WRITER’S LUCK
A MEMOIR: 1976–1991
Harvill Secker, 387pp, £25, Oldie price £16.72 inc p&p Quite a Good Time to be Born, the first volume of David Lodge’s memoirs, told the story, at some length, of how the author came to be the person he was. It ended in 1975, when Lodge was 40, happily married and embarked on a successful career as an academic, critic and novelist. Reviewers complained about the length, remarked on the lack of guile and feasted on the social history.
Writer’s Luck covers just fifteen years in 400 pages, years spent on teaching, conference travel, writing and bringing up his children. Reviewers, in the main, just complained. Nakul Krishna in the Telegraph suggested that those with a taste for Booker Prize gossip would ‘find much to enjoy in his accounts of the process both as a shortlisted author... and as chair of the judging panel’, but went on to note that Lodge’s account of literary arguments is hindered by his failure ‘to convey a sense of an alternative perspective’.
Anthony Quinn in the Guardian described the memoir as presenting ‘a writer who simply has no clue as to what he should leave out, or how to compress a narrative for the sake of pace’. He was not the only critic to compare parts of the book to a round-robin Christmas card, nor to describe the voice as ‘Pooterish’. James Walton in the Financial
Times made the point that ‘David Lodge’s work often features a central clash between binary opposites: British and American universities in his breakthrough novel Changing
Places, for example; or the Midlands industrialist versus the feminist academic in 1988’s Booker-shortlisted
Nice Work. Only in his two volumes of memoirs, however, has that clash been between the illuminating and the almost comically dull.’