David Lodge, _Nice Work_

LODGE'S AUTHOR, AUTHOR! was sufficiently pleasing for me to try this, a sequel to the Lodge novels I had already read many years ago, Changing Places and Small World. Philip Swallow has only a relatively small role in this one, though, and Morris Zapp, disappointingly, a mere cameo, but new center-stage protagonist Robyn Penrose is a worthy addition to the cast.

The plot has mainly to do with a "shadow scheme" wherein Robyn, a scholar of the Victorian industrial novel, will observe local factory manager Vic Wilcox at his work, and he observe her at hers. Lodge is very good at rendering both milieus, and the gradual entangling of Robyn's and Vic's lives, though predictable as a plot element, is nonetheless wittily and persuasively handled.

The peculiar thing for me was that Robyn and I have a lot in common. The novel, published in 1988, is set in (I think) 1986. Robyn is 33 and in the second year of a three-year temporary appointment at the University of Rummidge (where Swallow is now department chair). She has a book out and another she needs to finish, but is anxious about her prospects. In 1986, I was 32 and in the first year of a temporary three-year appointment, also with a book in the works. Was I anxious? Lord, yes.

There are differences in our situations, too. Robyn is single; I was married and had a one-year-old daughter. Robyn is thoroughly enchanted with continental theory; I could take it or leave it. But that terrible sense of having invested years in a career that could all too suddenly vanish from under one's feet...that was 1986 for me, no doubt about it.

Things worked out for me, somehow; Robyn's prospects have bloomed nicely by novel's end. Is there another novel about her, I wonder?