Write on

by David Lodge

Novelist, critic, lecturer, reviewer, man-about-conferences, David Lodge, as both analyst and practitioner, is one of our foremost experts in the forms of fiction. He is also an uncommonly sympathetic and informed observer of the passing scene, and his penetrating vision is set in a consistently ironic frame. David Lodge's humour can be a devastating weapon, but it is continually engaging because as often as not the sniper's sights are trained on the author himself, and on the curiously mobile, cosmopolitan yet specialist world he inhabits.The essays and reviews collected in this volume are selected from the occasional writings over a span of twenty years, and are all prompted by an impulse - or an invitation - to "write on" some specific a book, a film, an anniversary, a trip abroad. They also reflect the drive of the professional to keep writing, "to keep the muscles of composition exercised."The pieces collected here are designed for a wide audience, and most focus, in more or less direct ways, on Lodge's own work as a novelist. Enthusiasts will take especial pleasure in discovering sources for episodes from his novels, in tracing how reality mutates into fiction - or how on occasion, the process works the other way round.

Genres: Essays

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

David John Lodge was an English author and critic. A literature professor at the University of Birmingham until 1987, some of his novels satirise academic life, notably the "Campus Trilogy" – Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975), Small World: An Academic Romance (1984) and Nice Work (1988). The second two were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Another theme is Roman Catholicism, beginning from his first published novel The Picturegoers (1960). Lodge also wrote television screenplays and three stage plays. After retiring, he continued to publish literary criticism. His edition of Twentieth Century Literary Criticism (1972) includes essays on 20th-century writers such as T.S. Eliot. In 1992, he published The Art of Fiction, a collection of essays on literary techniques with illustrative examples from great authors, such as Point of View (Henry James), The Stream of Consciousness (Virginia Woolf) and Interior Monologue (James Joyce), beginning with Beginning and ending with Ending.

Reviews

[Jeremy Walton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ease in writing and reading
I've enjoyed David Lodge's novels since someone gave me his Changing Places thirty-odd years ago; by turns funny, perceptive and moving, it's long been one of my favorite books. I've also dipped into his non-fiction, including his illuminating The Art of Fiction, in which he uses his experience as a university teacher to explain various aspects of literature in a series of short essays. The articles in the present volume are much more wide-ranging, being composed of pieces he's written for journals and newspapers over a twenty-year period starting in 1965. They touch on such diverse topics as the reviews of John Updike, Robertson Davies and the campus novel, the Bible as literature and the autobiography of Graham Greene. In addition, he's included personal reflections on subjects like living in the USA in the mid-60s, travelling to Poland in 1981 and the impact (or lack of it) of the Catholic church on cultural life in the UK.

What makes reading this book so rewarding is Lodge's easy, unforced writing style, which gives the reader the impression of communing with a pleasantly friendly, wryly knowledgeable author who wears his learning lightly, but is always ready to explain abstruse points such as the difference between metaphor and metonymy. A few of these pieces have inevitably dated, given their age - some readers may only have a hazy memory of the immense popularity of Shakin' Stevens, for example - but reading them is still a pleasantly stimulating experience.

Originally reviewed 20 October 2011

[Lysergius · Rating 3 out of 5]

What makes reading this book so rewarding is Lodge's easy, unforced writing style, which gives the reader the impression of communing with a pleasantly friendly, wryly knowledgeable author who wears his learning lightly, but is always ready to explain abstruse points such as the difference between metaphor and metonymy. A few of these pieces have inevitably dated, given their age - some readers may only have a hazy memory of the immense popularity of Shakin' Stevens, for example - but reading them is still a pleasantly stimulating experience.