# Posted 4:43 AM by Ariel David Adesnik  

HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS AND ALIENATE PEOPLE is the name of a gut-wrenchingly funny memoir by British expat Toby Young. I bought a copy at Heathrow Airport on my way back from the UK and had read 200+ pages by the time I got off of the plane.

While I had thought about quoting a few of the best passages here on OxBlog, I unfortunately decided to lend the book to a friend before I had a chance to do that. Rest assured, the quotes will appear sometime in the indefinite future.

Another gut-wrenchingly funny British book I've been busy with is Nice Work by David Lodge. An emeritus professor of English at the the University of Birmingham, Lodge has taken academic satire to new heights. He is also a prolific writer, with more than 10 novels to his name.

In addition to the providing the standard attributes of an outstanding novel, such as a compelling story and characters one actually cares about, Lodge's work stands out because of its unparalleled ability to hoist jargon-laden post-modern academe on its own petard.

The basic premise of Nice Work is that Robyn Penrose, an expert in the 19th Century British "industrial novel", has to confront the divide between theory and reality when she finds herself forced to work with Vic Wilcox, the managing director of a local factory. Now, while I would probably enjoy a novel that mercilessly satired post-modern thought without granting it any sort of redeeming characteristics, Lodge persuasively presents Dr. Penrose as a genuinely good human being who uses her theoretical knowledge in productive ways despite her often ridiculous behavior.

While I haven't yet lent my copy of Nice Work to anyone, I thought I'd pull out a quotation or two from another one of Lodge's novels instead, this one called Small World. On page 113, we learn that literary critic "Michel Tardieu sits at his desk and resumes work on a complex equation representing in algebraic terms the plot of War and Peace." The glorious absurdity of that one line had me in stitches.

Small World also happens to provide one of the the best descriptions of blogging I have ever come across, despite the fact that it was written in 1984. On page 99, Lodge comments as follows on the philosophy of undersexed Oxford don Rudyard Parkinson:

The highest form of writing is a book of one's own, something that has to be prepared with tact, subtlety and cunning and sustained over many months, like an affair. But one cannot always be writing books, and even while thus engaged there are pauses and lulls when one is merely reading secondary sources, and the need for some release of pent-up ego on to the printed page, however trivial and ephemeral the ocacasion, becomes urgent.

That is exactly the feeling I have when I go through the paper every morning. Nothing I say is going to be as well-thought out as what I put into my dissertation. But I just have to say something in response to all the ridiculous things I read, otherwise I'd go insane.

As an academic, one tends to think that one's life exists outside the reality which one writes about. One rarely considers the fact that the Ivory Tower is its own sort of reality, with customs and folkways that would befuddle the most conscientous anthropologist. In fact, one tends to assume that academic life is so boringly rational that it isn't worth commenting on. But after reading a novel by David Lodge, you won't make that mistake again.

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