I expect you've made some New Year's resolutions for 2025, and I imagine mine are in no way out of the ordinary: match or exceed the paltry running schedule I managed in 2024, try to take it a bit easy on the old sauce, at least before breakfast anyway, finally perfect that perpetual motion machine, world peace, etc. etc. This blog, on the other hand, has stormed out of the traps in 2025 in pursuit of one thing and one thing only: DEATH. And you would have to say it's made a pretty strong start with the demise at the age of 89 on New Year's Day of David Lodge, author of Thinks... which appeared here in March 2008, and also a dozen or so other novels of which I have read a handful including the three (Changing Places, Small World, Nice Work) which are now grouped together rather grandly as The Campus Trilogy.
Those are probably the three novels you want; if you must have only one I'd say the first, Changing Places, is probably the best. Much is made of Lodge never winning the Booker Prize and he features highly (alongside Beryl Bainbridge and a few others) on lists of best authors never to have won it. As I said elsewhere it's probably the case that his books were a bit cosy and middle-class to win, though as befits a literature professor he did discreetly sneak in a bit of experimentalness in places.
At a couple of months short of 17 years Lodge also wrests the title of longest-surviving cursee from the barely-cool dead hands of Kinky Friedman.
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