review

Terry Eagleton

The Silences of David Lodge

The success of the campus novel in England is not hard to account for. Ever
since Burke and Coleridges testy polemics against the Jacobins, the English
attitude to the intelligentsia has been one of profound ambivalence. Intellectuals are seen as faintly sinister figures, bohemian and nonconformist, treasonable clerks whose heartless celebrations pose a threat to the unreflective pieties
of ordinary life. But they are also pathetically ineffectual characterscrumpled
figures of fun pursuing their ludicrous abstractions at a remote distance from
the bustle of daily life. The anxiety and resentment they inspire can thus be conveniently defused by a sense of their farcical irrelevance; and Napoleons dismissal of the Enlightenment ideologues as at once subversive and superfluous
captures this ambivalence exactly. The intellectual combines the fascination of
the offbeat with the comic relief of the harmless eccentric, and is thus fit meat
for a kind of fiction which equivocates between a satiric criticism of everyday
middle-class life and an unshaken commitment to its fundamental values.
Something of the same ambiguity can be traced in the relation of the university
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to society as a whole. As a place set somewhat apart, the university has the
glamour of the deviant and untypical, providing the novelist with a
conveniently closed worlds marked by intellectual wrangling, political infighting and sexual intrigue. Yet in its bureaucratic routines and down-atheel dreariness it is also sufficiently continuous with the wider society to
act as a microcosm of middle-class mores. It is neither too hermetically
sealed from the social order to be of merely specialist interest, nor too
commonplace to be merely tedious. The campus novel thus provides one
kind of solution to a problem which has never ceased to dog the modern
English novel, and which is nothing less than how ordinary social experience is to offer a fertile soil for fictional creation. The striking number of
contemporary novels written in England but set in some non-English
locale seems to testify to a genuine difficulty hereto a sense that from
the viewpoint of creative writing there is something peculiarly unpropitious about the typical social experience of an industrially declining,
culturally parochial, post-imperial nation. English literatures traditional
solution to this dilemma has been to import the exotic, estranging perspectives it lacks: hence the entry into the indigenous canon of the
emigrs and expatriates (James, Conrad, Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Joyce,
Beckett), writers who brought with them a modernist or avant-garde
bravura at odds with the realist, empiricist cast of the native culture, but
to which that culture could for a brief historical moment play host. In
writers like E.M. Forster or Graham Greene, who export their experience
to the colonial world, this movement is clearly reversible. The academic
novel can offer here a characteristically English compromise, anchored as
it is in the idiosyncrasies of middle-class life, yet sufficiently askew,
unconventional and (given the global reach of academia) internationalist,
to call that familiar existence into satiric question.
The two leading comic academic novelists of contemporary England
David Lodge and Malcolm Bradburyare both literary theorists as well
as imaginative writers, a fact which is surely significant. It has always
been superficially puzzling why a subject as specialist and esoteric as
literary theory should have given rise in Britain to such apparently disproportionate ideological wranglings, epitomized in recent years by the
extraordinarily excited attention lavished by the media on the refusal of
Cambridge University to promote a post-structuralist critic. Why should
a discourse of metaphor and metonymy, of signifiers and subject positions, provoke such passions and polemics? The answer, surely, lies not in
the field of literary studies as such, but in its intersection with a wider
ideological formation. It is a familiar left case, recurrently argued in the
pages of this journal, that British bourgeois society is marked by a conflict
between a pervasive cultural traditionalism and the modernizing imperatives of contemporary capitalism. In that process of capitalist modernization, the traditional humanities are by no means struck redundant; on
the contrary, they continue to encode values and pieties which are
ideologically essential. Yet they are also rendered progressively marginal,
abstract and ineffectual by the dynamic of capitalist development itself.
Liberal humanism continues to enshrine certain central moral imperatives, which late bourgeois society can on no account simply leave behind;
but it also appears increasingly as a residual ideological hangover from an
earlier phase of capitalist development, out of step with some of the later
requirements and life-styles of the same system.
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The British Microcosm

For historical reasons, British society provides a peculiarly apt microcosm of this contradiction; and it is because the contentions between literary theory and literary humanism are in turn microcosmic of this
condition that they have had such far-reaching reverberations. The conflict between theory and humanism in the literary academy touches
indirectly on this structural lag or hiatus at the heart of the British social
formation. Structuralism is more than an analytic procedure: it is badge
and code-word for a form of intellectual technocracyalien, professionalized, Europeanwhich in its anti-humanist austerity strikes at the roots
of English empiricist humanism, and so rehearses once more (though this
time, some might argue, as farce) the quarrel between the pious Coleridge
and the clinical Jacobins. The battle between the contradictory English
perceptions of the intellectual, as at once sinister and shambolic, dangerously dissident and innocuously eccentric, becomes metonymic of the
ideological dilemma of Britain as a whole, torn between a cherished but
threadbare amateur humanism and an efficient but alienating professionalism. It is not surprising that this issue should come to a head in the field
of literary criticism, which has always displayed an embarrassing tension
between its specialist procedures and the human universals of its content. Literary studies are the flagship of the humanities; but with the
advent of literary theory the unthinkable has occurred, as the jargon of
technological specialism now penetrates the very bastion of humane
values. Even literature, the last refuge of the genteel amateur, is now perilously infected with its scientistic other; and it is no doubt for this reason
that what might seem a mere parochial skirmish within English studies
has come to assume such ominous ideological proportions.
The politics of this situation are notably ambiguous. For structuralism at
once mimes the technocratic procedures of late capitalism, and threatens
to undermine its protective humanist ideologies. It turns the former
against the latter, installing itself in the lag between base and superstructure so as to discredit the humanist assumptions of bourgeois society with
a theoretical version of its own reifying social practices. But if a
traditional liberal humanism thus appears increasingly tarnished and
shopsoiled, it remains for such liberal bourgeois ideologues as Lodge and
Bradbury the only available source of social critique and fundamental
value. This is so because the politicalan alternative resolution of this
dilemma which would seek out its very material conditionsis for them
part of the problem rather than the solution. Marxism and feminism are
yet more instances of theoreticist Eurospeak, to be blandly satirized along
with floating signifiers and intertextuality. They are simply moves within
the semiotic gamewhereas the beauty of liberal humanism is that it is at
once a move within the game and a move outside it, to those intuitive
decencies beyond the long arm of politics or theory.
In the case of David Lodge, the ambivalences discussed so far are interestingly overdetermined by his Roman Catholicism. For the Roman
Catholic church contains two major currents which are not always easy to
square: a lineage of rigorous doctrinal thought, and a tradition of ethical
and social concern. The former pulls towards a tenacious Thomistic intellectualism; the latter towards a pastoral or evangelical preoccupation with
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the common life of society. At the worst, these twin currents combine to
deliver a callous pedantry in such matters as abortion and contraception.
At the best, they can blend to incline those brought up within them to the
political left. For the typical Roman Catholic receives an early training in
the habits of systematic analysis which sits more comfortably with structural enquiry and holistic social theory than with liberal empiricism.
Instinctively hostile to the spirit of Anglican compromise, the Catholic
inherits along with this respect for strenuous thought an essentially collective theology, wary of individualism and the inner light. Values and ideas
are grasped from the outset in institutional terms, as questions of common religious practice rather than private conscience. The heritage of
social Catholicism, notably vigorous in Britain, can translate itself under
propitious conditions into radical political terms. Moreover, this whole
ideological formation, in Britain at least, is the product of a semighettoized immigrant culture. Apart from a recusant rump, the British
Roman Catholic is likely to be of working-class Irish immigrant provenance, conscious of his or her faith as a badge of difference and subalternity within the dominant social order. Even where this upbringing does
not include a certain spontaneous sympathy for Irish republicanism, it is
likely to be shaped by the political sensibility of a society which did not
produce an indigenous bourgeoisie until this century. As in many such
ghettoized environments, however, a younger generation is encouraged
by its educationally deprived elders to succeed in the broader cultureto
integrate and conform, while privately preserving the faith. The Roman
Catholic in Britain is the classic scholarship child, urged on to intellectual achievement by a culture which has traditionally placed high value on
learning and literature, but socially displaced and psychologically
estranged. That these tensions can then resolve themselves in left political
terms is evident enough in the relatively high number of former Roman
Catholics within the British left.
Religion and Liberalism

Lodges own social background would not seem intensively Irish; but in
the educated plain man posture of much of his writing he enacts something of the inside/outside ambivalence typical of that situation. It is
arguable, however, that with him the impulse to integrate has proved considerably stronger than the drive of critical dissent, while not entirely
eradicating the latter. Unlike most other prominent Catholic novelists of
the century, Lodges religious faith appears in his writing in peculiarly
privatized, notional form. He is, in effect, a thoroughly secularized
author, whose Catholicism makes little difference to his conventional
liberal vision other than providing him with convenient materials for
social commentary and comic satire. Unlike a Graham Greene, whose
novels continually pose secular and religious experience in complex tension, or an Evelyn Waugh, whose secular world is so remorselessly twodimensional that God can be sensed as an implied alternative to it,
Lodges writing is almost wholly unmarked by spiritual passiona
dimension which apparently remains locked within a separate compartment of the self, and which would only disturb the comic equipoise of his
fiction. The only novel of his which engages Catholicism as its central
themeHow Far Can You Go?is ethical and sociological rather than
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theological in its focus, and commits the banal Catholic error of mistaking sexuality for morality.
In this sense, then, Lodge is not a Catholic writer at all; instead, his work
reflects a necessary marginalization of such exotic metaphysical commitments in the commonsensical world of English middle-class liberalism.
The authorial persona which emerges from his fiction is too hopelessly
balanced and conventionally-minded to entertain any such absolutist
creed, which must then remain a disconnected set of doctrines which for
some private reason he happens to hold. It is a little as though one were to
discover that Martin Amis is in private life a Seventh Day Adventist, or
that Margaret Drabble is a dedicated Satanist. Where Lodge is most
typically Roman Catholic is not in the substance of his fiction, but in the
running conflict between doctrine and experience, now translated as the
fraught encounter between literary theory and liberal humanism. Like
literary theory, Roman Catholic dogma is a kind of hermetic game, a
shuffling of neo-scholastic categories with little apparent relation to daily
life; yet these categories concern the most crucial truths of human existence, solidly realist beneath their apparently non-referential significations. What seems at first glance a wholly dissociated discourse in fact
rigorously orders ones routine life, as the apparently unreal discourse of
romance organizes the minute social details of Lodges novel Small World.
From the sacramental to the semiotic is a shorter distance than it might
seem.
In the conflict between theory and experience, Lodge ensures that the
former enters the arena seriously weakened. His theoretical interests are
in fact highly selective: he is a latter-day Formalist, comfortable with those
theoretical currents which confine themselves to linguistics and the literary text, uneasy with political and psychoanalytic ideas of more radical
import.1 His theoretical writing is not only derivative and unadventurous, butlike that of Jonathan Culler in the USAgiven over to domesticating and defusing otherwise disruptive European insights for the
purposes of home consumption. The title of his most recent critical
volume, Working with Structuralism, strikes just the essential balance of
closeness and caution, in the manner of a circus trainers autobiography
entitled Living with Leo. Much the same can be said of Lodges experimentations in literary form, which rarely get beyond the odd self-reflexive
flourish or experimental narrative device within what remains a sedate,
commercially acceptable realism. It is interesting in this respect that his
most ambitiously experimental text to dateSmall Worldchooses as its
dominant code the genre of romance; for romance is at once among the
most self-consciously literary of forms in its elaborate improbabilities,
and a mode which in its erotic interest, happy ending and spirit of optimism is readily acceptable to the realist sensibility.
The typical strategy of a Lodge novel is to place in caricatured antithesis
the ideological poles of his world (theory and humanism, Zapp and
Swallow, California and Birmingham, modernism and realism, technocrat and common man), allowing each to put the other into ironic
1

For his critical and theoretical work, see The Language of Fiction, London 1966; The Modes of Modern
Writing, London 1977; and Working with Structuralism, London 1981.

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question while the author himself disappears conveniently down the

middle. The irony of this strategy, of course, is that its implied posture of
Arnoldian disinterestedness places the text firmly on one side of the duality it is supposed to mediate. Lodges fictions guy the ineffectual academic
liberalbut this, precisely, is testimony to the resilience of their liberalism, which thus rejects and retrieves itself at a stroke. The capacity to put
itself into amused ironic question has been a commonplace of such
thought since the days of Matthew Arnold, so that the position wrests its
superiority from the very jaws of self-critical collapse. As with the deconstructor Paul de Man, the helpless vulnerability of ones case becomes the
exact index of its complacent unassailability.
Sex as Substitute

Lodges writing, both fictional and critical, has displayed from the outset
an almost total plain mans inability to grasp politics as anything but
either trivial or abstract; and there would seem no doubt that the acclaim
he has received from the literary establishment has a good deal to do with
this convenient blindspot. Sicne his novels are largely innocent of political
or spiritual passion, they need to find their dramas and intensities elsewhere, and do so in sex. Sex provides Lodge with a suburban substitute
for the high emotional currents which the careful comic distancing of his
fictions otherwise expels; and it is a major theme of his most recent novel
Nice Work, in which an academic feminist and literary theorist (Robyn
Penrose) is drawn into a sexual affair with a truculent, philistine,
averagely sexist managing director (Vic Wilcox).2 Since Henry Fieldings
Joseph Andrews, it has been a familiar assumption of the English novel that
sexual desire is no respector of social divisions. Fieldings Lady Booby
makes sexual advances to Joseph, her footman; and Fielding at once
satirizes her for lowering herself socially, while implying contradictorily
that class divisions are relatively unreal in comparison with universal
human appetites. Desire, then, is in one sense a subversive force, traversing the artifice of social distinctions with scant regard for their authority; but in doing so it lays bare a human essence or general common
humanity, which can be a convenient ideological doctrine for the dominant social power. This ambiguity then becomes available for the contemporary liberal humanist novelist, for whom (as in E.M. Forsters Howards
End) sexual love must offer that transcendence of social barriers which
politics cannot provide. In Forster, a liberal realist recognition of the
extreme difficulty of this project consorts with a Romantic utopian
impulse for its achievement, reflecting at once the ideological gloom of a
now marginal liberalism, and the residual buoyancy of its earlier, more
sanguine and idealist days. It is precisely this contradictory structure of
feeling which Lodges Nice Work inherits from its forebears, in a Thatcherite Britain where liberalism is at once severely disillusioned and unable
entirely to relinquish its fond idealist hopes.
If Nice Work is modelled on Howards End, it also draws heavily on Elizabeth Gaskells North and South (1855), in which a liberal middle-class
ingnue, Margaret Hale, is ambiguously attracted and repelled by the hardnosed Northern manufacturer Thornton, saves him at a point of
2

Nice Work, Hodder and Stoughton, London 1988.

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dramatic crisis from the wrath of his own striking workers, and finally
humanizes him by marriage, thus tempering his callous attitudes to his
labour force. The relationship between Margaret and Thornton is in a
Lukcsian sense typicalfor what is concretized in this liaison is
nothing less than the pattern of alliance and antagonism between two key
sectors of the Victorian ruling class: its cultivated, enlightened wing, and
its harshly Benthamite captains of industry. North and South, unlike Gaskells earlier novel Mary Barton, is thus a story of intra-class conflict, at a
point where the ruling bloc needs to overcome its internal dissensions in
order to consolidate its sway over a proletariat just emerging from Chartist militancy. To this extent, Gaskells liberal humanism is harnessed to
the requirements of bourgeois hegemony; and Nice World reveals over a
century and a half later how little things have changed.
In one respect, they have changed decisively. For there is of course
nothing hisrorically typical about the relationship between Penrose and
Wilcox, or even, one might add, empirically plausible. The novel is
forced to resort to an improbable plot device simply to bring the pair
physically together. There is no question of an alliance between socialist
feminism and contemporary capitalism, as there is for Gaskell between a
progressive but ineffectually idealist middle-class stratum, and the
uncouth but admirably dynamic energies of the Manchester mill-owners.
At one level, the novel recognizes its parodic misreading of its Victorian
forebear well enough: there can be no common interests, Robyn avers,
between herself and Wilcox, and the couple finally go their own ways. But
to take over another literary text is to appropriate something of its builtin ideology in the very act of defacing it; and to this extent the suggestion
that Robyn and Wilcox could somehow come together is insistently present. A realistic acknowledgement of objectively antagonistic interests
thus consorts with a liberal utopian hope that divided social groups might
finally, vaguely emerge; contradiction becomes simply difference and
division. The content of Gaskells ideology is by and large rejected, but its
spirit is nostalgically preserved, and underscored by the fact that, as
individuals, Robyn and Wilcox do indeed learn something from each
other. Whatever our social differences, we are all human under the
skinor perhaps, more accurately for Lodge, under the trousers.
This hope, however, can be sustained only by a considerable sleight of
hand. For it assumes that Robyn is indeed a kind of Margaret Hale, essentially a middle-class liberal, and thus refuses to take seriously her socialistfeminist politics. The influence of the Gaskellian model thus succeeds in
distorting and belittling the female protagonist. On Wilcoxs side, the
novel certainly takes the pressure of social and ideological differences; but
it does not succeed in extending the same understanding to Penrose.
Indeed its treatment of her is notably less sympathetic than the portrayal
of Wilcox, one of Lodges somewhat pathetic hommes moyens sensuels for
whom he has a suspiciously intimate fellow feeling. The limits of the texts
patriarchal imagination are nowhere more obvious than in the contrast
between the convincingly characterized Vic and the externally presented
Robyn. For much of the time, Robyn is made to speak like a theoretical
textbook, spouting indigestible chunks of Lacan; and this threadbare caricature, fit target for a cheap laugh, is overshadowed by the persuasively
realist Wilcox. Whereas in his case readerly expectations are ironically
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undermined (for all his drawbacks, Wilcox turns out to be honest, sensitive and intelligent), the stereotype of the sexually independent woman
remains on the whole unchallenged. Robyn, for example, has little time
for sex, since intellectual women are of course irritatingly passionless. She
behaves rather like a Victorian prude, needing to get drunk to have intercourse with Wilcox, and then apparently repressing the whole affair.
Whatever the novels intellectual convictions about the impossibility of a
permanent relationship between its protagonists, its actual feelings pull
strongly in the other direction: Robyns brusque refusal of her poignantly
love-struck suitor is made to count against her, showing her up as callous
and even frivolous. Cast off by this frigid bluestocking, Vic turns back to
his familya group which has been shown by the novel in a consistently
negative light but which now fuses lovingly and improbably around him.
The fusion is catalysed in part by economic necessity: if Vic now needs his
wife, it is for one thing because she is going to become his secretary.
(Indeed he displays a curious inability to make love to a woman unless she
is a secretary: Robyn has been masquerading as Vics secretary just before
they consummate their relationship.) Part of the solution to the problems
of Thatchers Britain is thus Thatcherite familial values, in which Victorianism and Roman Catholicism may harmoniously mingle.
Theory and Real Life

So far, there is little doubt that Nice Work thoroughly deserves the Booker
Prize. But there are other reasons for such an appropriate reward. The
novel is Lodges most explicit exercise so far in the running conflict
between theory and real life; but it is clear that the scales are heavily
weighted in favour of the latter. Penrose is a dedicated feminist; but there
is little sense in which the text takes the pressure of the interests she
speaks up for, which make no concrete appearance within it, and which
are certainly not regarded as being as much a part of the real world as
Wilcoxs factory. Once more, by subtly separating Robyn from her own
political allegiances, the novel can win a few easy victories at her expense.
Theory does not divide for Lodge between the more and the less esoteric
between those ideas which genuinely articulate real world interests,
and those which belong merely to a hermetic game. Since he has never
given much credence to the former kind of theorizingindeed since he
has consistently displayed a suburbanite suspicion of ittheory as a
whole can appear in Nice Work as pretty much an unreal, privileged, selfindulgent pursuit, as Robyns boyfriends ominously easy slide from
semiotics to stocks and shares makes forcefully clear. The novel does not
entirely endorse this sceptical view of theorizing, but it is nevertheless
powerfully insisted on. But if socialism and feminism are just more Parisian gobbledygook, then the falsifying equation between Penrose and Mrs
Gaskells Margaret Hale is surreptitiously underscored. For what is
wrong with theory on this view, what brings it into conflict with the pragmatic world of Wilcox, is not so much that many of its interests are politically antagonistic to that world, but simply the fact that it is abstracted
and disconnected. And this in turn suggests that all that then needs to be
donehowever frustratingly difficult it will prove to beis to put these
sundered spheres together again, in a classic Forsterian act of connection.
The novel, in other words, hesitates between two quite different cases: the
acknowledgement that radical politics are indeed implacably, irreconcilably
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opposed to Vics capitalist doctrines, and the thesis that what is at stake
here is simply a gulf between abstract ideas and real life. In this sense,
what has in fact been for long a radical positionthat theory and social
reality should be closely relatedbecomes the vehicle for a distinctly nonradical vision which downplays at a stroke the reality of Robyns politics
and the unsavoury nature of capitalism.
The final point might seem questionable, given the amount of time Nice
Work spends in depicting the unvarnished brutalities of industrial exploitation. In the end, Vic will withdraw from this world in disgustbut only
to set up, with the aid of a timely legacy from Robyn, as a small entrepreneur. Since such small-time business will with luck escalate into bigtime business, Robyn has been instrumental in perpetuating the social
order she rejects. So she is a Margaret Hale after all, whatever the texts
tongue-in-cheek literary ironies; in a kind of double bluff, the novel generates Gaskellian expectations, goes on to undermine them, and then partly
fulfils them. Gaskells sexual resolution must be rejectedRobyn and Vic
do not end up togetherbut the liberals material support for capitalism
is perfectly acceptable. Or if Nice Work is being ironic about Robyns final
complicity with the system, then this is just another dig at her pseudopolitics. It would seem as if liberal humanism since Gaskell and Forster,
under the pressure of the womens movement, has matured sexually in
some respects, but matured in no other way. The novel cannot be blind to
the fact that small-scale business breeds larger enterprise, since Vic has
explicitly said as much to Robyn earlier in the narrative; but this gloomy
recognition is in conflict with a petty-bourgeois faith in the creativity
and autonomy of the little entrepreneur, and so must be written out of
the final comic resolution.
That resolution, in fact, is a remarkably hollow affair, jarringly divergent
from the novels previous realism. The comic ending of Small World could
pass itself off as a kind of literary joke or romantic device; but though the
conclusion of Nice Work has a similar ironic self-consciousness, it is also in
earnest. The novel should not in fact end happily: the whole of its textual
logic pulls against such an anodyne dnouement. It is a thoroughly disillusioned work, symptomatic of a liberal humanism which has fallen on
hard times since its Victorian hey-day, and since the days when the Wilcox of Howards End could transcend the social divide by the power of
love. But a belief in the redemptive capacities of the individual, however
tattered, lingers on, to furnish the work with its qualifiedly comic conclusion. Vic Wilcox will begin reading Tennyson, and Robyn, sobered by her
encounter with the Satanic mills, will turn down a well-heeled academic
post in the United States. The answer to the system lies with the individual, and other such liberal banalities. But this is not, nowadays, an
answer which even the liberals can fully credit; and the novel is aware that
what it says in this respect is at odds with what it shows. The ending must
therefore, as with Small World, sceptically dissociate itself from its own
seriousness, as it seeks to have its ideology and transcend it at the same
stroke. Structuralism has now in effect come to mean a kind of ironic
textual playfulness which allows you a certain fulfilling emotional investment while simultaneously putting you at a safe ideological distance from
it; and in this sense it is merely the latest, fashionable rehearsal of a
familiar liberal gesture.
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Nice Work pokes a little plain-minded fun at Penroses belief that all
literary texts revolve around eloquent silences; but the silence in its own
discourse resonates through its every letter. What is forcibly suppressed
by the work is the possibility of any theory which might have practical
foundations in social life. To admit any such possibility to Lodges scrupulously antithetical world would be to deconstruct the whole affair. Nice
Work reinvents the polarized vision of a George Orwell, for whom theory
was for the Nancy intellectuals and reality for the big-boned miners. Just
as The Road to Wigan Pier had to edit out the politically articulate proletarians whom Orwell encountered on his trek to the North, so Nice Work
heavily underwrites the old English empiricist prejudice that ideas are
one thing and life another. It would be wonderful, of course, if we could
bring them together a little: as a nice chap, Lodge would like to see us all
rubbing shoulders a bit more regularly. The novel thus displaces contradictions to simple division, and so becomes part of the problem to which
it seeks a solution. Theory and practice can no more combine politically
than they can sexually: at the sexual climax of the work, there is no real
alternative between Vics Romantic hermeneuticismhis pathetic overinvestment of the event with meaningand Robyns blank postmodernist
insistence on its brute, meaningless factuality. On the evidence of Small
World, the novelist himself is far closer to Vic here than to Robyn,
Romantic eroticism being the appropriate sublimation for conventional
domesticity, and casualness about sex its demonized other. (Robyn even
giggles about Vics ridiculous sexual idealization of her with her feminist
friend, a black mark against her if ever there was one.) There can be no
mediation between too much and too little meaning, just as there must be
at all costs no set of theoretical ideas bound up with real life situations.
Such ideas must be either expunged from Nice Work or travestied as so
much foreign flim-flam; and to this extent the novel is in profound collusion with the Britain about which it is so notably uneasy.

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