Nice Work

David Lodge’s Nice Work (1988) is described as a mix between an industrial novel and a university novel. It describes the two separate lives of feminist writing lecturer Robyn Penrose and Vic Wilcox the managing director of an engineering firm.

Examining the basic premise of the novels action you get the idea that this could be interesting. The feminist critique part of the novel symbolised by Robyn vomits French literary critics on you complete with arguments on deconstructionalist and postmodern theorems. She is the very essence of the ideas she promotes, living in an open relationship with another university intellectual and she promotes her own purposes within the academic structure in order to gain tenure.

Vic is a man possessed by the bottom line, increased efficiency in his factory, margins and business in the time honoured tradition of factory work. He is a cog in a bigger machine, being responsible for turning the factory he has been hired by profitable. He talks of cost margins and labour reduction. His home life is the sedate wife-on-valium and two rebellious teenagers, a boy and a girl, just like you’d expect.

They meet due to the “shadow project” in which a member of staff from the university is drafted to follow a business man around for one day a week during eight weeks.

So far so good.

We are dealing with types and tropes here. We’ve seen all this before. She is an intellectual, and idealist and a feminist. He is a salt of the earth worker in the world of margins. So of course she will reject his values and he will not understand hers. No big surprise there. They are attracted to each other. The world of culture seduces the world of work. And again, no big surprises there. Robyn beds Vic, he believes himself to be in love. She rejects, not only his love, but love as a patriarchal notion designed to control female behaviour.

I got half way through and felt like… So? Introduction of characters completed. Please let story commence. After having finished the novel I realised this is all there is. And if that’s all there is… then let’s go dancing.

That’s how I felt right up to the last couple of chapters when I went from “stop wasting my time” to “oh, no tell me you didn’t”.

Lodge chooses to attach a very sticky classical comedy ending on this story of opposites. There is a timely resolution to everyone’s situation largely due to an inheritance from an uncle in America. Deus ex machina crap.

This is supposed to be a witty observational novel of opposites. It is supposed to juxtapose industry and academia. But is does not, despite it’s best intentions. If it was to have any clang, boom and steam, it should have been a factory worker, not an executive in the role of industry.

The ending seems so false, so contrived, that I can’t even relate to it as irony. It all feels too detached, too disinterested in its own theme.

On the cover it says it was shortlisted for the Booker prize. Well, sometimes the weak fall by the wayside. Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda won that year. Just goes to show that being on the shortlist doesn’t mean a damn thing.

I picked this book up at an second hand book store in a moment of acute booklessness when I was heading for the train station. I paid for it with the very small change in my pocket, and that is as far as I can see, exactly what it was worth. Don’t waste your precious time on this one. Not even if you are faced with staring out a train window for four and a half hours.

Mule.