KATHRYN HUGHES

MEMOIR Writer’s Luck David Lodge Harvill Secker €30.49 ★★★★★

Agood chunk of a writer’s career is down not to talent but luck. David Lodge has had his fair share of both. In this second volume of memoirs, he recounts the highs of having his novels Small

World and Nice Work shortlisted for the Booker and filmed for television. But then there are the lows too – never actually winning the Booker, attracting horrible newspaper reviews for his next novel and failing to get his dream job of Professor of Literature at Oxford.

Lodge is most famous for satirising the glitzy lifestyle of academics in the Eighties. Funded by plentiful grant money and puffed up by a sense of their own importance, Lodge’s characters jet around the world from one conference to the next, talking luscious strangers into bed thanks to their mastery of the new gobbledegook of critical theory.

But was it ever really like that? Yes and no. Lodge, who is ‘constitutionally monogamous’, makes it clear that he never went in for adultery as he zoomed from Australia to Canada via Tel Aviv giving guest lectures. But it’s evident too that he has an unholy fascination with the what-if of a possible parallel life. He tells us in detail about a close encounter he had in a hotel room in Zurich with a beautiful young graduate student who was determined to bed him.

Best of all, though, is when Lodge reveals the intrigue of Eighties literary life. It was then that the Booker Prize became a landmark event. Lodge describes the ghastliness of having to be polite to his fellow nominees at the award ceremony in 1984. He is scrupulous, too, at charting the way his critical fortunes stumbled in the following decade. His 1991 novel Paradise News attracted the kind of reviews that would make the most confident writer hide under the duvet.

In general the score-settling is kept to a minimum. Lodge is also tight-lipped about his family life, with the result that the only racy thing we ever hear is that he and his wife Mary have an unlikely penchant for taking nude saunas.

The result is a memoir that reads more like a social than a personal history, an account of how one mid-20th-century novelist’s career was shaped by larger shifts in the zeitgeist. The luck, in other words, of being mostly in the right place at the right time.

‘Best of all, is when Lodge reveals the intrigue of the Eighties literary life’