BOOK REVIEWS : Comic Novel of Characters and Wit Set in England

Nice Work by David Lodge (Viking: $18.95; 276 pp.)

Though the title of this elegantly witty novel could be its review, you’d never know from those two words how Lodge manages to resolve the sticky town-gown divisions in the dreary English industrial city of Rummidge.

You wouldn’t meet the brilliant red-haired feminist scholar, Robyn Penrose, her amusingly pedantic lover Charles, or have the slightest idea how Robyn became involved with Victor Wilcox, managing director of Pringle and Sons Casting and General Engineering. You’d miss the marvelously erudite send-ups of deconstructionist literary criticism, still be in the dark about how the English university system works, and be deprived of the author’s description of a Jacuzzi, in which his leading characters sat “up to their necks, facing each other like cartoon characters in a cannibal’s pot.”

“Nice Work” is a start, a hint at the delights in store. By applying a bit of our heroine’s semiotic theory to these operative words, at least 10 meanings of nice will spring to mind, of which wanton, fastidious, subtle, and uncommon apply directly, and as for work, the condensed list includes agitate, cause, manipulate, tease, and manage, just for openers. Robyn could write a monograph on what nice work signifies when joined together in the catch phrase, but you’ll have your own interpretation.

Geographically Separate

Robyn and Charles are now employed at different universities because Robyn’s particular subject is the English Industrial Novel, a field of concentration that has landed her in Rummidge, where she’s appropriately surrounded by factories. Charles, who chose the safer topic of “The Idea of the Sublime in Romantic Poetics,” has achieved a post in pastoral Suffolk. As a result of the separation, the romance has begun to wind down, though the principals are not yet ready to admit that.

Robyn’s theoretical connection with manufacturing is what gets her assigned as “shadow” to Victor Wilcox, the director of Pringle, as part of a British Industry Year program. The purpose of this experiment is to foster greater mutual understanding and respect between city and university by having a professor spend one day a week with a businessman. Naturally everyone concerned regards this notion as an imposition, a bore, a nuisance and a waste of time, at least until Wilcox’s shadow turns out to be the fetching Robyn.

Prepared to find herself handcuffed to precisely the sort of philistine she’s always avoided, Robyn is amazed to discover that industry can be stimulating, and that an engineer like Victor is a splendid sounding board for her radical ideas. Unlike her students at Rummidge, Vic is a professor’s dream--a tabula rasa on whom she can work intellectual and emotional magic. A literary innocent, he’s shrewd, sensitive, and responsive, and the enforced visits soon turn from an ordeal into an adventure. The process by which this happens gives the author great scope to explore the similarities and differences between academics and the rest of the world, an opportunity Lodge exploits to the fullest.

Nothing for an Encore

In addition to Robyn’s colleagues and Vic’s cohort of managers, there’s Vic’s wife Marge, a pudgy woman whose goal in life was to have a bathroom adjoining the bedroom, and now that she’s achieved it, has no idea what to do for an encore. The family includes the three Wilcox children, none of whom have come up to their parent’s expectations, and Vic’s curmudgeonly father, the sort of Englishman often called the salt of the earth by those who don’t live with him.

Robyn has parents of her own--an Australian professor and his lady now happily settled in a seaside town; a brother who has abandoned the life of the mind for the life of the market place, and of course, her own full set of professional associates, from the superannuated department chairman to the student who works part-time delivering Gorrilla-grams.

Everything a comic novel should be, “Nice Work” is funny without being antic, coincidental but not implausible, simultaneously satiric and generous. As a bonus, the reader can learn a great deal about contemporary fashions in literary scholarship and discover why the British are world leaders in the advertising business, all in the company of the season’s most diverting characters.