David Lodge (1935 – 2025), saw the funny side of academia (and academic conferences)

 David Lodge, whose wrote some of the greatest comic novels about academia, is now laughing at us from beyond the grave.  He was 90 years old (up to a rounding error).

 Here are those of his books I have at home...

Here's the NYT obit:

David Lodge, British Novelist Who Satirized Academic Life, Dies at 89  By John Cotter

"Mr. Lodge’s university novels took place not in the rarefied world of Oxford, Cambridge and the Ivy League but at middle-class schools, like the fictional Rummidge, a “grimy, provincial” place full of thwarted ambition and backbiting. Ingeniously plotted, his fiction teems with unlikely romance and strange coincidence.

"The first of these novels, “Changing Places” (1975), became famous for a game the character Philip Swallow invents called “Humiliation,” in which players try to name the most well-regarded book they haven’t read. In his first attempt, Howard Ringbaum, a pretentious English professor, keeps missing the point by listing obscure titles in attempts to impress his colleagues. Finally, desperately, he admits to never having read “Hamlet.” He wins the game but loses his job.

"In the trilogy’s second book, “Small World” (1984), Morris Zapp, a slick theoretician delivering a lecture at a conference, uses the striptease style supposedly popular in the all-nude go-go bars of Berkeley, Calif., as a metaphor for what continental theory has uncovered about language...

...

"(The third novel in the trilogy is “Nice Work,” published in 1988.)

"Graham Greene was an early admirer of Mr. Lodge’s fiction, going so far as to send Mr. Lodge’s third novel, “The British Museum Is Falling Down” (1965), which concerns the Roman Catholic Church’s antipathy toward contraception, to Cardinal John Heenan, then the church’s highest-ranking official in England."