David Lodge: Life Sentence is Good
David Lodge’s latest novel, Deaf Sentence, is delightful and warm and very, very funny. The book also made me cry but Lodge didn’t leave me to wallow in my tears. He offered sage words, his own and others, on mortality and culpability and sex drive and retaining hopefulness against the parade of ridiculous and homicidal stupidity that is the nightly news of the world. And he made becoming deaf a reality: it happens to most of us if we’re lucky enough to live long enough, and it will be a pain. But better deaf than dead; not hearing what a loved one is trying to explain can be tolerated, and it may even be used to tune out the more disagreeable (and less-loved) voices.
I like Lodge for his quiet humor and for his way of putting his finger right on the mark of an issue (mortality: “better to dwell on life, and try to value the passing time”) or an annoyance (“I’m afraid I could never trust someone who would make irreversible marks in a library book”) or a tragedy (when visiting Auschwitz, his narrator says “one feels pity of course, and sorrow, and anger, but these feelings seem as superfluous to the immensity of woe this place evokes as tears dropped into an ocean”). Lodge is never particularly original in an insight or a description but he is burningly accurate. He may not be saying anything new or brilliant but everything he does say, he says with elegance and humor. He is an absolute pleasure to read.
I felt as if I were reading Lodge’s own private journal, his autobiography: is this his story, the story of an academic who retires and lives on in a new mode of life facing unexpected romantic entanglements (caused by deafness) and the difficulties of a working wife and adult children and an aging parent? It is all so real, it could be true.
Only when Lodge switches from the first person to the third person narrator did I remember I was reading fiction, but a true-to-life fiction about a good and decent and very human man. The story is told with such genuine expression, and with such an easy flow of narrative, that I was a member of the family (or an over-aggressive graduate student reading his personal journal entries kept on the computer). And again, Lodge is funny, so funny (example: the narrator proposes sarcastically a Viagra ad to run around Easter time: “Rise Again this Easter”) . Lodge is acute in his descriptions of emotion (“we should have hugged each other, but it is not in our lexicon of body language. The most we could manage was a stronger, longer handshake than usual”) as well as place (as when he compares an indoors water park to Dante’s inferno, “those half-naked crowds tossed in the turbulent waves, or hurtling down the spiraling semi-transparent tubes at terrifying velocity, or tumbled arse over elbows through the rapids, choked with water, blinded by spume, spun around in whirlpools, dragged backwards by undertow, entangled with each other’s limbs…”, and it goes on wonderfully). He is good at complaining and also at conveying quiet moments of peace (if not exactly jumping joy).
Some of the narrator’s thoughts on death reminded me very much of the musings of Julian Barnes on his book, Nothing to Be Afraid Of (see my review of November 18, 2009). Both men are smart and well-read, and well-versed as well, quoting poetry (both are fans of Philip Larkin and for good reason) to work out their own fears and self-held myths about death and the end and afterlife, or not. Both authors reach a conclusion of acceptance of the inevitable that is not slump-shouldered and teary but wise and open and forward marching. Hopeful and all that.
This is a wonderful book, captivating and comfortable, and yet moving and thought-provoking, It is not easy to do all that in one book, but Lodge has done it, again.
