Volume 39, Number 7 · April 9, 1992
Innocents at Home
By John Bayley
Paradise News
by David Lodge
Viking, 294 pp., $21.00
The Gate of Angels
by Penelope Fitzgerald
Doubleday, 167 pp., $19.00
Coziness can still seem a virtue in the British novel, and in keeping with the diminished status of the old country most novels written in England today have a modest and miniature air, almost as if they were saying, since we can't do things big anymore let's make the small ones as engaging as we can. David Lodge has had a good deal of success but has never been spoiled by it: always a modest writer, he has come to make modesty seem an art in itself. Well aware of all the devices of modern international fiction—switches between third and first person, changes from past to present tense and back, jokes about the making up of fictions—he has even used them modestly, and with a wholly personal lack of pretension.
Review, 2409 words
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