When University Meets Factory

Nice Work

By David Lodge

Viking Books

$18.95, 277 pp.

THERE are books. And there are books about books. In the most erudite of literary circles, people have even been known to write books about books about books. It uses up a lot of paper.

And then there are those conservation-minded writers who try to squeeze fiction, criticism and metacriticism into a single volume. Nice Work, the newest novel by the British writer and English professor David Lodge, is the result of just such an effort.

Like its predecessors, Changing Places and Small World, Nice Work is both a novel and an ironic commentary on itself. Along the way, Lodge also manages to take a few jabs at the 19th century industrial novel, the state of 20th century literary criticism and the lyrics of pop singer Jennifer Rush.

It all takes place in roughly the same universe as Lodge's prior two novels: the imaginary campus of Rummidge University in England. But unlike the two earlier works, which ranged over the entire globe, Nice Work confines itself almost entirely to the city of Rummidge, which, as the author explains, "occupies, for the purposes of fiction, the space where Birmingham is to be found on maps of the so-called real world."

And while Changing Places and Small "campus" novels, that description only half fits Nice Work. This novel concerns itself as much with the world of industry as with acadamia, as Lodge sets up a modern parallel to the world of 19th century industrial novels.

WHICH subject just so happens to be the specialty of Robyn Penrose, a radical feminist scholar who has a temporary teaching post at Rummidge.

Through a university exchange scheme, she is assigned to spend one day a week as the "shadow" of Vic Wilcox, the managing director of a Rummidge engineering firm and a man who doesn't know--or care--that such a thing as literary theory exists.

Despite her field of expertise, Robyn doesn't know the first thing about industry. At one point, when touring a factory, Robyn has to ask Vic what a foundry is. And when she arrives at the factory for the first time, she naively expects it to be something out of a Victorian novel; "Where are the chimneys?" she asks.

Reading Nice Work simply for the story is a waste of time. The characters are almost entirely one-dimensional. After introducing Vic and Robyn in the first section of the book, Lodge simply turns them loose--they almost automatically begin to lose their disrespect for one another, become friends and wind up in bed.

At this point Lodge simply pulls an ending out of a hat--every one gets saved. The novel simply falls back on what Robyn describes as the standard solutions of the Victorian novelist: legacy, marriage, emigration and death.

But the beauty of Nice Work is that abstract literary concepts take on a real meaning in determining the lives and outlooks of the characters. Vic, for example, sees the feelings he develops for Robyn as "love," while Robyn says that love is "a rhetorical device," a "bourgeois fallacy" and a "literary conjob." It's just another word used to exploit people.

Lodge sets up a neat tension in the novel between the analytical literary world of Robyn, who doesn't believe that anything exists beyond text, and the bottom-line-conscious world of Vic, where only real things matter.

AND Lodge is not above taking himself apart in the same way from time to time. As he flits between styles, voices and tenses, Lodge constantly points out the deficiencies of the novel while steadfastly sticking to its conceits. Introducing Robyn, he describes her as:

...a very different character. A character who, rather awkwardly for me, doesn't herself believe in the concept of character. That is to say (a favorite phrase of her own) Robyn Penrose, Temporary Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Rummidge, holds that "character" is a bourgeois myth, an illusion created to reinforce the ideology of capitalism.

This type of self-criticism and analysis will be familiar to readers of Small World and Changing Places, as will the characters of Phillip Swallow and Morris Zapp, who both play cameo roles here.

But Nice Work covers new ground, particularly in its analysis of Thatcherite Britain in relation to the Victorian industrial era. It is just as consciously literary as either of the first two, but it has a firmer grounding in the contemporary social and economic problems of modern-day Britain.

Industry is finding it ever harder to compete with Europe and the Far West. And without anything real to support it, the university system is falling apart from lack of funds--Robyn can't even get a permanent job.

The world of academia, from which the previous novels rarely strayed, is on a collisiion course with reality in Nice Work. It is to Lodge's credit that he can see the reality so clearly from such a literary standpoint. And vice versa.