Nice Work Background

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Nice Work is a novel written by David Lodge in 1988. The story mainly revolves around Robyn
Penrose, who is a feminist university lecturer and specializes in women's writing. She meets Vic
Wilcox, who is the manager of an engineering firm. The story is set in the fictional city of
Rummidge and Robyn and Vic have many encounters together as Robyn is assigned to shadow
Vic under a government program. This leads to the development of their relationship throughout
the book, as Robyn accepts fate which leads her to Vic and in doing so relaxes her feminist
beliefs. Vic also discovers a romanticism within himself that he had previously disliked, and the
two result in having a relationship.

The book was written by the author to explore the industrial novel genre, and to describe how
feminism does not define a person entirely. Rather, fate seems to have the upper hand and can
lead to a person letting go of their beliefs in pursuit of fate.

The book was well received by critics and fans alike. The novel won the Sunday Express Book
of the Year award in 1988 and was also shortlisted for the Booker prize. The book was also
broadcast as a TV miniseries.
http://www.gradesaver.com/nice-work

NICE WORK spans the winter term at Rummidge University, playfully modeled after Lodge’s
own Birmingham, in the English Midlands. In observance of officially proclaimed Industrial
Year, Robyn Penrose, a temporary lecturer specializing in feminist theory and the nineteenth
century English industrial novel, is assigned to spend one day a week observing a senior manager
at a manufacturing plant. She spends her Wednesdays at the low-tech factory of an engineering
firm run by forty-five-year-old Vic Wilcox. Robyn, a feminist intellectual more comfortable with
irony than iron works, and Vic, a proletarian who has worked himself into affluence, could
hardly be more different in background and attitude. Yet, inevitably, despite Vic’s wife and
Robyn’s boyfriend, the two become romantically involved and learn to see the world through
each other’s eyes.

Lodge provides an informative excursion into the daily activities of workers at an industrial plant
and department of English. His two main characters provide an entertaining dialectic between
abstract and concrete, female and male, theory and praxis, and he offers the sentimental
optimism that the two can be reconciled. Lodge’s characteristic technique is to crosscut between
the parallel and contrasting lives of an academic and a businessman, and his recurring plot, here
as elsewhere, is that of changing places. The main characters of CHANGING PLACES resurface
in NICE WORK in cameo roles. It is a novel that merits its title.
David Lodge’s career has been marked by a number of telling doublings and divisions. He is a
novelist who is also a noted literary critic, and as a critic he is something of an anomaly, being as
interested in current theory as in its practical application. His novels appear similarly divided:
four more or less serious works published in more or less alternating rhythm with four decidedly
comic ones. These latter reveal an even further division within Lodge’s work insofar as they
situate themselves rather strangely in two very different traditions of academic fiction: the
British, written chiefly about the academy, and the American, written largely for it. He is, in
other words, a writer at once realist and postmodernist, a writer as interested in maintaining the
possibilities for realist writing in a postmodern age as he is in testing and undermining them,
exposing realism’s limitations and conventions.

Although his first four novels—The Picturegoers (1960), Ginger; You’re Barmy (1962), The
British Museum Is Falling Down (1965), and Out of the Shelter (1970)—went largely unnoticed
(the latter’s publisher, Macmillan, forgot to send out review copies), Lodge’s next three—
Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975), How Far Can You Go? (1980; published in
the United States as Souls and Bodies, 1982), and Small World (1984)-have been much more
widely and warmly received-generally, however, as highly but nevertheless merely entertaining
fictions, delightful but hardly deep. Joel Conarroe’s front-page piece on Nice Work in The New
York Times Book Review suggests that a similar fate may be in store for Lodge’s most timely,
most thematically important, and most technically interesting novel. More even than the earlier
novels, Nice Work deserves and repays the kind of close attention that its quasi-comic,
pseudorealistic surface hardly seems to invite or encourage. Its popular appeal aside (Lodge has
already begun adapting it for British television), Nice Work provocatively foregrounds its own
intertextual range of reference and not only raises a host of contemporary social questions but
also deepens and dialogizes them, fusing the simple and the semiotic, the realistic and the
postmodern into one splendidly irreconcilable, self-regarding, self-interrogating whole.

Nice Work is the third of Lodge’s novels to explore the fictional landscape of Rummidge, a city
of words modeled on the author’s native Birmingham, in the English Midlands. Half of
Changing Places takes place in Rummidge (“a great dark smudge sounds like Rummidge,” says
one character, seeing the city from the air and for the first time). Changing Places is a novel of
two cities (Rummidge and Berkeley, California) of two cultures (English and American), of two
languages, each nominally “English”; it is a “problematic novel,” to adopt one of Lodge 5
eminently sensible literary coinages, written by a “novelist at the crossroads,” facing the
possibilities and limitations of fiction writing in a postrealist age. With only its first pages set in
the academic backwater of the University of Rummidge, Small World proves a vastly more
expansive work, an “academic romance,” a decidedly carnivalesque novel, having as many
parallel and often intersecting plots as the world has air routes in the era of the “global campus.”

Nice Work, set entirely in Rummidge in England’s rust belt, seems a far more circumscribed
novel. The narrowness is, however, somewhat deceptive, for in Lodge’s fiction place is never as
important as pace—which is to say, not merely the speed of the action but especially the
simultaneously diachronic and synchronic sequence of the narration. In Nice Work the focus may
be tighter, the geographical and narrative range narrower, but the dialogic relations run deeper
and appear (the humor notwithstanding) more troubling. In retrospect, the geographical
expansiveness of Changing Places and more especially of Small World betrays a certain
narrowness of scope, a degree of inbreeding, insulated as these novels are from the pressures of
the nonacademic world. In Nice Work, Lodge narrows the narrative range in a way that allows
him to explore more fully the increasing separation and monologic insularity of discourse and
ideology not only within the academy but also—perhaps more important—between the academy
and the business world, between intellect and industry, male and female, feminists and
phallocentrists, theorists and humanists, mainstream and margin, Anglo and alien, old and new,
North and South, the bleakness of David Lodge’s Birmingham and the prosperity of Margaret
Thatcher’s London.

The novel begins by all too neatly dividing the small world of Rummidge into two separate,
symmetrical parts, each embodied in a character. First comes Victor Wilcox, whose very name
provides an ironic measure of his apparent power and importance. A lifelong resident of
Rummidge and a graduate of the city’s College of Advanced Technology, he has worked...
https://www.enotes.com/topics/nice-work-david-lodge

Nice Work is set around the unlikely relationship between Victor Wilcox, Managing Director of a
struggling engineering plant, and Dr Robyn Penrose, a lecturer of English literature theory at Rummidge
University. Robyn and Vic meet through a PR scheme designed to bring the Industry and the University
closer at the time when both the Industry and the University are threatened by the emerging monster of
financial services industries; at the time when making real things is going out of fashion and ex-English
lecturers compete with barrow-boy yuppies at City merchant banks just before the Big Bang.

Yes, we are talking Thatcher's 80's here and the historical and social realities are always there, explained
clearly enough for those who don't remember or were not told.

The story is, of course, the classic, topical - let's call it 'Crocodile Dundee' - scheme, where two people
from two different social spheres meet and go from more or less despising each other to developing
understanding and more. This vehicle of a story is used to present the reader with the main two
characters and a host of others. Those characters are superbly drawn, typical without being boring, vivid
without becoming caricatures.

Doctor Robyn Penrose, a daughter of a lecturer and a lover of a lecturer; thoroughly liberated and
independent; follower of feminism and a passionate devotee of semiotic materialism. Robyn is
confident, but not vain, stylish but not coquettish. Refreshingly, her intellectual belief that love is a
textual construct does not fall apart under the force of real-life passion of a real-life phallic male. Her
academic background, her intellectual backbone are not proven to be false and we do not discover that,
underneath, she was really an emotional cripple.

I found it rather satisfying to read a novel in which the main female character is not some kind of victim
(or even a survivor) of profound emotional trauma. It is also quite sad that it somehow had to be a book
written by a man.
Each of the character is a figure standing for a social group, for a world from which he or she comes
from: down-to-earth, practical industry and the ivory towers of the academia. Their work habits and
dress habits, their values and their mores; their prejudices and annoyances differ and clash; and
observing this clash is rather funny.

But of course Nice Work is not just a comedy of character and social mores. It is an "issue" novel and the
main issue discussed and debated by and in the book regards the role and the form of university in the
world of (disappearing) factories and (seemingly unstoppable) financial services.

The contrast between a Managing Director's Office and a Lecture Hall is only one of the many explored
in the book. In one instance the grim realities of Rummidge as a whole are put against the well-dressed,
well-heeled and refreshed by the sea-breeze comfort of the seaside university town where Robyn's
parents live. In another we have the opportunity to compare Rummidge to Frankfurt, shiny and clean,
modern and efficient.

The Nice Work of the title refers mostly to Robyn's work and I have to say that, to my satisfaction, the
University seems to come out of this ideological confrontation quite victorious. After piling the critique
on the elitist set-up, the irrelevancies of theory, the mores, habits, prejudices and occasional utter
stupidity of the academics the last word is given to young Dr Penrose, the human and humane but also
competent and committed face of the academia and her shaken but still strong belief in the values
represented by the University. I have to say that I passionately share this belief and am greatly saddened
by the currently in vogue attempts to re-present and re-formulate academic institutions as some high-
level vocational courses. The debate is in some ways more relevant now that it was in the 80s.

All this serious stuff shouldn't shadow the fact that Nice Work is a very funny book indeed, not in a
laugh-out-loud funny but rather smirk-with-delight funny kind of way.

On top of this, Lodge plays with the language, plays with the characters, plays with the social stereotype
and (of course!) engages in a very post-modernist play with literary theory. The whole novel is, in fact,
such a big game as it is self-referential to the extreme.

'Industrial novels', known in their time as 'conditions of England novels' are mentioned in one of Robyn's
University lectures: "They are novels in which the main characters debate typical social and economic
issues as well as fall in and out of love, marry and have children, pursue careers (...) and do all the other
things that characters do in a more conventional novel." These novels are where Dr Penrose's expertise
lies and she happens to actually be a character in such a novel. Nice Work is quite obviously a 'condition
of England novel' for the 80s. However much Lodge likes to take the mickey out of post-structuralism
and literary theory, he himself engages in a most delicious, post-modernist, inter-textual game.

The way that sections describing Robyn's side of the story are presented differs subtly from the way
Vic's story is told. His part is traditional, realistic, 'like novels should be'; while Robyn's side is more
ironic, full of author's comments, reminding of digressional poem.
The way that the book concludes is also straight from the "industrial novel". The solution to all the
characters' worries comes deux ex machina, the only way the 19th century writers could find to resolve
the conflicts described in their books. This resolution is described in the best realist tradition, moving
and satisfying as in a proper realistic novel; so those reading on one of the more literal levels will not be
disappointed.

All in all, Nice Work is a surprisingly complex novel that can be perfectly well enjoyed on any level: as a
comedy of characters, as a social satire, as an "issue novel" and as a literary game. The issues it explores
(Industry, Academia and Finance) are still as current as they were in the 80's; sadly so.

It does not have a terribly compelling plot, but the characters are brilliant and actually grow on you, the
jokes are funny and the argument is pervasive.

If you get bored by references to literature as well as social issues, or if you cannot stand David Lodge as
such, then this book is probably not for you. Otherwise recommended.
http://www.thebookbag.co.uk/reviews/index.php?title=Nice_Work_by_David_Lodge

1 . Introduction

This scientific essay has been written according to the Proseminar “Contemporary British novelists. An
introduction. David Lodge’s »How far can you go?« (1981) and »Nice work« (1988)”. For my essay I
decided for the book »Nice work«.

The aim of my essay is it to find out what happens when the world of academia meets the world of
industry, therefore when Robyn Penrose as a lecturer of English Literature meets Victor Wilcox, who is a
Managing Director in a factory. This clash of values causes quite a lot of personal and public conflicts,
problems and obstacles for Robyn and Victor. But they try to get on with each other as well as they can.
And although these two people are so different, they find each other in the end.

In my essay I will also pay special attention to the use of irony according to the theme of the “Romantic
Quest”, because I think that this is quite an interessting topic to write about. The reader learns a lot
about the relationship between Robyn and Victor and about David Lodge’s special techniques of writing.

Stefanie Warnke
2 . Characterization of Robyn Penrose

Robyn Penrose is first mentioned in chapter one when also Victor Wilcox and his family are introduced.
So the reader first gets an impression of Victor and his life until he gets known to a totally different
character and person – namely Robyn. In chapter I/2 the reader is introduced to Robyn Penrose and gets
quite a lot of information about her past, her life, her appearance and her career: Doctor Roberta Anne
Penrose, who is now a Temporary Lecturer in English Literature at Rummidge University, was born in
Melbourne, Australia and is now thirty-four years old. She is a tall and slender person with a womanly
shaped figure. She has got grey-green eyes and her nose and her chin are a little bit too long. Robyn
prefers wearing dark and loose clothes made out of natural fibres, so that nobody can see her body as
an object of sexual attraction. Robyn’s hair, her finest feature, is curley and copper-coloured. When
Robyn was five years old, she and her family moved from Ausralia to England, because her father, as an
academic historian, had a scholarship at Oxford. And so they stayed in England and later her father came
to an univerity situated at the south coast of England, where he has an own Chair. Robyn never returned
to Australia and can not remember very well in her childhood and the country where she was born.
Robyn had a good childhood. She grew up in beautiful house on the sea and attended a fisrt-class direct-
grant Grammar School, where she got an excellent leaving certificate. After the A-level exam Robyn’s
teachers wanted her to go to Oxbridge, but she went to Sussex, because most young people in the “Wild
Seventees” went there and because this place had an innovatory and exiting reputation. In Sussex
Robyn read authors like Marx, Freud and Kafka, who she could not have read at Oxbridge. At the
university she lost her virginity and was promiscuous until she met (or chose) Charles, who is now her
husband and also a lecturer at the university in Suffolk. First they lived togehther in a flat in Brighton
and later they bought a house in Rummidge. Robyn’s thinking is mostley influenced by capitalism and by
several writers. That is why she does not believe in the concept of character and thinks that characters
are “a bourgeois myth, an illusion created to reinforce the ideology of capitalism.”[1] Robyn is a very
self-confident person and she thinks she is good at what she is doing and she prefers her career and not
raising an own family. She is also very strong-willed and rational in thinking an finishes the relationship
with Charles, because she thinks it is about to die and because he had an affair with another woman.
After this seperation they got together on more time, but it failed again and so Robyn decided not to
look for a man on her side any further. Admittedly Robyn is fullfilled and happy with her job, but she is
also very lonley. But Robyn is a feminist and she is convinced that women are not incomplete without
man, because they can love other women or themselves. But that does not mean that she is lesbian –
she is interested in having sex with men. And so she became involved in a Women’s Group at
Cambridge, where she discussed for example women’s writing together with a group of women. Robyn
likes her job so much that she can imagine to work as a lecurer for the rest of her life. But like every
person else, she has also fears an anxienties and wants to make the world a better palce. Every now and
then she strikes for more money and no cuts in the education - she dreams of an ideal university. But
money does not mean everything to her, because she thinks that money can not fulfill her life and she
does not want to become very rich. All in all one could say that Robyn Penrose is a very intelligent young
women, who loves her work at the university. She is very self-confident and knows exactly what she
wants in her life. Sometimes she is also a bit arrogant towards other people, who are not as educated as
she is. Robyn is a feminist and likes having the company of women, who are as strong as she is. Robyn is
a little fighter – she fights for women’s rights and for better circumstances in the world of academia.

Robyn Penrose is also a telling name. The name “Robyn” itsself is a masculine one, but she prefers that
name instead of “Roberta”. “Robyn” is also the name of a bird with a red chest – this could be an
allusion to the political attitude of Robyn (“a Leftie”). The name “Penrose” consists of two syllables –
“pen” and “rose”. “Pen” could be allusion to Robyn’s work at the university. She is a lecturer and has
quite a lot do with literature, writing and written language. “Rose” as a flower could be related to
Robyn’s female features – romantic, beautiful, sweet, but also dangerous because of its thorns.
3 . Characterization of Victor Wilcox

Victor Wilcox is the fist character the reader becomes acquainted with in the first chapter. Because of
the detailed descriptions of Vic’s daily life, his family and his routines, the reader gets an impression of
this person: Victor Eugene Wilcox, who is now foutry-six years old, works as a Managing Director at
Pringle & Sons Casting and General Engineering. His workplace is the factory. Vic was born in Easton,
Rummidge and after he attended the Primary School and the Grammar School for Boys, he went to a
College of Andvanced Technology in Rummidge. Before he became a Managing Director at Pringle &
Sons, he worked as an engineer at several enterprises in Rummidge. Vic is married to his wife Marjorie
and has three kids (Raymond, Sandra and Gary). He works very hard for his money and his family uses
this money without seeing the hard work behind it. Due to his capitalist doctrines, money is very
important to Vic. He is a stereotypical busineness man – he and his family are living in beautiful house,
he is wearing expensive clothes, he smokes and has a huge office room with expensive furniture in it, he
reads the “Daily Mail” and his taste of music is simple and sentimental (he prefers female singers like
Jennifer Rush). But instead of identifying with the upper class, Vic counts hisself to the working class –
he does not believe in status symbols, he speaks the local dialect, he does not need a lot of electronic
devices in the houeshold and he is in a particular way modest. But he seems to be very unsatisfied with
his life and with his marriage and believes that he has missed something in his life, because he has
always worked so much. He lives in a routine – every day the same procedures. He gets up, goes to the
bathroom, has breakfast, drives to the firm, works until late in the evening, goes home , has dinner and
goes to bed. Vic does not love his wife anymore and feels disturbed by her. He also does not respect his
children. He hates the materialistic attitudes of his family. All these things make his social life to an
extention of work. Vic can not sleep very tight. He always lies awake in his bed before the clock is ringing
and thinks about his work and all the decisions he has to make and what consequences these decisions
have. Vic knows that he is just a “little light” in the huge world of industry and that he can lose
everything in very short period of time. And so the most importatnt things for Vic are his job and the
money he makes with his profession. He enjoys the advantages of his job in higher position – he has his
personal secretary, he drives a Jaguar and he eats out in expensive restaurants for free when there is a
business meeting, for example. Vic has a certain attitude towards industry. For instance, he is convinced
that people, who are working in industry always do something respectable. Industry produces goods,
which are needed for the surviving of the society and that is why everybody should be respectful
towards the work of industry. He thinks that the industry is responsible for the whole society, because
industry is always doing something useful. People, who are employed in a factory are working with their
hands, that means they are doing “real work”, especially men. Vic says that men love to do hard work,
because they need it for their self-respect. Refering to women in the factory, Vic thinks that they are
glad to work here and that they are not opressed. “We don’t force people to work here […] For every
unskilled job we advertise, we get a hundred applicants […].” [2] Statements like that are typical for Vic’s
capitalist attitude. He also believes in “Buying British”. All in all one could say that Victor Wilcox is a very
accurate and serious man, who loves his job as a Managing Director in the factory. Sometimes he treads
the workers in the factory in a very cruel way, because he makes them feel that they can be replaced by
somebody else so easily. He would do nearly everything to preserve the foundry and keep it go on
working, without considering the people’s personal situations in life.

“Victor Wilcox” is also a telling name. “Victor” could be an allusion to the Victorian people and their
attitudes. “Wilcox” can be devided into two syllables – “wil” and “cox”. “Wil” could be an allusion to the
verb “will” and “cox” could refer to Vic’s higher position in the foundry. That means that “Wilcox” could
be a name for a man, who wants to be a strong and leading person in every situation of life.
4 . Clash of Robyn and Victor – the collision of two different worlds

Now we got known to two totally different chararcters: Robyn as strong and steadfast woman, whose
workplace is the world of academia, namely the university. And on the other side there is Victor, a
stereotypical business man, who works in the world of industry and for whom money is the most
important thing in life.

Robyn and Vic meet each other in chapter II/II within the bounds of the so called “Shadow Scheme”,
which is a kind of exchange project between the “Industry Year” and the “Faculty of Arts”. And so Robyn
was chosen to take part in the “Shadow Scheme”, because her special field of work is the nineteenth-
century Industrial Novel. And Vic, after being convinced by his colleagues, decided to join this project,
because it is a good PR for his group in the firm. The “Shadow Scheme” consists of two parts and its aim
is it that an academic follows a person from the world of industry all day long and watches him or her
doing the daily work – and the other way around. Later the ”shadow” (= the person, who follows
around) has to write a short report about what he or she has learned by that.
https://www.grin.com/document/121698