The Campus Trilogy, by David Lodge

I last wrote about David Lodge in 2009 when I reviewed his novel Deaf Sentence. Looking around in a bookstore recently I came across a new edition that collects my three favorite Lodge novels of academia. So with college graduations so recently in mind these seemed like a great summer reading opportunity. The Campus Trilogy, collects Changing Places, Small World, and Nice Work, which are three of the funniest and most pointed satires of campus and academic life I have ever read.

Changing Places introduces the reader to Morris Zapp, all-star American professor in the English Department of the State University of Euphoria in California and to Phillip Swallow, a somewhat less successful professor at the University of Rummidge, in England. The two are part of an exchange programs and as we meet them, they are on passing flights over the Atlantic, heading for a six-month teaching position at each others’ campus. The campus turmoil of 1969 affords Lodge a lot of targets for satire, and he makes the most of them. But it is not all barbs. There is a lot of humor here that is not pointed and sharp, and the responses of both Zapp and Swallow to their new situations raise some interesting questions about the human condition.

Lodge followed this novel with Small World, a raucous novel set at a variety of literature conferences, and featuring many of the characters from Changing Places. Zapp and Swallow are back, as are their wives, and a host of new, and equally superb, characters from English departments around the world. Lodge is playing with romance and the Grail legend here, as one of the main story lines follows the romantic aspirations of Persse McGarrigle, a poet and lecturer at the fictional Limerick University, Ireland. Despite the complex plot and almost Russian-novel cast of characters, Lodge pulls all the strings together at the end with all the main characters attending the annual Modern Language Association conference in New York.

The final novel in the series, Nice Work, is more of a stand-alone work, though it is set at the University of Rummidge, where Swallow is heading up the English Department, and Morris Zapp does make an appearance. Here, Lodge takes a narrower focus though, following the lives of Victor Wilcox, Managing Director at a local engineering firm, and Rummidge U. professor Robyn Penrose, a feminist scholar, who is assigned to shadow Wilcox as part of a university project to better understand the commercial world. Lodge wields a gentler pen here, though there the satire is still amply present. The novel does raise questions about how we talk to each other, and what the role of the university is in the modern world, a debate that continues to be timely in this ear of budget cuts and calls for more oversight of colleges and universities.

All together, Lodge’s three novels make a delightful, humorous, and thoughtful summer reading opportunity.

Check the WRL catalog for The Campus Trilogy