Books, Arts & Manners: To the Couch!

Therapy, A Novel, by David Lodge (Viking, 324 pp., $21.95)

DAVID LODGE’S new novel is only partly about therapy. Mostly it is therapy for those, like its hero, Tubby Passmore, who are experiencing the various “Internal Derangements” attendant upon advancing age. This seems to be the season for male-menopause novels from Britain, but Lodge covers slightly different territory from that of Martin Amis’s more spectacular but less satisfying book, The Information. Tubby is 58, not 40 as the heroes of Amis’s novel are, and his belated “mid-life crisis” has none of the apocalyptic overtones of theirs. Instead, it is a quietly and comically desperate grasping at some accommodation with God and guilt and marriage and mortality which has much more the feel of real life about it.

About the Author

James Bowman

Featured Tags

Therapy, A Novel, by David Lodge (Viking, 324 pp., $21.95)

DAVID LODGE’S new novel is only partly about therapy. Mostly it is therapy for those, like its hero, Tubby Passmore, who are experiencing the various “Internal Derangements” attendant upon advancing age. This seems to be the season for male-menopause novels from Britain, but Lodge covers slightly different territory from that of Martin Amis’s more spectacular but less satisfying book, The Information. Tubby is 58, not 40 as the heroes of Amis’s novel are, and his belated “mid-life crisis” has none of the apocalyptic overtones of theirs. Instead, it is a quietly and comically desperate grasping at some accommodation with God and guilt and marriage and mortality which has much more the feel of real life about it.