Book Review: David Lodge, Nice Work

What drew me to this book was the first line on the dust cover blurb: "The campus novel meets the industrial novel..." -- or so wrote David Profumo in the Daily Telegraph. Of course, I was also lured by BMV's price tag of $1 and the signature orange spine of Penguin paperbacks from days long gone. Thumbing through the pages, the chapters of the novel, subdivided into parts, bear inscription from some of the most well-loved industrial novels of nineteenth-century Britain: Dickens' Hard Times, Bronte's Shirley, Gaskell's North and South, and Disraeli's Sybil. I was sold. I even put a few books on hold and moved this one to the top of the queue. Unfortunately, the first chapter had me disappointed.

Lodge begins with the most banal narrative of a day in the life of Vic Wilcox, managing director at J. Pringle & Sons Casting and General Engineering. His life seems so mundane, so unremarkable that to read about it is as dull and inspiring as his diurnal activities: from bum kids to bowel movements, every detail of Vic's morning routine is chronicled to the disinterest of the reader. The pace is painful, the minutiae excruciating. However, I continued, determined that, were the book not to improve by the second chapter, I would deliver it to my local Goodwill the next day.

That's where the reward comes. Perseverance yields a delightful change in tempo and style. Enter Robyn Penrose, Temporary Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Rummidge -- the imaginary industrial town borne of Lodge's at times Gaskellian imagination -- and committed feminist. Her concentration, the nineteenth-century industrial novel, lends itself well for framing the story (perhaps a neo-industrial novel or post-industrial novel?) and we are certain that Wilcox and Penrose will somehow collide in a moment of pure fictional kismet. We gain insight into Robyn's Freudian interpretation of industrial capitalism's phallocentrism in her undergraduate lecture delivered in chapter three, which alternates between scenes of Vic's production meeting and his pill-popping wife's trip to the mall with their unambitious daughter.

For the literary snob seeking high-brow fiction in decidedly low-brow disguise, consider this it, for no sooner do we have Robyn and her on-again/off-again post-modern post-feminist relationship discussing Saussurean linguistics over erotic massages than both she and Vic meet in an altogether too-contrived-to-be-believable manner: Robyn is selected to "shadow" Vic every Wednesday for the duration of Rummidge's winter semester as part of a scheme called "Industry Year," in which members of the academy and business get a crash-course in the problems plaguing the other's sector in the aftermath of Thatcher's reforms. Lodge makes no attempt to disguise what is evidently a critique of university funding cuts and the human cost of industrial rationalization.

Penrose might be familiar with "industry" from the pages of Bronte's Shirley and Gaskell's North and South, but is completely ignorant of the challenges facing managing directors like Vic Wilcox in an industry confronted with more complex dilemmas than the wage and mechanization debates of Thornton's Milton or Bounderby's Coketown. The immigrant labour force, elevated production costs, market forces, technological advancement, and the politics of placating potentially restive workers inspired to action by Penrose's blunder all illustrate the level of sophistication of contemporary industrial obstacles which Wilcox navigates with a mixture of pragmatism and bottom-line business sense (and which Penrose often opposes on moral and humanitarian grounds).

The "relationship" between Penrose and Wilcox reads like an updated version of North and South, with Penrose defending the virtues of the academy (the South) from her advantageous social position against naysayer "manufacturers" like Wilcox (representing the North), who discount the utility of advanced study in the arts. (And, much like Margaret Hale's encounter with Nicholas Higgins and the strike, Penrose nearly incites one, and, later, even has a change of heart about her own rigorous advocacy for higher learning. In dialogue with her pseudo-boyfriend, Charles, Penrose admits, "Well, when Wilcox starts getting at me about arts degrees being a waste of money...I find myself falling back on arguments that I don't really believe any more, like the importance of maintaining cultural tradition, and improving students' communicative skills--arguments that old fogies like Phillip Swallow trot out at the drop of a hat. Because if I said we teach students about the perpetual sliding of the signified under the signifier, or the way every text inevitably undermines its own claim to determinate meaning, he would laugh in my face.")

The burgeoning romance between Penrose and Wilcox develops to its climax, albeit awkwardly, and leaves, at least this reader, unsatisfied. Perhaps this is what makes this a neo-industrial novel/post-industrial novel? Penrose remarks in her lecture that the women writers of the industrial novels "were never able to resolve in fictional terms the ideological contradictions inherent in their own society" and instead "[offered] narrative solutions to the personal dilemmas of their characters. And these narrative solutions are invariable negative or evasive" (pp. 82-3). This might explain the book's unusual ending: Lodge finds himself unable to satisfactorily work out the contradictions inherent in the mandate of academia, the tensions between the ivory tower and industry, the precariousness of assumed job security, the socioeconomic repercussions of Thatcherism, and Penrose's idea that love is nothing more than "a rhetorical device...a bourgeois fallacy" that the reader is left wondering what the moral of the story really is. (And he cleverly exempts himself from a more explicit commitment to outlining it for the reader with the help of Charlotte Bronte: "This story is told. I think I now see the judicious reader putting on his spectacles to look for the moral. It would be an insult to his sagacity to offer directions. I only say, God speed to him in the quest!")

What makes this book charming is the adept insertion of critical theory, semiotics, and some of English literature's less mainstream Victorian novels into a character and a story that has the elements of a social critique, a romance, and an exploratory piece of the psyche of the 1980s working class and the old "elite" (here think privileged academics past their '68 heyday). Though Lodge attempts to persuade the reader to sympathize with both, the bra-burning, man-eating, love-hating feminist orientation of Robyn Penrose does grate on the nerves and, by contemporary standards, seems cliche. Nevertheless, those familiar with the plot of North and South will invariably enjoy Lodge's modern spin, though perhaps likewise finding the ending a tad rushed and more than a little hollow.

☆☆☆/5