If there is such a thing as an eloquently disarming break-up letter, it is to be found in David Lodge’s scandalously delicious novel, Nice Work. But what on earth is a disarming break-letter? Or a phone call? Or text message or DM? Is it possible to sweeten a tragic message from the loser who doesn’t have the guts to break up in person?

That’s what Charles leaves for Robyn, both struggling, junior academics on the verge of disenchantment in 1980s’ England. But Charles’s disenchantment, as the letter reveals, has now reached a point of crisis that has energised a volte-face in both love and labour. That’s a rub on so many levels. Not only Charles is leaving the intellectual Robyn for the working-class origin investment banker Debbie who makes “thirty-thousand odd a year”, but he has also decided to abandon his straggling career as a lecturer in English to be a banker working with securities and investments.

Nothing about this is either eloquent or disarming to Robyn. Her response to Charles’s breakup letter left on the doormat of her house in Rummidge (a fictionalised Birmingham where Lodge spent most of his career) is: “You shit”. And subsequently, “You utter shit”. But she recognises herself that the “utter” is “a hyperbole”. If it doesn’t quite disarm, it does strike a weak note of persuasion. “There were things in this letter which struck a nerve of reluctant assent,” Robyn realised, “mixed up with things she found false and obnoxious.”

It’s a hopeless mix-up. The mangled heap of high academia and the stock market, the university and the bank, lofty ideas and fast money. Charles anticipates the question in his letter: “But, you will ask, what about the ideas to which we have dedicated our lives for the last ten years, what about critical theory and all that?” Here’s the glorious mess – critical theory is as surreal as currency – both acts of faith, or its alter-ego, doubt. Charles sees “no fundamental inconsistency” in his change of profession, and by terrible implication, in his accompanying change of love interest. “I regard myself as simply exchanging one semiotic system for another, the literary for the numerical, a game with high philosophical stakes for a game with high monetary stakes – but a game in each case, in which satisfaction comes ultimately from playing rather than winning, for the game never ends.”

It is common knowledge that faith, imagination, fear and anxiety are potent units of currency in the world of finance, whose behaviour is often irrational. Money, in Charles’s argument, is merely a kind of a signifier – of gold reserve or labour or a strong government or whatever. And who knows it better than him and Robyn that language too, is an arbitrary signifier? These two have so far lived and loved a life of deconstruction, that iconoclastic strand of 20th-century philosophy that points to the constructed and fabricated nature of everything – from language to God, love, state, family, and scientific reason.

So is this even a break-up letter? Is Charles indeed breaking up with Robyn? Or is the letter, too, a philosophical hoax?

A materialist novelist

Alas, he is indeed breaking up with her. Playful deconstructionist as he was, David Lodge, who passed away last Friday, was also a materialist in the classic Marxist sense of the term. That is what he puts in play here – between the forces of production and the forces of philosophy – base and superstructure in terms of vulgarised Marxism. Speculative as they are, the philosophy of money and the philosophy of language come from, and arrive at, very different points of tangible realism. Intensely aware of the realities, anxieties and aspirations of the English working class, particularly that of the working-class writer and intellectual, Lodge, more than any other thinker of his generation, had his pulse on the greatest tension in the study of literature in the 20th century – between the elite abstraction of philosophy and the sweaty aspiration of the class-oppressed.

In literary theory, this ended up as a productive, and sometimes not so productive, tension between the thought of Jacques Derrida and that of Karl Marx. And between their various interlocutors. Deconstructive philosophy and Marxist materialism. A unique stake in this tension gave David Lodge a very special vantage point as one of the most influential commentators, archivists, and anthologists of literary theory in the 20th century. It also energised him to invoke a powerful tradition of English social realism to create some of the most moving, thought-provoking, and entertaining academic novels of that century.

Lodge wrote many novels, but he might be best remembered for his trilogy, Changing Places A Small World, and Nice Work, which memorialises one of the most exhilarating times in the modern Anglo-American academy – the period of high theory powered by iconoclastic philosophical traditions on one hand, and on the other, by radical political developments such as Second Wave feminism, Civil Rights Activism and worldwide anti-colonial movements. From Lodge’s novels, these years, notably the 1970s and 1980s – come across as full of academic power play, salacious gossip, promiscuity of all kinds, from intellectual to the sexual – but never far from the heavier, bitterer realities of labour and exploitation, class aspirations and anxieties, and the tightening regimes of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

His passing cannot but give me a deep pause. As someone who gets as much fun from literary theory as from fiction, and as much fun writing both, as someone who is always vulnerable to the charms of the campus/academic novel, both as reader and writer, I have always connected more closely to David Lodge than his more ambitiously experimental peers such as Martin Amis and Julian Barnes. There are biting personal memories too. The annual conference of the Modern Language Association of America is one of Lodge’s feistiest playgrounds for satire – where everything from job search to paper presentation to illicit affairs take psychedelic form and colour in carnivalesque convention hotels. This is the twentieth anniversary of my first MLA convention as a PhD student and academic job seeker. As I play with the still-vitriolic 20-year-old memory of running between job interviews in Philadelphia against the news backdrop of rising death tolls of Tsunami, it feels like the passing of David Lodge has finally dropped the curtains on the bizarre heyday of literary academia.


Saikat Majumdar’s books include, most recently, The Amateur and The Remains of the Body, and the campus novel, The Middle Finger.