The obituaries of the critic and author David Lodge, who died on 1 January aged 89, have been a long time writing and relate the facts scrupulously. He has earned the reporting of his passing as a fact of national importance. Nonetheless what I’ve read does not, I feel, entirely capture the essence of Lodgeism.
In my twenties (I’m three years his junior) I read Lodge’s first critical treatise, The Language of Fiction (1966) and his novel The British Museum is Falling Down (1965). Consider them together and it’s hard to avoid the j’accuse always latent in Lodge’s versatile genius – if you can’t write a novel what gives you the right to stand at a lectern and be all-knowing about fiction? I only taught a seminar with him once but that point was brought home to me more sharply than I liked.
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