‘Home Truths’: A Perfectly Slight Work

Not so very long after the voices of various “Angry Young Men” and disgruntled “Movement” types like Kingsley Amis resounded across postwar Britain, a distinctly different kind of voice was heard in the land. Its tone, too, was satirical, its origins also middle or lower-middle class. But in place of the truculent provincialism and nose-thumbing defiance of “Lucky Jim,” younger writers such as Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge provided a brighter, more genuinely open-minded form of comic relief in novels like Bradbury’s “The History Man” (1975) and Lodge’s “Changing Places” (1975).

Perhaps not as well-known in the U.S. as Bradbury, Lodge is certainly well worth knowing. His novels, including “The British Museum Is Falling Down,” “Souls and Bodies,” “Small World” and “Nice Work,” are clever, witty and shrewdly observant. His latest effort, “Home Truths,” is a slight work, a novella, but perfect of its kind, like a well-made souffle. Based on a play of the same title that Lodge wrote a couple of years ago, it retains much of the charm of a stage production, with sprightly dialogue, ironic turns of events and a certain amount of dramatic tension.

Adrian and Eleanor Ludlow are a middle-aged couple living in “semiretirement” in a not-quite-picturesque village south of London. The story opens, aptly, on a Sunday morning in 1997. The Ludlows are browsing through the gossip-filled Sunday papers when they come across an interview with someone less famous than Princess Diana, someone whom they, in fact, happen to know: It’s their old friend Sam Sharp.

Sam has become a rich, highly successful screenplay writer, and the interviewer, a modish young journalist named Fanny Tarrant, famous for making her subjects look ridiculous, has done her usual devastating job on Sam. As Adrian and Eleanor are debating whether or not Sam “asked for it” by agreeing to the interview in the first place, who should ring their doorbell but Sam himself, en route to a big deal film meeting in L.A.

Sam and Adrian both started out in the 1960s as promising young writers. But while Sam took the traveled road toward celebrity, Adrian was content to write a few well-regarded novels, then retire to lead a quiet life editing anthologies. Adrian values his privacy, and he can’t help feeling that his publicity-loving pal got what he deserved. Nevertheless, he allows Sam to talk him into a scheme to turn the tables on the offending journalist: Adrian will submit to one of Tarrant’s interviews. The plan is for him to interview the interviewer.

“Don’t you ever feel even the faintest spasm of remorse when you see your articles in print?” he asks her. “Why should I?” Fanny retorts. “I perform a valuable cultural function. . . . There’s such a lot of hype nowadays, people confuse success with real achievement. I remind them of the difference.” Although forewarned, hence forearmed, against Fanny’s beguiling manner, Adrian finds himself telling her things he had not intended to, much to the consternation of his wife.

Embarrassing revelations, cleverly staged scenes and ingenious turns of plot offer the reader some of the pleasures of actually attending a theatrical performance. And while no one is likely to mistake this engaging jeu d’esprit for a major work, it does reveal some perceptive “Home Truths” about the temptations and perils of publicity.