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Original Title:	Nice Work
ISBN:	0140133968 (ISBN13: 9780140133967)
Edition Language:	English
Series:	The Campus Trilogy #3
Literary Awards:	Booker Prize Nominee (1988), Sunday Express Book of the Year (1988)

Nice Work (The Campus Trilogy #3)

David Lodge

Paperback | Pages: 277 pages

Rating: 3.84 | 4849 Users | 241 Reviews

Details Appertaining To Books Nice Work (The Campus Trilogy #3)

Title	:	Nice Work (The Campus Trilogy #3)
Author	:	David Lodge
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Anniversary Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 277 pages
Published	:	July 27th 1990 by Penguin Books (first published 1988)
Categories	:	Fiction. Humor. Novels. European Literature. British Literature

Narrative Conducive To Books Nice Work (The Campus Trilogy #3)

In this witty novel, Lodge engineers a confrontation between Robyn, a young, left-wing female literary theorist, and Vic, an older, conservative, senior manager type. There's a government initiative where Robyn is supposed to "shadow" Vic one day a week, an arrangement that initially neither of them can stand. Each of them thinks the other's world is absurd and pointless. I liked the book partly because I have also spent my professional life flitting between industry and academia. I can absolutely understand Vic's criticisms of academics. They're helplessly disorganised; most of what they do makes no sense and is just empty posturing; they're trapped in a rigid power structure, where the people in charge are mostly tenured professors whose minds atrophied long ago; and why are they inflicting all this pain on themselves anyway, when there's no money to be made? But Robyn's criticisms of the business world also make sense. They're equally trapped by the constant requirement to turn a profit, so they never have time to reflect on whether things could be different. Ultimately, what they do makes no more sense than academia.

It's amusing to see each character's life through the other's eyes, and I particularly liked the ironic presentation of Robyn's feminist views on sex and relationships. (She can explain to you, with footnotes from Lacan, why "love" is just a bourgeois construct, and she thinks penetrative sex is wrong on theoretical grounds). But the passages that have most firmly struck in my memory have to do with literary theory. Lodge just adores literary theory, and he is so ingenious about working bits of it into his novels so that you can also appreciate what a fun game it is. There's a discussion near the end about the technical concept of "aporia". Robyn is explaining it to Vic, and she quotes the following line from Tennyson's Locksley Hall:

Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.

As she says, the line brilliantly exploits the novel image provided by railways, which had just been invented. (Stevenson's "Rocket" was built in 1829; Tennyson wrote the poem in 1835). But there's a problem. Trains don't run in grooves, but on rails, so the image is fatally flawed. Despite this, it's still a great line! Robyn has clearly used the example many times before in academic settings. But Vic asks whether Tennyson might not have been thinking of trams, which do run in grooves? Hm! That hadn't occurred to her.

I thought of this discussion the other day when we watched Despicable Me. My favourite scene was the one where Gru, the supervillain with the well-hidden heart of gold, has been persuaded to read Sleepy Kittens to the three little orphan girls. The text, presented in its entirety, is purposely constructed to be as idiotic and saccharine-sweet as possible. Gru starts reading:

Three little kittens loved to play
They had fun in the sun all day

"This is GARBAGE!" growls the supervillain. "You LIKE reading this?" It is garbage. But the film shows you how the little girls see it, and for them it's the story they've had read to them every day at bedtime. They view it uncritically, and for them it's full of love and comfort. Gru unwillingly continues to read, stroking the kittens' fur and making them drink their milk as instructed, and by the end he's been won over. Even so, it's still garbage.

Is this another example of aporia? Damned if I know: my knowledge of literary theory is pretty much limited to what I've gleaned from David Lodge novels. But I wished Robyn and Vic had been sitting next to us, so I could have listened to them bickering about it on the way out.

Rating Appertaining To Books Nice Work (The Campus Trilogy #3)

Ratings: 3.84 From 4849 Users | 241 Reviews

Assess Appertaining To Books Nice Work (The Campus Trilogy #3)

An intelligent and comedic blend of critical theory, scandal, humor and insightfulness, Nice Work reminds me -- in the midst of a whirlwind semester -- why I love to read. The connection of Lodge's two binaries, practical industry-man Vic and theoretical feminist Robyn, is inspirational and their discourse evokes an all-encompassing vision of Thatcher Era England. Though it explores and discusses the difficulty of maintaining a public higher-education system in the contemporary economy at great

Nice Work concludes Lodges campus trilogy and whilst it is somewhat slow to pick up the pace, and not the best of the three volumes (the gold medal goes to Small World), it has the merit of transporting us once again back to Rummidge, a place where many readers - myself included - are very, very happy!

I read this because I really liked Small World and because I found it in the office collection of a Shakespearean scholar at my university who retired and then passed away. The administration staff invited us to take all of the books we fancied. He underlined things in this book and noted its realism. I love this. Though written in 1988 (the year I graduated from high school) it feels historical (that doesn't seem that long ago) because of the specifics he gives about the effects of Thatcherism

My favorite of the "campus trilogy." Vic and Robyn, quasi-stereotypical as they are, are alive in their conflicting ideologies and clashing differences, and this novel, vaguely modeled after English social novels of the 19th century, poses some interesting, if simplistic, questions about the relationship between academia and industry. G.B. Shaw does something similar better in Heartbreak House, but no mind - this is the most fully realized of Lodge's Campus novels in that it doesn't rest fully

The cap to David Lodge's Campus Trilogy is neither as neat nor as funny as its predecessors, but Nice Work is not without its enticements. The melding of the Rummidge University with its grey industrial heart is a firm idea, and Lodge handles matters of class differences astutely. The two lead characters are sympathetic in their own separate ways and are justifiably drawn together, and Lodge foreshadows their conclusions without being obnoxious about it. Probably the most interesting point that

If you like literary theory and you have the open-mind to understand there's a world outside of the college, you will like this book. I really like this retold or homage to Industrial Novel, and particulary to North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell. But don't be confused, this not a love story, as it is well said at the beginning. And that's a pity :(Robyn and Vic are two different worlds. She is a left feminist working for the University and he's an Engineer who works as general manager at a big

Very loosely based on E.M. Forster's Howards End, Nice Work follows Vic Wilcox, a head honcho in a British factory, and Robyn Penrose, a feminist PhD trying to secure a job at a university. Lodge does a really nice job of developing the characters and allowing them to change as a result of their interactions. He also manages to bring the novel to a satisfying and believable conclusion after leaving me wondering for most of the book where the story would end up. Overall, a book worth reading.