Small World: An Academic Romance [Paperback]

David Lodge (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 1991

Veteran rivals for an exclusive academic chair (recently endowed with $100,000 a year) do scholarly battle with each other in what the Washington Post Book World called a "delectable comedy of bad manners . . . infused with a rare creative exuberance". From the author of the award-winning Changing Places.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The unbridled greed, pettiness, buffoonery and intellectual gobbledygook in the world of higher scholarship are the topics of this thorough and thoroughly funny roman a' English department. It's interesting for a couple of reasons, aside from its humor and spoofiness: it's an insider's view of things -- always the best kind -- and it takes its old-fashioned time telling a story, complete with reasonable digressions about the state of literary criticism and what may or may not be a realistic view of the academic life. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Warner Books; 1st edition (November 1, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0446393274
• ISBN-13: 978-0446393270
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 1 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,674,182 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

57 of 57 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars been there, August 17, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Small World (Paperback)

I am an academic and I must say that this book nails the academic world to the wall in a way that is somehow wicked and sweet at the same time. The pretension, the meanness, the self-absorption, the lack of social skills, the pettiness, the competition for attention and glory. All too true.

I especially enjoyed the clever superimposition of the Grail legend on a tale of modern English professors pursuing a UNESCO endowed chair that entails no academic duties. Persse McGarrigle (Percival), the Irish innocent. Morris Zapp (Merlin), the canny but cynical sage. Morgana Fulvia (Morgan le Fay), the decadent, hypocritical Italian witch. They and the others are all here playing their time-honored rolls.

The coincidences come so thick and fast in this book that you very quickly get used to them. It is a good joke to make the entire world as small as academia, a place where you run into the same people again and again whether you want to or not.

It was a pleasure to read a book whose prose was devoid of trickery, over-cleverness and gimmicks. Here is a modern novel in a world increasingly full of post-modern works that are too often little more than cleverly constructed rooms full of mirrors. Lodge makes several funny, well-deserved swipes at post-modernism's negative effect on literary criticism.

25 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars More than an academic satire, January 15, 2003

By 

Russ Mayes (Glen Allen, VA United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Small World (Paperback)

I approached this book with a bit of trepidation, which I ought to explain before my review. Small World is sort of a sequel to Nice Work (it has some of the same characters and locations, but doesn't rely on knowledge of its predecessor). I read Nice Work a few years ago and was put off by it. It wasn't that I didn't find the satire on academia to be humorous. Rather, I thought it was a bit tasteless for someone who had spent most of his adult life employed by universities to turn around and write a satire that was (IMO) often bitter to the point of being unfair.

So, I wasn't sure I wanted to read Small World, though I had been assured it was a better book. I am glad I finally overcame my resistance and read it, because it is a much better book; indeed I think it is a very good book.

Small World is also a satire on academia, and while all the jacket blurbs talk about how biting the satire is, I didn't find that to be the case. Lodge seemed much more in tune and sympathetic with his characters, even as he skewers their antics. Also, the attacks in this novel seem less personal and more on literary studies as a profession.

I actually think Lodge has much bigger ambitions in this novel than writing an academic satire. His goal, it seems to me, is to package the history of the novel into a story in the form of an academic satire. So instead of a relatively simple, satirical plot (as in Nice Work), Lodge gives us a multitude of interwoven plots. He has a standard comic plot, but he also has a thriller plot, several varieties of romantic plots, a few mistaken identity plots, a foundling plot, a reunion plot and probably several others I'm forgetting. As the characters move around the world, they move in and out of the various plots. Some of the great moments in the book are watching how the characters react and change as they move from the comic plot to the thriller plot to one of the romance plots.

Because Lodge is writing about Literature academics and has designed the novel to borrow from many different genres and eras, he gets to show off his extensive literary knowledge as well. The novel is littered with quotations (attributed and unattributed) and allusions (acknowledge and unacknowledged). I had fun trying to pick out these bits as I was reading, but you don't need to catch the allusions to enjoy the book. Overall, I highly recommend the book.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars funniest book I have ever read, August 1, 2001

By 

Leslie Cheng (St. Louis, MO USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Small World (Paperback)

Once you start to read David Lodge, you are hooked and would want more. I started with his newest book "Thinks" and ended up reading him nonstop. So far I have read "Home Truths", "Changin Places", "Practice of Writing" and then "Small World". I plan to read on. "Small World" is the best academic satire I have read; it is funny, pereptive and very true. Even on gloomy sleepless nights, it made me laugh so loud that I constantly startled my two poor dogs. They looked at me with their sleepy eyes and wagged their tails in bewilderment. Too bad to be a dog that you cannot appreciate such good and funny stuff.

Having been a literature student and known many academics, I have been constantly struck by the sense of recognition. Lodge writes with his profound knowledge in literature and and his insight in people in the field of literarute. The pretentiousness in that world is mercilessly satirized. And the holy canon is hilariously and wonderfully parodized.