Heaven: August book -Changing Places by David Lodge
This month's book is Changing Places by David Lodge. It is a short, light read and (I think) laugh-out-loud funny in places. It will particularly appeal to those who were in or around universities in the late 1960s - early 1970s, as that is its setting, but I think its appeal is wider than that.
The basic story concerns an academic from an American university and one from a British one who change places for year under an exchange scheme, in both cases leaving their family behind. Each finds the new milieu rather different professionally, culturally and sexually from the one he left behind.
Enjoy!
The basic story concerns an academic from an American university and one from a British one who change places for year under an exchange scheme, in both cases leaving their family behind. Each finds the new milieu rather different professionally, culturally and sexually from the one he left behind.
Enjoy!
Comments
To return to Changing Places, my copy is almost falling apart, but I will reread it. Actually I prefer Nice Work, but will enjoy this again.
Thanks. I think it's good that they've used venues around the West Midlands.
1. Did you have any difficulty identifying possible real-life equivalents for the fictional State of Euphoria (somewhere in the USA) or Rummidge (somewhere in England) and their respective universities?
2. The novel is set in 1969. Has it dated badly or held up well in today’s world? What features and customs are still all-too-true and what have changed out of recognition?
3. Did you savour the descriptions of the various characters? Could you recognise from your experience (not necessarily in academia) people like Zapp? Desiree? Boon? Melanie? Philip? Hilary? Masters? O’Shea? Any others?
4. The novel used a variety of narrative styles: straight 3rd person, letters exchanged, and even a film script. Did you find this effective or did it make no difference to your reading? Did these shifts carry any ‘hidden’ messages?
5. Most basically, did you find the book mildly or wildly amusing or not amusing at all?
6. Any favourite lines?
7. Several previous posters mention reading other books by David Lodge. How do you think this one stacks up against some of his other work?
2. The novel is a product of its time and very much reflects a specific culture in universities in the late sixties and early seventies.
3. Having spend over 40 years in academia, many of the university types were ones that can be identified on most campuses, with time variations, today.
4. I loved all the parts except the film script. It was annoying and I thought Lodge was trying to be a tad to clever with how he closed the book.
5. Mildly amusing. I have read many books in the university campus genre.
About to get on plane but I may have more to say later (not crossing any oceans unlike Lodge’s characters…)
I don’t think I ever gave a lot of thought to where Euphoria State and Rummidge were until I found out from other sources. Euphoria State at Plotinus is clearly based on UC Berkeley - Lodge practically gives it away with geographical hints (including nearby Esseph = SF) - and like Berkeley, Plotinus was a philosopher, though of rather different vintage and philosophical outlook. It might not be totally obvious to someone unfamiliar with the geography of California though. Lodge fesses up somewhere (I think in the foreword to Small World) that Rummidge is based on Birmingham without actually being Birmingham in any literal way.
Thinking about what’s dated, this is basically an academic satire and the most interesting thing about the main characters is their careers… which means that well-developed female characters are pretty thin on the ground. The academic wives (including Hilary and Desiree) are there mainly as foils for their husbands’ follies and neither one of them is very interesting in her own right. Hilary is merely long-suffering and unfortunately to me Lodge’s attempt to make Desiree something other than long-suffering makes her seem rather unlikeable. This changes a little in the next instalment (Small World, where all the main characters re-appear but he introduces additional characters) but we don’t get a genuinely well-developed female character until Robyn Penrose shows up in Nice Work (third book in the trilogy, with greater aims at realism and character development and only tangential character overlap with the earlier books). Generally I sense the Lodge is more comfortable writing male characters, and also much less inhibited about making them objects of satire.
Thinking about what’s not dated, it seems like the more things change in academic politics the more they stay the same. I’m sure the details are different, but this all sounds vaguely familiar.
I think of Changing Places as representing the high water mark of Lodge’s satirical/formalistic/non-realist style - it’s a good book, and I recall finding it very funny on first reading, but it’s not my favourite Lodge. I like both Small World (the immediate sequel) and Nice Work better - Small World is unapologetically described as an academic romance, without any pretence of realism, but I find it more engaging at a human level despite being basically the same kind of book as CP. Otherwise I think my favourites would include Out of the Shelter (an early realistic novel set during the main character’s childhood and teenage years during and immediately after WW2) and Therapy (a much later book [1995]). He also wrote a very interesting reader’s introduction to writing style in fiction called The Art of the Novel. That said I’ve read (and enjoyed) almost all of his novels - some are better than others, but none (that I’ve encountered) are outright bad.
As I said upthread, I don't have my copy to hand so I won't be able to contribute much, but ...
4. Part of the plot is that the academic characters are writing novels or teaching students how to write them, so I think the varying narrative techniques are relevant to that. Like @Caissa, I wasn't crazy about the ending, though.
7. The use of different narrative styles is similar to another Lodge novel from around this time, The British Museum is Falling Down, about a postgraduate student who is working on modernist novels in the British Museum reading room - each chapter pastiches a different modernist writer. Coming back to what Marsupial said about female characters: this novel has a chapter narrated by the main character's wife, in which she is portrayed, if I recall correctly, very sympathetically in difficult circumstances.
I have always assumed Rummidge was Birmingham; it was where Lodge was lecturer, and fits the novel, though I suppose Manchester or Leeds would fit reasonably well too. I seem to remember that in Nice Work there are some more directly Brummie references. Euphoria is clearly California – San Francisco? Or another part of UC?
2. The novel is set in 1969. Has it dated badly or held up well in today’s world? What features and customs are still all-too-true and what have changed out of recognition?
Well I remember the student demonstrations of 1968-9 and in Birmingham – and they seem to have vanished, for all sorts of reasons. In general I think the novel has not dated all that much, though all of academia seems much closer to the American model today – obsession with publishing, bureaucratisation, and management of image – than the old amateurish British model (which I think is a bit exaggerated for comic effect, even for 1969). I encountered a paternoster lift once, and I think it was in the University of Birmingham Library; OHS today would have a fit! But people haven’t changed much.
3. Did you savour the descriptions of the various characters? Could you recognise from your experience (not necessarily in academia) people like Zapp? Desiree? Boon? Melanie? Philip? Hilary? Masters? O’Shea? Any others?
I’d agree with Marsupial that Lodge’s first rounded female character comes in Robyn Penrose in Nice Work, and that Desiree and Hilary don’t quite make it. Certainly I’ve encountered people like Zapp in academia, and Philip.
7. Several previous posters mention reading other books by David Lodge. How do you think this one stacks up against some of his other work?
I think I prefer Nice Work for two reasons: the first is personal. I was a student at Uni Birmingham (did my PGCE there) after spending my high school years across the road from the uni, while at the same time my father was a manager in a Black Country industrial firm, so I knew both sides of the story well. In many ways it sums up my Brummie teenage years. The second is the greater realism of the novel, and the clever shadowing of the industrial novel.
I guessed the American College was somewhere in California due to the political protests and references to a character that was based on Ronald Reagan, who I knew had been Governor there. I guessed Birmingham based on the description and that Rummidge sounds a bit like Brummy and on reading the author bio it made sense he would base a novel there. Did he also work in the U.S. or were his experiences of an American college second hand?
2. The novel is set in 1969. Has it dated badly or held up well in today’s world? What features and customs are still all-too-true and what have changed out of recognition?
The novel was very much of the time. It was interesting to me, born a decade later, to read a book set in this time, but written not long after. A lot of books and movies I have seen or read set in the 1960s were from the 1980s onwards.
The academic politics have continued into modern times. Women obviously have a lot more equality with men and professors sleeping with students is taken a lot more seriously, particularly in the U.S. Technology and the ability to study from home have changed the landscape for further education students and teachers. I hope Boon didn't age to flip political sides and become the next Alex Jones. Though these days he would probably have his own Youtube channel or be a Tik Tok influencer.
3. Did you savour the descriptions of the various characters? Could you recognise from your experience (not necessarily in academia) people like Zapp? Desiree? Boon? Melanie? Philip? Hilary? Masters? O’Shea? Any others?
I haven't actually met anyone who strongly reminded me of any of the characters. I worked out that the middle aged couples would be my grandparents' age, however they were all evangelical Christians - paternal were missionaries and maternal were pretty conservative Baptists, though my mother's father was abusive and drank behind closed doors. Most other people I know or have known from that generation were also from church. My parents were fairly hippish left wing Christians so maybe they or their friends were more like the people involved in making the garden in the novel but with God and more conservative relationships.
4. The novel used a variety of narrative styles: straight 3rd person, letters exchanged, and even a film script. Did you find this effective or did it make no difference to your reading? Did these shifts carry any ‘hidden’ messages?
I liked the novelty of different narrative styles. Sometimes the story was a little slow, so I found the switch to other narrative styles kept things moving and kept me interested in the story line and characters' relationships. The sudden disasters to Zapp and Phillip's homes were a bit of an over the top way to move the story along and throw them together with Desiree and Hilary though! I couldn't work out how the story could be resolved and Lodge left it very up in the air. Does the sequel tie up the relational loose ends?
It's funny that these days it's sometimes easier to tell how far a movie has to go than a book if you are watching a movie on a streaming service compared to reading an e-book.
5. Most basically, did you find the book mildly or wildly amusing or not amusing at all?
I found the book mildly amusing, though found the sex scenes icky rather than humorous, much in the same way I don't usually like toilet humour. I think the movie 'Bridesmaids' is the only book or movie where I have found toilet and sexual humour to be really funny, even though it is also very over the top!
1. Recognisable places?
> Obviously Euphoria is California. The Governor who came to fame as a film star is a nice touch , especially with his name of Donald Duck. Rummidge could be any British industrial city, though certainly not London.
3. The novel is set in 1969. Has it dated badly or held up well in today’s world? What features and customs are still all-too-true and what have changed out of recognition?
> Academia - particularly the American type, as Marama has noted - sounded all too recognisable in my recent experience. The demographics of Rummidge look out of date, with no coloured characters even in the student body.
4. Did you savour the descriptions of the various characters? Could you recognise from your experience (not necessarily in academia) people like Zapp? Desiree? Boon? Melanie? Philip? Hilary? Masters? O’Shea? Any others?
> I'll put in a plug for some of the "minor" characters. Boon, the celebrity famous for being opinionated and for being locally famous, is a very recognisable type today. So too the seductive student Melanie, though (in some ways to my regret) none such tried it on me in my academic career. Hilary, the bright woman, who retired to marriage and children in accordance with societal expectations, is another type still around - though many I know who have done this, even decades ago, continued to exhibit more feisty opinions and behaviour than Hilary. And social conservatives like O'Shea (to put it mildly) are still with us, though more likely nowadays to be shocked and offended by homosexuality than by girlie magazines. American shipmates can no doubt think of several such in public positions, some of whom are fired up about women's bodies and abortion.
4. The novel used a variety of narrative styles: straight 3rd person, letters exchanged, and even a film script. Did you find this effective or did it make no difference to your reading? Did these shifts carry any ‘hidden’ messages?
> Since the principal characters , and I believe the author, are all scholars of Jane Austen's work, it seems obvious to me that some of these styles are meant to reflect those used by Austen (though without the humorous overtones in her case). The only exception is "film script", which did not work as well for this book, as well as (obviously) not being used by Austen.
5. Most basically, did you find the book mildly or wildly amusing or not amusing at all?
> I thought this book was funny the first time I read it (decades ago), and on every occasion since, though I have taken care to space these occasions out.
6. Any favourite lines?
> The scenes in Melanie's shared house had me laughing out loud, but my favourite single line was about one of the "pro-garden" demonstrations in Euphoria:
“The soldiers often looked like they would like to join the protesting students, especially when the girl supporters of the Garden taunted them by stripping to the waist and opposing bare breasts to their bayonets, a juxtaposition of hardware and software that the photographers of the Euphoric Times found irresistible."
7. Several previous posters mention reading other books by David Lodge. How do you think this one stacks up against some of his other work?
> I have read only two other books by Lodge, "How far can you go?" (now dreadfully dated as the plot concerns whether a young man and his girlfriend dare to indulge in full-on sex, even in private), and Nice Work (a much more straightforward and less farcical novel than Changing Places , but a good read with themes still of current interest, as others have pointed out). Inspired by this thread, perhaps I should look for a copy of Small World.
Small World doesn’t attempt to resolve the relationship issues in Changing Places. Philip and Hilary somehow end up back together, as though Lodge had pressed the “plot reset” button on that relationship but without further explanation. As I recall Morris and Desiree are effectively separated (at least) which was where their relationship seems to have been headed in CP. They are all still important characters but not as central in SW as in CP.
I assumed Euphoria was Berkley and that Rummidge is Birmingham. I don't know Berkley at all and have only driven through the campus of Birmingham once, so can't claim any great knowledge of that either.
I thought some things were of it's time, Swallows wincing over the use of the term 'black the whole use of women's lib as a term, but the things they represent the assumptions made about people because of their ethnicity or their gender is still with us.
I always think of my late father in law, also called Philip, when I think of Swallow. A very gentle erudite university lecturer that wasn't going to push himself forward. I started out not liking Morris at all, but I'd warmed to him by the end.
I found the narrative styles a bit distracting, specially when it was mentioned in the bit all in letters that this style wasn't used any more. I guess Lodge found a book on how to write a novel and was having fun with the styles mentioned. I too thought of the British Museum is Falling Down, a book where I think the style gets in the way of a good story.
I enjoyed it, and found it funny, though not laugh out loud funny, as I wanted there to be more story and less playing around with styles. I did enjoy the Pasternoster lift bit though. There was one at Loughborough College when I was a library studies student back in the early seventies.
My favourite David Lodge book is How Far Can they Go. That seems to manage style and story at the same time.
Obviously, after all this time I can remember next to nothing of the plot, but it has never entered my mind for one second that Rummage could be anywhere other than my home city. After all, 'Brummie' comes from 'Brummagem', the local name for Birmingham, so the link seemed obvious.
There might have been other 'clues' in the text, but I am afraid those are long forgotten.
I first read Changing Places about 30 years ago, possibly more. I don't recall trying to identify either Euphoria or Rummidge at the time. I must have read something in the intervening years, because I knew where they were when I re-read the book now.
The novel is set in 1969. Has it dated badly or held up well in today’s world? What features and customs are still all-too-true and what have changed out of recognition?
I think it has dated. Oddly enough, one detail jarred - Zapp's twins Darcy and Elizabeth are described as "identical twins." Obviously, male/female twins can't be "identical" and I wondered if that was generally known when Lodge was writing in the early 1970s, or if our knowledge of DNA etc has advanced hugely since then.
Did you savour the descriptions of the various characters? Could you recognise from your experience (not necessarily in academia) people such as Hilary?
Although others have said that Lodge's females are not well-rounded in this book, I felt one detail about Hilary rang very true; her immediate response to Philip's letter confessing to having slept with Melanie was to order the central heating. That one detail filled out Hilary for me; pragmatic, pissed off, clear-thinking.
But going through the book again with the search function I see Lodge has Desiree referring to Darcy as “he” in a letter to Morris earlier in the book and I suppose she should know…
If I were guessing I would guess that Lodge might have changed his mind halfway though and decided to make them identical female twins and forgot to go back to change the pronoun. Either that or Lodge is just messing with us. I would be surprised if Lodge didn’t know identical twins had to be the same sex in the 1970s because I think even I knew that in the 1970s and I was still in elementary school…
Most basically, did you find the book mildly or wildly amusing or not amusing at all?
I found it wildly amusing when I first read it, and mildly amusing now.
Several previous posters mention reading other books by David Lodge. How do you think this one stacks up against some of his other work?
I haven't read all of his books, but of those I have read, Nice work is my favourite.
I have just found out, via Google, that David Lodge is aged 87. Somehow I thought he was older. Perhaps, when I first read his books some 30 odd years ago, when he would have been in his late fifties, I thought late fifties was old. Now that I am in my late 50s myself I realise how foolish I was in my twenties!
Agree with your comments about the central heating. As an aside, Hilary makes me think a bit of Helen Reed one of Lodge’s late-ish books, Thinks. It’s not one of his best or most original works (the other main character in the book, Ralph Messenger, feels a bit like an echo of Morris Zapp, and the relationship between the two takes a similar trajectory), but a good read nonetheless if someone needs a Lodge fix and has already digested the usual suspects.
The only two Lodge novels I haven’t read are Ginger you’re Barmy and Deaf Sentence. The latter sounds a little depressing, and I’ve just never managed to get my hands on the former (I’m sure it could be had easily enough with a few clicks on the Internet). Does anyone have any thoughts on either book?
Ginger is based on Lodge's time in National Service, and is one of his early novels about Catholicism in the 50s/60s. I don't remember much about it, but recall the ending as being pretty downbeat. I like Lodge's early novels a lot, probably more than his later ones, but this one didn't make much of an impression on me.
Deaf Sentence I read more recently - I can't remember much about the actual plot, but yes, it does deal with some pretty heavy subjects (the main character has an elderly father who needs looking after, and there's a big revelation towards the end which I won't give away). I think it was a good read, though.
I've read all of his fiction except his two most recent, about Henry James and H G Wells - I started the former but life got in the way. I think he might also have written a book of short stories that I've never got hold of.
I've read both Ginger You're Barmy and Deaf Sentence. The former I remember enjoying till near the end when it all got a bit dismal. As a deaf person I also quite enjoyed the later, and I need to re-read it, as I remember the portrayal of the elderly father being quite good.
I remember enjoying his novels on Wells and James but not finding them very memorable. I sense that he was interested in their lives and decided to write novels around the topic. Thinks is also a bit like that but with cognitive science as the topic.
It also has identical twins, one of which mentions reading a book where the author didn't realise that identical twins had to be the same sex. I wonder if various people had pointed out that Darcy and Elizabeth in the previous book couldn't be identical.
I’m not inclined to read too much autobiography into Lodge’s middle-later works - more so in his earlier books I think. Though I know next to nothing about his personal life so who knows…