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Review by George Cowmeadow Bauman
"The pleasure and the enhanced sense of reality that you get from reading gives you the urge to try and produce that effect on others." David Lodge has provided ample evidence of his writing skills in such novels as Changing Places, Small World, Nice Work, and other humorous books. His nonfiction places him in the category of a novelist who can also write quality criticism, appropriate for a former English professor.
In The Practice of Writing Lodge talks about writing, his own and others', to give would-be writers insights into the complexities of the writing craft. One might challenge Lodge for using his own texts for critical examination, but he aptly defends the practice by quoting T. S. Eliot: "Probably the larger part of the labour of an author in composing his work is critical labour, the labour of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing; this frightful toil is as much critical as creative." This book is the kind of criticism Lodge prefers, "criticism that tries to demystify and shed light on the creative process, to explain how literary and dramatic works are made, and to describe the many different factors, not always under the control of the writer, that come into play in this process."
The first essay (of a total of 17), "The Novelist Today," positions fiction writing in the 1990s as a "literary situation in which everything is in and nothing is out." The upside here is "that the literary world is open to anybody with talent," and that "in the recent past literary novelists have probably been better rewarded financially than at any time in this century." The commodification of the author is largely responsible, and Lodge wryly observes, "It is an interesting and significant fact that at the very moment when post-structuralist academic criticism has been proclaiming the Death of the Author as a theoretical axiom, an unprecedented degree of public attention has been focused on contemporary authors as living, breathing human beings."
This book is for the serious student of writing, people willing to read deeply into Lodge's coordinates of his observations, which are aesthetic/institutional, critical/creative, and descriptive/ prescriptive. If the readers of Lodge's latest work turn out to be writer's of Lodge's caliber, the book community will have been well-blessed.
George Cowmeadow Bauman is a freelance writer in Columbus, Ohio.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.