Romance, Of Course, Blooms

By Christopher Porterfield

NICE WORK by David Lodge; Viking; 277 pages; $18.95

If English movies of the '80s had a team like Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, David Lodge's funny, adroit Nice Work would make an ideal vehicle for them. The novel's protagonist, Vic Wilcox, is a gruff but keen-witted exec struggling to turn around a laggard steel-parts factory in Rummidge -- "an imaginary city," the author informs us, "which occupies, for the purposes of fiction, the space where Birmingham is to be found on maps of the so-called real world." Vic's antagonist (and here the term is literal) is Robyn Penrose, an attractive, rigorously feminist lecturer in literature at the local university -- a specialist in the 19th century industrial novel, no less. To bolster her chance of a permanent appointment, Robyn goes along with a university scheme to shadow Vic's movements for one day a week in the interests of better academic-industrial understanding. The result: temperaments and cultures clash. Complications multiply. Romance, of course, blooms. Wittily rueful insights emerge.

All of which is predictable -- but not too predictable. Lodge is a writer who seems to favor schematic setups precisely because they enable him to play sly variations on the formulas. Left-wing Robyn, for example, decries Vic's factory as a hellish model of capitalism in extremis and dismisses his maneuvers against rival companies as "a lot of little dogs squabbling over bones." Yet while tagging along to a trade show in Frankfurt, she can't resist helping him bring off a negotiating coup for a piece of automatic machinery that will replace several workers. Vic charges that Robyn's scholarly concerns have no place on society's balance sheet and that the university's elitism violates her own populist ideals. Yet he soon starts turning up on campus, helping Robyn's faculty committee reorganize a syllabus and shyly thumbing a volume of Tennyson in one of her tutorials.

Lodge takes care to keep these two evenly matched, each as disconcertingly perceptive and sweetly ridiculous as the other. Sexually, it is Robyn who is the lighthearted aggressor and Vic who, after spending a single night with her, turns into a love-sick calf and begins making alarming declarations about leaving his "podge" of a wife. Robyn, ever the teacher, expounds poststructuralist literary theory to him in bed, explaining that what he mistakes for love is merely a rhetorical device, a bourgeois fallacy. "Haven't you ever been in love, then?" he asks. "When I was younger," she replies, "I allowed myself to be constructed by the discourse of romantic love for a while, yes."

Bright as its comedy is, Nice Work takes place within a sort of psychological smog spread by England's economy. All the characters, whether they know it or not, are indirect victims of Thatcherism -- Robyn because of the cuts in public spending that have ravaged her university's budget; Vic because of Rummidge's desperate rust-belt competition, which causes his firm to be taken over and him to get the sack; even Robyn's lover Charles because of the post-Big Bang financial speculations that lure him from academe and leave him adrift. This theme weighs a bit heavily on the book and keeps it from having quite the buoyancy and sparkle of Lodge's earlier campus novels, Small World and Changing Places. However, a pair of holdovers from those novels, the long-suffering Professor Philip Swallow and his American counterpart, the wheeler-dealer Morris Zapp, put in welcome minor appearances.

As Zapp's walk-on particularly illustrates, Lodge has more verve in academic settings than in his conscientiously worked-up factory scenes, and naturally so. He taught literature at the University of Birmingham from 1960 to 1987, and still holds an honorary chair there. But in either sphere his writing displays the wicked eye of a born satirist. Swallow's smile exposes teeth set at odd angles, "like tombstones in a neglected churchyard." A receptionist at Vic's factory strokes her platinum-blond hairdo "as if it were an ailing pet." This is a novel that lives up to its own billing: it's nice work.