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Original Title:	Nice Work
ISBN:	0140133968 (ISBN13: 9780140133967)
Edition Language:	English
Series:	The Campus Trilogy #3
Literary Awards:	Booker Prize Nominee (1988), Sunday Express Book of the Year (1988)

Nice Work (The Campus Trilogy #3)

David Lodge

Paperback | Pages: 277 pages

Rating: 3.84 | 4849 Users | 241 Reviews

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Title	:	Nice Work (The Campus Trilogy #3)
Author	:	David Lodge
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	First Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 277 pages
Published	:	July 27th 1990 by Penguin Books (first published 1988)
Categories	:	Fiction. Humor. Novels. European Literature. British Literature

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In this witty novel, Lodge engineers a confrontation between Robyn, a young, left-wing female literary theorist, and Vic, an older, conservative, senior manager type. There's a government initiative where Robyn is supposed to "shadow" Vic one day a week, an arrangement that initially neither of them can stand. Each of them thinks the other's world is absurd and pointless. I liked the book partly because I have also spent my professional life flitting between industry and academia. I can absolutely understand Vic's criticisms of academics. They're helplessly disorganised; most of what they do makes no sense and is just empty posturing; they're trapped in a rigid power structure, where the people in charge are mostly tenured professors whose minds atrophied long ago; and why are they inflicting all this pain on themselves anyway, when there's no money to be made? But Robyn's criticisms of the business world also make sense. They're equally trapped by the constant requirement to turn a profit, so they never have time to reflect on whether things could be different. Ultimately, what they do makes no more sense than academia.

It's amusing to see each character's life through the other's eyes, and I particularly liked the ironic presentation of Robyn's feminist views on sex and relationships. (She can explain to you, with footnotes from Lacan, why "love" is just a bourgeois construct, and she thinks penetrative sex is wrong on theoretical grounds). But the passages that have most firmly struck in my memory have to do with literary theory. Lodge just adores literary theory, and he is so ingenious about working bits of it into his novels so that you can also appreciate what a fun game it is. There's a discussion near the end about the technical concept of "aporia". Robyn is explaining it to Vic, and she quotes the following line from Tennyson's Locksley Hall:

Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.

As she says, the line brilliantly exploits the novel image provided by railways, which had just been invented. (Stevenson's "Rocket" was built in 1829; Tennyson wrote the poem in 1835). But there's a problem. Trains don't run in grooves, but on rails, so the image is fatally flawed. Despite this, it's still a great line! Robyn has clearly used the example many times before in academic settings. But Vic asks whether Tennyson might not have been thinking of trams, which do run in grooves? Hm! That hadn't occurred to her.

I thought of this discussion the other day when we watched Despicable Me. My favourite scene was the one where Gru, the supervillain with the well-hidden heart of gold, has been persuaded to read Sleepy Kittens to the three little orphan girls. The text, presented in its entirety, is purposely constructed to be as idiotic and saccharine-sweet as possible. Gru starts reading:

Three little kittens loved to play
They had fun in the sun all day

"This is GARBAGE!" growls the supervillain. "You LIKE reading this?" It is garbage. But the film shows you how the little girls see it, and for them it's the story they've had read to them every day at bedtime. They view it uncritically, and for them it's full of love and comfort. Gru unwillingly continues to read, stroking the kittens' fur and making them drink their milk as instructed, and by the end he's been won over. Even so, it's still garbage.

Is this another example of aporia? Damned if I know: my knowledge of literary theory is pretty much limited to what I've gleaned from David Lodge novels. But I wished Robyn and Vic had been sitting next to us, so I could have listened to them bickering about it on the way out.

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Ratings: 3.84 From 4849 Users | 241 Reviews

Rate Based On Books Nice Work (The Campus Trilogy #3)

"I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head;And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed".- Robert Louis Stevenson - My Shadow. "O'er grassy dale, and lowland sceneCome see, come hear, the English Scheme.The lower-class, want brass, bad chests, scrounge fags.The clever ones tend to emigrate"- The Fall - English Scheme."Shadowing: that which follows or attends a person or

I think of the three books in this loosely connected trilogy (Changing Places, Small World, and Nice Work), I enjoyed this one the most, I think because it concerned itself with more than the academic world (with which I have had too much connection), and showing some interesting contrasts between it and the business world (about which I have almost no connection at all). Strangely though, I have marked no passages that particularly caught my eye, although I do remember very much enjoying the

This book changed the way I thought about people in industry vs. academia. Definitely worth a read. Plus it's really funny.

The last in what is loosely termed "The Campus Trilogy" by David Lodge. The books are only distantly linked, it's nice to read them in order but not strictly necessary, and each can stand on it's own two feet, I believe.This time we follow two very different characters. Robyn is an idealist: a feminist professor of literature, in a non-relationship with her long-time partner, Charles. Vic is a man's man: a managing director of a factory, macho, hard-working, a laborer who has money because he's

Don't take my four stars as a wide endorsement -- I recognize that not everyone would enjoy this as much as I did (especially with the tiny print -- I really am getting old). But I'll tell you about the book, and about why I appreciated it.I've now read a few novels which would fall into a category I recently discovered -- a "novel of ideas." My sense of these novels is that plot, and certainly characterization, unfortunately tend to be secondary to setting up debates between characters

In this witty novel, Lodge engineers a confrontation between Robyn, a young, left-wing female literary theorist, and Vic, an older, conservative, senior manager type. There's a government initiative where Robyn is supposed to "shadow" Vic one day a week, an arrangement that initially neither of them can stand. Each of them thinks the other's world is absurd and pointless. I liked the book partly because I have also spent my professional life flitting between industry and academia. I can

Having read now entire the Campus Trilogy I found this last installment to be the most compelling in terms of characterization and themes. At times I felt like I was reading the script for a British television mini-series: there is something sentimental, melodramatic, predictable about the way the two main characters' relationship is portrayed. Nevertheless, a novel worth reading, for its apercus on academic life, forward-driving plot, and fascinating depiction of the clash between two worlds: