Customer Reviews

Small World: An Academic Romance

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

SMALL WORLD easily takes its place among the very finest books ever written about academia. This provokes the question: Why are there so few novels, good or bad, on the world of higher education? A huge number of novelists and writers have attended graduate school, many are themselves teachers or professors, and yet the number of first-rate books covering the world of scholars are rare. Off the top of my head, I can think of Kinsley Amis's LUCKY JIM, A. S. Byatt's POSSESSION, John Barth's GILES GOAT BOY, Robertson Davies CORNISH TRILOGY, and several other novels by David Lodge, including the prequel to SMALL WORLD, CHANGING PLACES. I should also add Malcolm Bradbury's THE HISTORY MAN and magnificent parody MY STRANGE QUEST FOR MENSONGE. Many novels have characters attending college or university at some point, but as a whole it is a genre that is underrepresented.

Even if novels on academic life were plentiful, this one would stand out. Lodge has written many superb books, but this one just may be his best. It was also one of the first to be widely available in the US. I still remember vividly in the 1980s having to search out Penguin editions published in Canada because he was largely unavailable in the US.

The novel features some of the characters we came to know in CHANGING PLACES, including Philip Swallow and Morris Zapp, and takes place to a large extent at a number of academic conferences. Although a first-hand acquaintance with higher education isn't a prerequisite, anyone who has been to graduate school or taught will find a host of familiar characters and situation. Lodge magnificently lampoons the intellectual posturing and gamesmanship that fills the small world of the scholar. The novel manages to be both accurate and quite funny at the same time.

At one point in my life, I worked in a number of bookstores. One of my happier experiences was to have been employed at a campus bookstore in Chicago during Lodge's first reading tour of the United States (I believe this was around 1990). I was happy to spend some time with him along with other employees before his reading, and I remember his being so surprised that so many in the US had read his work, given the difficulty at the time of getting his novels in the states. He was an enormously pleasant person, and he gave a fine reading from NICE WORK. A final word on that: many speak of NICE WORK as being the final novel in a trilogy. I have trouble with that. CHANGING PLACES and SMALL WORLD feature many common characters, none of whom reappear in NICE WORK. Fans of the first two may be disappointed to find that NICE WORK, as fine as it is, does not continue the story of the other two novels.

As a teenager I reveled in the picaresque, occasionally perverse, peregrinations of Fielding's "Tom Jones." Hours of watching Laurel and Hardy and The 3 Stooges had convinced me that literature was incapable of affording the same intensity of pleasure. But Fielding's writing showed me otherwise. Nevertheless, I had never experienced the power of literature to induce uncontrollable physical laughter, akin to the audible response resonating throughout a movie theater, until reading "Small World." Never mind the parody of the Parsifal legend or grail quest, the rewriting of "The Fairie Queen" and "The Wasteland," or the send-up of not merely current literary criticism but many of its celebrated gurus. My wife had none of this background, and yet when I read the novel out loud to her, she was no less incapacitated by the force of the farce than I had been during my first reading (no, I don't think she was laughing at my recitation).

One caveat: I thought the novel would provide college students with an excellent introduction to numerous archetypal themes, canonical works, and schools of literary theory. Forget it. A generation brought up on Pauly Shore and Adam Sandler seems incapable of finding humor, let alone meaning, in language as well crafted as Lodge's.

Small World is the second installment of a trilogy. Basically a satirical send up of academia, the trilogy by and large (well, for the first two installments, anyway) follow a wild cast of characters as the seek sex, fame and fortune along with academic recognition. The First effort, Changing Places, chronicles the adventures of two professors--one English and one American--as the swap assignments for a year.

This installment follows the two, along with a cast of what often feels like thousands, on the convention, conference and lecture circuit.

Lodge is blessed with a wonderfully sardonic and sharp sense of humor and a deep appreciation for farce. These skills are in admirable display in this book. The comedy level matches--possibly even exceeds--that of the first book--which is saying something.

On the whole, though, this is a somewhat less satisfying read. The cast of characters, as previously mentioned, is huge. It's so big it's often difficult to remember who's who. Moreover, the plot is singularly complex. And contrived. That everything is tied up neat as a pin by the end only adds to the level of contrivance.

This is a very clever book--perhaps too clever by half, as the Brits would say.

However, it is hysterically funny. If you are in need of a good laugh--actually, dozens and dozens of good laughs, this should be your cup of tea.

Close behind a delightful read of Lodge's "Trading places", I quickly moved to the second part of his trilogy. "Places" was very good and "World" is even better.

Moving ahead ten years in time from "Places", Lodge shows an absolutely superb ability to mesh the globe-trotting, incestuous, backbiting and networking world of university professors of literature. Zapp and Swallow are back for a colorful encore. For any well-traveled academic, or even those who travel for other reasons, you will enjoy Lodge's descriptions, insights and surprising intricacies, as characters jet across continents to yet another subsidized conference, never forgetting that the rationale for the conference is not what it is advertised to be. As any professional, well-published academic knows, the real reason to write papers to present at conferences is to be able to justify traveling to the conference where most if not all agree that there is little reason to actually read or listen to the presentations.

Yet beyond the trysts and tripe of these fools can be found lessons in life and romance, of the great pursuit of life. Look past the lust, the deception and the pettiness, as Lodge presents plenty of food for thought.

Lodge colors his well-drawn players with all the affectations of their profession: greed, pettiness, ego, banality. A wonderful job. "Small world" is a great, most pleasant summer escape, a humorous jab at the soft underbelly of college life -- without ever really teaching a course.

Small world is the heart of David Lodge's trilogy of academic life. In this second of the trilogies, Lodge brilliantly describes the social climbing and intellectual flailing of Literature professors as representatives of all academics. Questions such as what book to write and what paper to present are revealed to be as much political questions as intellectual ones. The book, in short, explicates in hysterical fashion Moynihan's quote that "the reason that academic politics is so nasty is that so little is at stake'. Lodge's depiction is just close enough for anyone in academia to say ' I know that person' while at the same time being brilliantly satirical. A must read.

How often does a sequel far surpass an original (particularly when the original was very, very good)? "Small World" has the same great humor that made "Changing Places" so fun to read, but is so much more ambitious, multi-layered, and introduces even more hilarious characters. The book at first seems intimidating because so many different characters and plotlines are introduced that it is easy to think the book will be hard to follow. It is to David Lodge's credit that this never happens. Each character and plotline is distinct and original enough that one never gets confused as to who is who and what is going on with each character.

As a former English major, I can vouch for the amount of pointless gobbledygook masquerading as intelligent discourse by many English professors. It is important to know, though, that one does not need to be a student of English Literature to fully appreciate "Small World". The characters in this book, although primarily all English professors, can just as easily represent those overambitious people that can be found in any industry who are looking for the most amount of money and prestige, while having to do the least amount of actual work.

Lodge's 'Small World' is a multi-layered text, rich with classical and theoretical reference. Links with the works of T.S Eliot, classical mythology and Arthurian legend are evident enough to be credibly acknowleged, yet subtle enough to be overlooked by the more casual reader. And it is incredibly funny!