, while not his best, is still a brilliant read and an essential conclusion to the Rummidge Campus trilogy. Read it!

After I finished grad school, a fellow student bought me this book as a going away gift. She had written on the frontispiece, "This book helps me keep perspective on how the rest of the world sees us academics." It was the first David Lodge book I read, but certainly not the last. Robyn Penrose, Ph.D. in English, has been assigned to shadow Vic Wilcox, factory manager in industrial Rummidge (a fictional version of the English city of Birmingham) for a semester. Of course Mr. Wilcox is going to learn something about feminist criticism; what you might not realize is how much Dr. Penrose will learn about English industry. David Lodge's familiar characters from his other novels, _Changing_Places_ and _Small_World_, are back here in supporting roles. But the real stars here are Robyn and Vic, two people who are very adversarial at first, only to become quite understanding of the other's point of view. Lodge's resolution of his plot seems a bit forced, but the writing is extremely intelligent: Lodge effortlessly provides humorous examples of the seemingly difficult literary theories that Robyn espouses. This book did more for my appreciation of critical theory than anything other text--and without the pain of reading Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, or Julia Kristeva. Anyone who's worked in academia will not only recognize the truth that is contained in this novel; (s)he will also recognize several of the people. Others might wish to start with _Small_World_, but _Nice_Work_ will let you know what you think of David Lodge in short order.

Nice Work is the third in Lodge's trilogy send-up of academia and stands as a significant departure from the previous two novels. The cast of characters from the first two entries is all but gone and the book takes a satirical look at academia from the corporate point of view.

The story revolves around on of those truly bureaucratic inventions that in the end never seem to serve any real purpose. In this case, it Industry Year, a celebration of industry in Britain at the height of the Thatcher ear when English business is in full retreat from the opening of markets and fierce foreign competition.

As part of this nonsense, Robyn Primrose, fierce socialist intellectual and lecturer on 19th century English literature is assigned to "shadow" Vic Wilcox, the managing director of a local foundry and manufacturing concern, to "foster greater understanding between the collegiate and business communities".

Wilcox is doing his best to remake his company into a competitive concern that can make a go of it for the long term. Primrose is a sheltered child of privilege whose left wing theories aren't tinged with any experience of the real world.

Naturally, this situation provides full fodder for Lodge's wonderfully wacky satirical vision, and he does his utmost to make the best of the situation, to wonderful effect.

This book isn't nearly as outright funny as the previous entries ion this trilogy, falling more along the lines of amusing rather than comical. Yet, I liked it best of the three. The books isn't as cluttered by the huge--and often confusing--cast of characters that populated the first two books. The pace is more subdued than the frenetic pace of the earlier books, and the characters much more fully drawn. If this effort produced far fewer "laugh out loud" moments, it was nevertheless the most satisfying of the three books.

Many complain these books are outdated--I don't find them so. They wonderfully chronicle a past time. That's like saying Dickens or Twain shouldn't be read because they are outdated. It doesn't make sense.

Lodge has a witty, effervescent writing style and a wonderfully sardonic world view that make for very enjoyable reading. This trilogy is well worth your time.

Mike Stone was evidently missing something when he said Nice Work had a horrible ending. On page 52, Robyn Penrose offers a solution to the problems of industrial capatalism (how conflict in industrial novels is solved)"a legacy, a marriage, emigration, or death." Now look at the ending, Robyn inherits the money, Charles asks her to marry him and she does not except, Robyn does not emigrate to America,and the death of Robyn's uncle. This explains why the ending of the novel was so simple. Lodge seems to be neatly tying up all loose ends. It is a happy ending after an idealogical battle, just like in Dicken's Hard Times. Now do you get it?

It's the mid-eighties. It's England. Robyn Penrose, a young teacher of literature and kneejerk leftist, and Vic Wilcox, a rather conventional manager of an engineering firm and a proudly self-made man, are both gong along happily enough until town is forced to meet gown in a government-sponsored "shadowing" program. Robyn and Vic grate against each other, gradually forcing changes in both their ways of life. It's a wonderful portrayal, not just of academia and of floundering industry, but of how people can get so caught up in their own insular worlds they have no notion of what is going on just across town. Robyn writes about Victorian industrial novels and always supports labor over business but knows nothing about contemporary industry and doesn't actually know any working class people or any businessmen. Vic supports continued business growth but has himself stopped growing. Their contact forces both to reexamine their comfortable assumptions about business, politics, literature, and the role of the university. Inevitably, their personal relationships are changed--not just their relationships with each other, but that of Robyn with her significant other and of Vic with his family. Hard economic times may be affecting both their worlds, but by the end of the book, Vic and Robyn may just be better equipped to deal with these changes than they were before.

This book is a masterly exploration of how insular people become living their lives in one culture (in this case, industry or academia) . When Robyn, highly successful in academia, meets Vic, highly successful in industry, the suspicion, culture shock and new insights on both sides are glorious to watch. I was also impressed by his skill at characterisation - Vic and his family are very well-drawn, and Robyn is marvellous... I know Lodge is an English Lit. lecturer himself, but to portray an idealistic, brilliant, female lecturer so convincingly takes talent. Funny and perceptive. Nice work, David.

I stayed up late reading this novel and thought it was a terrific read.

You may feel a bit taxed at first. As other reviewers have mentioned, the book starts slow, but then really picks up as the plot gets impossibly complicated. The ending is clearly a parody of the endings of deux-ex-machina Victorian novels.

Perhaps this factoid will shed some light on Lodge's inspiration for the novel ... One of Lodge's favorite writers is Henry Green, who wrote one of the great factory novels of the 20th Century, Living. Green and Lodge both worked in Birmingham, and Lodge himself says the fictional town of Rummidge is located on the map exactly where Birmingham is. With the parodies of 19th Century novels, and this inspirational aspect of Living, there's a lot of referencing going on and I'm probably not the only reader who couldn't keep up.

Where the book stumbles, that is, falls just this short of being an all-time classic, is Lodge's handling of the factory half of the novel. Part of the problem is Lodge handles the academic scenes with ease and authority, knowing exactly what's important and exactly what's not. Not so with the factory. Lodge's narrator comes across as a reporter, that is, not from lived experience (his filtering the factory through Robyn Penrose was perhaps necessary but tipped the balance of the book in favor of academia) and perhaps that's why the novel moves so slowly in the early going. Lodge didn't quite have the same level of confidence as he does with his rendering of academic life (or Green does with factory life), it seems to me.

A second quibble seems the affair between the two main characters. The plot seems forced at times and the closure twenty times as forced ... but this criticism runs into the intertextuality issue I mentioned above.

Perhaps I'm showing my own biases in this review ... I would've preferred to see the values of the business world set in equal play with the values of the academic world and seem where things ended up ... but Lodge may have had nothing of the sort in mind when he wrote the novel.

It's rare to find a novel this pleasurable that
at the same time is so very stimulating. David Lodge does
more than tell a wonderful story (though he very clearly
does that); he draws subtle parallels between fact and
fiction, the novels his characters analyze and the world
they live in. I read this at a gulp, then went back to sip
slowly of the many delicious parts. As soon as I can put
it down (and that may not be this year!) I will send it to my
mother. David Lodge can tell her everything I've been
trying for years to tell her about being an academic, and
make her laugh as fully as I did.

"Nice Work", given the acclaim David Lodge's books have received, starts rather slowly. The first chapter lugs along without inspiration, tepidly cataloging the unremarkable events of an unremarkable man's morning routine. Vic Wilcox is a middle-class, managing director at a floundering casting and general engineering firm. He works hard, and has no time for the self-serving attitudes of university people, unwilling to get their hands dirty and help revive his England's precious economy. Vic has horrible musical tastes, favouring 1980s female yuppie soul singers (Sade, Jennifer Rush) in the privacy of his Jaguar. Rush's song 'The Power of Love' even provides a laughable soundtrack to a cringe-worthy love scene. This introduction is not very stimulating, and the prose and narrative techniques Lodge uses are rather amateurish. It turns out, though, that this was Lodge's intention, for he has other tricks up his sleeve.

The second chapter makes it clear that Lodge, the author, is well aware of the rhetorical devices he's using, and of the expectations we have for the character(s) he's created. It begins with a nifty bit of self-referentiality, and regular readers of this space will know of my fondness for that device. Hopefully meta-fiction will save the day again. The chapter introduces Robyn Penrose, a feminist literary theorist, specializing in the industrial novel of the 19th century, who, and here's a great irony, has no practical knowledge of industry whatsoever. This is Lodge spitting in the face of his theory-minded colleagues (he spent 27 years teaching English at the University of Birmingham), stuck in their ivory towers, turning their noses up at the real world.

Robyn, as opposed to Vic, is a beguiling creation. I thought she'd sustain her status as a humourless member of the intelligentsia throughout the novel, but she redeems herself about halfway through, with this startling realization: "You know, there are millions of people out there who haven't the slightest interest in what we do." She neatly articulates my longtime criticism of advanced academia: that it is incestual, masturbatory, and ill advised of the actual problems of the real world. Robyn manages to break through its outer veneer (thanks to her participation in the Shadow Scheme, a kind of exchange program between the university and the industrial community, in which she must follow Vic around while he does his job). Unfortunately, Lodge seems to be saying, you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Witness a later exchange between Robyn and her brother Basil. When told that she's writing a book, he asks, "Does the world really need another book on nineteenth-century fiction?" To which she pompously replies, "I don't know, but it's going to get one." The more things change, the more they stay the same, I suppose.

So how does the relationship between the seemingly disparate Robyn and Vic manifest itself? Well, it allows the novel to make a point of education's need to become more like industry in a Thatcherized England, but with comic results: One memo requests that all official university correspondences use acronyms when possible, in order to save paper. This leads to someone reacting to a line about the proposed Shadow Scheme ("The SS will advertise our willingness to inform ourselves about the needs of industry") by saying "Got his own stormtroopers, now, has he?" Lodge periodically shows a neat knack for bon mots like this. When they came up, I'd always wish he'd use them more. It might help to bring out the hidden satirical elements of the book, and in general they would entertain the reader. The characters' relationship also tries to make the point that maybe industry needs to become more like education, by accounting for its workers needs to be intellectually stimulated instead of giving them jobs that necessitate standing on a dirty, dark assembly line 8 hour a day. Although, the sight of Vic trying to digest the Brontes or Tennyson puts a pin in this utopic balloon rather quickly.

Lodge's greatest success here is that he is able to write a kind of modern Industrial Novel, such as the ones Robyn Penrose is studying. The concerns of the post-post Industrial Age are delineated nicely, and he manages to throw in some entertaining hanky-panky for good measure. However, Lodge stumbles greatly with a howl-worthy ending that appears to have been written by another author entirely. It features scenes of amateurish exposition (one character neatly ties up his own loose ends with a timely letter), and deux es machina after deux es machina. I felt cheated, and a little frustrated, that an author of such skill and self-awareness as Lodge would so lazily end an otherwise fine novel. Am I missing something here? Are the final chapters meant to be ironic, poking fun at the shoddy plotting and melodrama of other books in the same vein? I'm willing to give Lodge some benefit of the doubt on that point, but not a lot. It's truly a pity, because he was on his way to a fine, if unspectacular book. As it stands, it only barely deserves its passing grade.

A young woman called Robyn Penrose, working as an lecturer at the University of Rummidge, gets involved in a project called Industrial Year Shadow Scheme. She is supposed to shadow Victor Wilcox, a managing director at Pringle's engineering company. Robyn is not enthusiastic about shadowing Mr. Wilcox, especially since she knows that nobody else wanted to do it, but finally she gives in. At the beginning she causes a lot of trouble with her anti-capitalistic and feministic point of view. The characters appear to be very stereotypical, two completely different worlds are meeting personified by Victor Wilcox and Robyn Penrose. Victor Wilcox on the one side is an industrious, hard-working managing director with a big Jaguar and a decaying family. Robyn Penrose on the other side is a woman who is well-read, has a socialistic leaning and fights for a better position of women in the society. Robyn has never been in the business world and says openly if she does not agree with something. At one time she causes a lot of trouble by telling a worker the he is supposed to be layed off, which she has heard in a confidential meeting. As a result the workers go on strike. A lot of negotiations follows. Finally the management has to make confessions to the workers concerning the working hours. Tension rises between Robyn and Mr. Wilcox, their relationship is characterized by amibivalent feelings. On the one hand there is mutal dislike but on the other hand also a certain interest in the other person. Finally Mr. Wilcox discovers that he is in love with Robyn because she is so entirely different from all the women he knows and brings some fresh air into his life. All he has from life is a lot of work, a depressed wife in her menopause and children in their puberty. He is seeking for a change.
David Lodge has written a fantastic novel full of subtle humour and intelligent dialogs. At the beginning of the novel the introduction of the charcters drags on for quite a long time, which should later be more than forgiven by the reader, as soon as the story gains drive. Then the reader is enchanted and captivated by the story and its fascinating characters. David Lodge has written a fantastic book, giving the reader a critical insight into Britains` working world in the eighties. He never leaves out on cynical or critical innuendos. He has created a book that is fun to read for everybody who is, or has been, earning money by working. That of course means this book is suitable for almost everyone.
I personally liked the book very much but I have to admitt in the retrospect that the beginning of this novel was dreary and tenacious. Fortunately the last three quarters of the novel really compensate for the beginning. I consider this book with its witty content and awesome story line worth reading. It is really fun as soon as you pass the first quarter of the novel.