literature
Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.What is happening to David Lodge? Time was when he wrote wry, pithy Bradburyesque tomes in which young Catholics committed acts of sacrilege, and academics flirted and fretted round the world. But his latest novel, Therapy, is distinctly flabby round the waist: all fret and no fretwork. The town of Rummidge, his regular suburban dreartopia, seems to be having the last laugh, lending the narrator, Tubby Passmore, a monochrome earnestness. A successful middle-aged TV sitcom writer, Tubby's knee pains become symptomatic of a repressed angst. As his psychotherapeutic quest continues, the life he has built around his physically uninhibited wife and platonic mistress starts to fragment.
Of course, the title alone indicates that Therapy wants to wear its unsexiness on its sleeve; if its jokes are thin on top, then they are tidily and proudly arranged; it aspires to the status of couch potato ("Working out... bears the same relation to real sport as masturbation does to real sex"). The degree to which this delve into the menopausal male psyche is autobiographical - middle-aged Martin Chuzzlewit adaptor living in Birmingham etc - is currently exercising the minds of many, but seems a distraction.
What is more interesting is whether Lodge is simply using the idea of therapy as an excuse for aimless narrative musings or whether the book's epigraph - Graham Greene's remark that "writing is a form of therapy" - taps into a much richer seam of literary argument.
David Lodge talks to Blake Morrison, 9pm, Wed, Blackheath Concert Halls, SE3 (0181-463 0100) £6/£4
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments