Thinks
David Lodge

review by: Stephan Finch
Date: 11/18/02

You may not know David Lodge. He's an Englishman, a university professor, and a remarkably crafty writer. I say "crafty" because Lodge's best novels are jewels of narrative clarity. There's a plot. There are characters. There's conflict. You won't find yourself halfway through his books wondering what hell the blasted things are about. Yes, Lodge gives us wonderful art by offering us his wit, his satire and his appreciation for romance. But unlike most "literary" writers, the man respects the conventions of story-telling enough to stick with them like a smithy does his hammer and anvil.

Like a few other of Lodge's novels, "Thinks" is the tale of a love affair between two college professors. She is a 40ish English novelist and visiting writing instructor trying to recover from the loss of her husband. He's a middle-aged American-born computer nut who specializes in the study of artificial intelligence, happily married but known for philandering. They meet, they make love, they break up. Story over.

Ah, but the joy comes in the telling. In Lodge's affairs, the battlefield is the intellect. All along the way, there's a running argument between these two about who, exactly, is better equipped to tell the rest of us about how consciousness really works. The computer nut, whose explorations of artificial intelligence attract piles of grant money and press attention, believes that the answer will come from science. He's an atheist. The novelist, who happens to have been raised a Catholic, shrugs him off, saying that literature which holds all the answers to the nature of being and thinking. Each is forced to rethink things they thought they'd been sure about. The shifting in their thinking about thinking leads them to reevaluate other long-held beliefs, and that sets the stage for their affair.

Lodge cleverly orchestrates the argument by presenting both sides of the case: Each chapter of the book is written from a different point of view. So at various points, you're seeing things from his point of view ("I turned and kissed her"), hers ("He turned and kissed me") or that of an omniscient narrator ("They turned and kissed each other"). Hell, we even get a few chapters written in imitation of various other "voices" of famous writers like Martin Amis or Irvine Welsh. None of this is confusing, believe it or not.

It's all delicious fun. I don't know if college professors really do have love affairs like this, but they ought to. If you're new to Lodge, I think you'll be delighted. If you've read other works of his, like "Nice Work," "Small World" or even "Therapy," you might have a slight let-down. The laughs are still there, but they seem to come more slowly now. And once the affair is consummated, Lodge isn't quite sure of where to take it. In the last part of the book, the computer nut is faced with a life-threatening illness. He instinctively reaches out to his wife for support and abruptly ends the affair with the novelist. It all feels slightly deus ex machina to me. Maybe I've just read too many of Lodge's books. Or maybe he's bored with his college campuses and his love affairs. I'll stick with him, though, because I adore intelligent writing that wants to be understood by its reader.