Tubby, Redeemed : At last! A fun-filled novel of a mid-life crisis with a genuinely happy ending : THERAPY, <i> By David Lodge (Viking: $22.95; 321 pp.)</i>

There are few writers whose roster of novels I’ve read in its entirety, but David Lodge is one of them. I began with his hilarious academic satire, “Small World,” and, mostly because that book gave me a laugh or two on every page, I sought out all the others, from the almost as well-known “Changing Places” (two university professors, one from a rainy British red-brick university ever falling on hard times, the other from Berkeley, which Lodge calls Euphoria U., exchange jobs and much else), to the quite obscure “Out of the Shelter” (young man escapes the narrowness and deprivation of post-war London). Like any other novelist, Lodge has his themes and his tricks--he often explores the redemptive effects of sex and travel, and redemption in general; his contemplation of Catholicism, particularly English and Irish Catholicism, is long-standing and always worth reading. Neatly laid out in his 35 years of novels is an astute social history of post-war England. And he tells a good story.

So it was that my heart sank with the title of Lodge’s latest, “Therapy.” After Philip Roth, after Woody Allen, after Jeffrey Masson, is there still a joke to be teased out of psychotherapy, even British psychotherapy? And Lodge’s protagonist, Tubby Passmore, seemed especially unpromising--a successful TV sitcom writer with a shooting pain in his knee, a sexy intellectual wife, a five-bedroom house, a Japanese luxury car and an attitude mostly compounded of rue and self-conscious irony.

On the other hand, at what point in his career does a writer earn the faithful reader’s patience, even trust? Is the reader always obliged to be ruthless, demanding sparkling invention and flourishes of stylistic novelty every time out? Why, in other words, was I so hard to please? Am I not interested in the angst of prosperous white men? Do I really not care about the sexual ennui of 30-year marriages? Was I actually not going to laugh at Lodge’s digs at British Rail? (Here’s one: “BR has taken to using this cumbersome phrase, ‘station stop,’ lately, presumably to distinguish scheduled stops at stations from unscheduled ones in the middle of fields, concerned perhaps that passengers disoriented by the fumes of bacon and tomato rolls and overhead brake linings in carriages with defective air conditioning might otherwise stumble out on the track by mistake and get killed.”)

Unwilling to leave any therapeutic stone unturned, Tubby engages not only a physiotherapist for his knee, but also a cognitive behavior therapist, a blind aromatherapist and an acupuncturist. His platonic mistress is seeing a traditional psychiatrist. But Tubby’s array of therapists offers him no relief; instead they give him only more ways to elaborate his story. His story devolves. Narrative lines proliferate. Tubby tries some time-honored ways of relieving his pain--aggression, sex in the tropics--and others not so time-honored--visiting Copenhagen in gloomy weather, visiting Los Angeles in sunny weather. Nothing works, not even revenging himself upon his wife.

I kept reading. Lodge’s style is practiced and smooth, goes down easy, slipping past the doubts and kvetching. He introduces Kierkegaard. Now there’s a notion. Woody Allen once wrote a story that was just a list of funny ideas. One of them was “Christy Brown,” the Irish writer handicapped from birth, who wrote with his big toe, the only part of his body he could manipulate. Christy Brown was not inherently a figure of mirth, but, as Woody Allen realized, context is all. So it is, in “Therapy,” with Kierkegaard, despair, existentialism and “Fear and Trembling.” And then (I won’t say where, because that’s Lodge’s joke and it wouldn’t be polite to exploit it cheap) he got me.

Fact is, David Lodge is a sly one. Heir to a tradition of realism that is long, broad and deep, he effortlessly constructs the substantial world of modern England. His characters have not only jobs, connections, social positions, belongings and histories, they also have opinions. Tubby, for example, comments that Philip Larkin is his favorite modern poet. “Apparently,” he remarks, “he used to end telephone conversations to Kingsley Amis by saying, ‘F--- Oxfam’ Admittedly, there are worse things than saying ‘F--- Oxfam,’ for instance actually doing it, like the gunmen in Somalia who steal the aid intended for starving women and children, but still, what did he have to say a stupid thing like that for? I took out my charity checkbook and sent off fifty quid to OXFAM. I did it for Philip Larkin.”

At the same time possessed of a highly developed sense of fun, he lets his characters run happily, or if need be, unhappily, amok. Tubby manages to embarrass himself in any number of ways before he gets a clue, for example pitching to his producer a movie about Kierkegaard: “I said, ‘Where’s your jeopardy, Tubby? Where’s your suspense?’ He looked rather taken aback. . . . ‘Well,’ he said, ‘there was a time when a satirical magazine started to attack him. That caused him a lot of pain. They made fun of his trousers”’ Life-affirmingly for Tubby, his fellow Lodgian characters hold no grudges.

Life-affirmingly for us, David Lodge is one of the few writers who can actually construct a happy ending that fits into the world as we know it. When Tubby decides to seek out his boyhood love, who, not surprisingly in a Lodge novel, had introduced him to Catholicism, the story seems to deepen rather than to cheapen (though I admit there’s a narrow edge there, and Lodge does teeter a bit once or twice). But what I especially like about it, and it would be especially cheap for me to give it away) is how he manages to sustain the irony and skepticism of Tubby’s style in the teeth of redemption all around.

Lodge has always been patient, both with his readers and with his material. Though I’ve found “Small World” uproariously funny and exquisitely insightful, my favorite Lodge novel is an earlier one, “How Far Can You Go?” which follows a handful of English Catholics for 20 years, from their last day at university, in the early ‘50s, deep into adulthood, through years of endeavoring to live moral lives while all ideas of morality are changing and even falling away.

Apart from the questions Lodge persists in asking through his characters, one of the most interesting aspects of the novel comes on the last page, when the narrator all of a sudden, but quite subtly introduces himself. The novel immediately shifts shape and becomes both more complex and more poignant as a result. Lodge is an accomplished and brilliant novelist who sometimes dazzles and always satisfies. A measure of his know-how is precisely the fact that he can take a subject so many have flogged before him and make something refreshing and wise of it. “Therapy” is, finally, a delicious read.