David Lodge
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John Cotter, "David Lodge, British Novelist Who Satirized Academic Life, Dies at 89", NYT 1/3/2025:
David Lodge, the erudite author of academic comedy and a wide-ranging literary critic, died on Wednesday in Birmingham, England. He was 89. […]
The author of 15 novels and more than a dozen nonfiction books as well as plays and screenplays, Mr. Lodge was twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and his work has been translated into dozens of languages.
The Booker Prize non-winning was featured in headlines from the AP ("British author David Lodge, twice nominated for Booker Prize, dies at 89") and the Independent ("Booker Prize-shortlisted author David Lodge dies at the age of 89"), and mentioned prominently in several other obits — so I want to give Lodge the last word on this topic, via his 2018 interview in The Times, which ran under the headline "David Lodge: ‘The Booker prize is good for the novel but bad for novelists’":
“The Booker prize has created a huge long line of losers, as Mr Trump would probably call them, and there are enough chances to fail in the literary world without going through that.”
David Lodge is one of the prize’s most notable unwinners. At the age of 82 this former professor of English literature, with 15 novels to his name, is probably the most distinguished novelist of his generation not to win it. Not that failure ought to bother him. It has been a nice little earner. He has mined the great seams of frustrated ambition, bungled relationships and sexual disappointment to create superb social comedy in novels such as Changing Places (1975), Small World (1984) and Nice Work (1988).
And I should mention that The Booker Prizes's web page for David Lodge, along with listing his three failures to win, features the fact that he chaired the prize committee in 1989.
A more notable fact about his obituaries is that The Guardian, in addition to a standard obit by John Mullan, has also published at least two other remembrances ("‘It’s largely thanks to him that the British comic novel remains in good health’: David Lodge remembered by Jonathan Coe", and "‘His books animated academia for me’: how David Lodge inspired my campus novel" by Janice Hallett), as well as a separate obituary in the Books section (Ella Creamer, "David Lodge, Campus Trilogy novelist and academic, dies aged 89").
For a sense of what he was like in (semi-formal) person, and perhaps to lead you to read or re-read Small World, here's his (oddly mis-edited) virtual lecture commissioned in 2016 for the 50th anniversary of ICMS Australasia:
Some earlier LLOG posts featuring David Lodge, focused especially on some linguistics-adjacent aspects of his novels:
“And yet.”, 3/28/2004
“Captain Crunch among the literati”, 6/7/2005
“Please don’t tell me about it”, 6/24/2011
And for a sample of his own linguistically-relevant work, see "Metaphor and Metonymy i Modern Fiction", Critical Quarterly 1975.
JPL said,
January 4, 2025 @ 5:25 pm
Why does he say "phenonemon" [sic] (purposefully enunciated) at 4:42? (Odd in amongst all the other examples of the diction of English studies.) But the video is as funny as his books, with the humorous points subtly departing from this diction. (But I want to extend the use of the word 'diction' to include, as I think Leavis did, what is characteristically chosen to express. (Maybe there is a better word for this phenonemon.))
Chips Mackinolty said,
January 5, 2025 @ 12:19 am
Curious the Times describes Lodge as an unwinner" of the Booker. To me that suggests he won the prize then had it taken from him. Perhaps "notable non-winner" would be more accurate?
Bloix said,
January 5, 2025 @ 10:48 am
I'm sad to learn of Lodge's death from this post. As I likely wouldn't seen an obit otherwise, I'd like to thank you for it. A book of his that might apple to regular LL readers who weren't English majors is The Art of Fiction. It's a collection of 50 columns that he wrote for the Independent on Sunday, each one discussing an excerpt from a novel illustrating a literary technique that would be well-know to a specialist in a way that's accessible to an average reader (e.g. me).
Bloix said,
January 5, 2025 @ 10:57 am
As I haven't seen an obit, I'd like to thank you for this post. A book of his that might appeal to regular LL readers who weren't English majors is The Art of Fiction. It's a collection of 50 columns that he wrote for the Independent on Sunday, each one using an excerpt from a novel to illustrate a literary technique in a way that's accessible to an average reader (e.g. me). It's clever, informative, and succinct.