David Lodge, British author of perhaps the greatest works of campus satire of all-time, died on Jan. 1, 2025, at age 89, surrounded by his family at his home in Birmingham, England.
I first read Lodge 30 years ago, when I was assigned the opening installment of his campus trilogy, “Changing Places” (followed later by “Small World” and “Nice Work”) as part of a graduate course in the English novel.
It became perhaps my favorite book over my three years of advanced study. “Changing Places” tells the story of two academics, one British (Philip Swallow) and one American (Morris Zapp), who are engaged in an exchange program. Swallow will spend a semester at Zapp’s Plotinus University in the state of Euphoria (a stand-in for Cal-Berkeley) and Zapp will in turn work at Rummidge, an avatar for Birmingham University.
Swallow is an unadventurous and emotionally closed-off typical bookworm academic. Zapp — modeled on peripatetic American academic and one-time UIC administrator Stanley Fish — is a superstar in the field. Set up as a dual fish-out-of-water story with the staid Swallow in free-swinging California (Euphoria), and the flamboyant Zapp in the grey, industrial gloom of Rummidge, Lodge subverts expectations by having both men adapt easily and thoroughly, including taking up with each other’s wives.
Working in a long British tradition of social satire mixed with absurdist story twists, Lodge managed to both paint a (gently) scathing and accurate picture of academics and their mores, and kept the audience entertained through narrative winks and nudges to let us know we shouldn’t take any of it too seriously.
As a satirist, he’s on par with his country’s forebears P.G. Wodehouse and Kingsley Amis. When “Changing Places” was first published in 1975, it drew comparisons to Amis’ “Lucky Jim” as the next great campus novel, but for my money, Lodge surpassed his predecessor. While the academia that Lodge skewers ceases to exist in the same form today, his deliberate patterning of his novels after classic narratives, such as the quest for the Holy Grail, which is somehow grafted onto a literary conference in “Small World,” keeps the work feeling relevant even today.
Lodge published a dozen other novels in his lifetime and many works of nonfiction, including one I highly recommend to any curious reader, “The Art of Fiction.”
Collected as a book in 1992, the chapters in “The Art of Fiction” started as weekly newspaper columns, and while many of the book versions have been stretched beyond column length, they are still brief, highly accessible lessons in how particular elements of fiction work.
Each chapter starts with a title (Beginning, Suspense, Point of View) followed by a brief excerpt from a well-known work — e.g. Jane Austen’s “Emma,” — after which Lodge explores the title subject in the context of the excerpt.
In lesser hands, this could be dry, academic discourse, but Lodge’s goal is to bring the tools of fiction alive for the reader by illuminating the craft going on underneath the experience of reading.
The result is like one of those David Attenborough nature documentaries where you learn all kinds of cool stuff about say, the mating habits of the albatross of the Galapagos Islands, only the subject matter is the use of an unreliable narrator in Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Remains of the Day.”
Leafing through my copy as I worked on this column revealed how much of Lodge’s wisdom I’ve absorbed and shared without necessarily always offering credit. I don’t think he would mind. It’s the teacher’s goal to give the student permission to possess the knowledge for themselves.
David Lodge will continue to inform our world for years to come.
John Warner is the author of “Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities.”
Book recommendations from the Biblioracle
John Warner tells you what to read based on the last five books you’ve read.
1. “The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store” by James McBride
2. “The Sands of Windee” by Arthur Upfield
3. “A Bend in the River” by V.S. Naipaul
4. “Brideshead Revisited” by Evelyn Waugh
5. “Grey Mask” by Patricia Wentworth
— Biff G., Valparaiso, Indiana
For Biff, I’m recommending John Irving working in historical mode, “The Cider House Rules.”
1. “The Odessa File” by Frederick Forsyth
2. “Sycamore Row” by John Grisham
3. “A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka” by Lev Golinkin
4. “Epic Grace: Chronicles of a Recovering Idiot” by Kurt W. Bubna
5. “Prince Caspian” by C.S. Lewis
— Otniel L., Montgomery
Otniel seems to enjoy true, humorous tales from interesting lives and different perspectives. To me, that puts to mind “Devil in the Details: Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood” by Jennifer Traig, a book that can still make me chuckle, just thinking about it.
1. “Klara and The Sun” by Kazuo Ishiguro
2. “The School for Good Mothers” Jessamine Chan
3. “Same as it Ever Was” by Claire Lombardo
4. “The Latecomer” by Jean Hanff Korelitz
5. “Leave the World Behind” by Rumaan Alam
— Helen M., Chicago
Helen’s recommendation comes via Mrs. Biblioracle who just finished Geraldine Brooks’ “People of the Book” and said I have to find someone to recommend it to this week, so here you go.
Get a reading from the Biblioracle
Send a list of the last five books you’ve read and your hometown to [email protected].
