David Lodge, who has died aged 89, was, like his close friend Malcolm Bradbury, a professor of English literature who became even better known as a novelist. The two men occupied adjacent offices for some years at Birmingham University in the early 1960s and greatly influenced each other. Both were grammar school boys from non-academic backgrounds who became leading figures in English letters without ever darkening the gateways of Oxford or Cambridge universities. Both wrote novels in part out of an instinct to reach a wide constituency of readers with literary tastes.
Lodge worked briefly for the British Council before getting his first academic job in 1960, as a lecturer in English literature at Birmingham. In the same year his first novel, The Picturegoers, was published. This and the novel that followed, Ginger, You’re Barmy (1962), were written under the influence of Graham Greene, a fellow doubting Roman Catholic novelist whom the young Lodge much admired. Lodge’s own PhD, The Catholic Novel from the Oxford Movement to the Present Day, had examined the genre to which he himself began to contribute.
The protagonist of The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965), Adam Appleby, agonises over the rights and wrongs of contraception, and Lodge’s early fiction was clearly rooted in his own scruples and discontents. The novel was also notable for its gift of literary parody: Adam is researching for an English literature PhD and sections of the novel mimic the styles of leading 20th-century novelists. This dexterity was as characteristic a feature of its author as the religious questioning. The subject matter of this and most of his subsequent novels was drawn from his close knowledge of literary academia, and its follies.
David was the only child of a dance-band musician and sometime singer, William Lodge, and was brought up in Brockley, south-east London. His mother, Rosalie, was a Roman Catholic and he was educated at St Joseph’s academy, a Catholic grammar school in Blackheath run by a religious order, the De La Salle Brothers. He went to University College London to read English – he said that he was put off applying to Oxbridge by the impression of it he received from reading novelists such as Evelyn Waugh. From 1955 until 1957 he did national service in the Royal Armoured Corps. The experience would later be used in Ginger, You’re Barmy, which gives a jaundiced picture of army life. He then returned to UCL as a postgraduate.
When he was 24 and still studying for his PhD, Lodge married Mary Jacob, a fellow Catholic, whom he met while both were English undergraduates. Soon the couple had two sons and a daughter. (He would look back with something like amazement at their conviction that they should use only the methods of birth control approved by the church.) The third of their children, Christopher, had Down’s syndrome. He lived at home until he was in his 20s, and his care and education were a central commitment of family life. Lodge was later to raise funds and campaign on behalf of sheltered communities for adults with learning difficulties.
Two formative periods in the US – at the Harkness Commonwealth Fellowship (1964-65), then as a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1969 – animated both Lodge’s academic studies and his fiction. He turned to the campus novel, a genre in which he became a household name. Changing Places (1975) featured Philip Swallow, a bumbling, middle-aged English literature lecturer who is liberated, sexually and intellectually, by an academic exchange with a dynamic American professor, Morris Zapp. As well as exchanging jobs, the two men take up with each other’s wives. Zapp, based on Lodge’s friend Stanley Fish, became his best loved character. The novel won the Hawthornden prize and his widest readership to date.
It was followed by the playfully allusive Small World (1984), which continued Swallow’s and Zapp’s misadventures, and then Nice Work (1988), whose two main characters, a feminist academic and a bluff businessman, enacted the clash between two worlds. Inevitably, they also have an affair. These last two novels were both shortlisted for the Booker prize.
The main location for Lodge’s campus novels was the University of Rummidge, a scarcely disguised version of the University of Birmingham, where he continued to work. The novels reflected the academic fashions of the period, of which he was a slightly hesitant leader. His early criticism, such as his Language of Fiction (1966), showed him applying the close reading techniques of the “new criticism” to classic fiction. This first book was widely read by students and he was soon established as a leading academic analyst of classic fiction.
In the late 1970s, like other literary academics of his generation, he was stirred by the arrival of literary theory in British universities, and his own critical writings changed in response. The first symptom of his new interest was his collection Working With Structuralism (1981). His Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader (1988) would become a standard anthology for students. He was a pioneer in making the sometimes arcane vocabulary of narratologists accessible to the general reader.
He had a special liking for the work of the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, whose delight in the novel’s subversive clash of different voices and viewpoints clearly appealed to him. By the mid-80s, however, Lodge’s interest in such theory had waned, and he was later to decide that it was a movement that had exhausted itself.
Thanks to the success of his fiction, by 1984 he was working only part-time as an academic, and in 1987 he retired from his post at Birmingham, though he continued to live in the city for the rest of his life and was made an honorary professor of his old university (and later emeritus professor). He was to admit that his use in his fiction of his observations from his professional life sometimes made colleagues, and therefore himself, uneasy. He remained a critic, however, as well as a novelist. For two years his column in the Independent on Sunday exemplified, for the general reader, the usefulness of particular items of critical vocabulary. Selections were collected in The Art of Fiction (1992).
His campus novels had taken him away from the Catholic themes that he had still been exploring in How Far Can You Go? (1980), which was the Whitbread book of the year. (In this novel Lodge gives one of his leading characters his own experience of having a child with Down’s syndrome.) Paradise News (1991) returned to the territory of religious dogma and doubt, and seemed to announce Lodge’s inexorable move away from religious certainty: its protagonist only achieves contentment by conquering his Catholic hang-ups.
Yet, Lodge’s fiction was not exactly becoming more secular: both Therapy (1995) and Thinks … (2001) have leading characters on whom Catholicism still has its hold. Lodge had come to describe himself as an interested observer of Roman Catholicism, rather than an actual believer, but his fiction tells the story of a writer still fiercely engaged by Christian themes.
With academia behind him, he entered new territory as a writer. At the end of the 1980s he adapted Small World then Nice Work for television (the former for Granada, the latter for the BBC). He then adapted Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit as a six-part BBC serial (1994). If Ulysses was his favourite novel, Dickens was probably his favourite novelist, and his involvement with this dramatisation seemed a logical fusing of his populism and his literariness. He also wrote three plays, including The Writing Game, staged at Birmingham Repertory theatre in 1990 and adapted for television.
His literary tastes were catholic (in the non-religious sense) at a time when literary academics were becoming more specialised. He wrote introductions to the works of authors ranging from Jane Austen and George Eliot to EM Forster and Patrick Hamilton. His critical generosity and sound judgment made him a natural choice to chair the Booker prize judges in 1989. He seems a quintessentially English proponent of a peculiarly English genre – the comic novel – but his work was widely translated. In France his popularity was marked when he was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1997. In 1998 he was made a CBE.
Ever the trained critic, he was candid in his analysis of his own narrative, confessing that, as a novelist, he had used up much of his own experience by his 60s. His later novels remained literary, but were not necessarily rooted in what he called “phases of my own life”, like the novels that had gone before. So Author, Author (2004) dramatised a period in the life of Henry James, while A Man of Parts (2011) was based on the life of HG Wells. They were biographically impeccable, but made less of Lodge’s gift for comedy than earlier novels. The former suffered the misfortune of being published at the same time as Colm Toibín’s novel about Henry James, The Master. Lodge wrote a rueful account of the coincidence and its consequences in The Year of Henry James, or Timing Is All (2006).
In 2008 he published what was, in many ways, his most autobiographical novel, and one of his best, Deaf Sentence. Lodge had started losing his hearing in his mid-40s. Up to this point, only those closest to him had realised that his partial deafness had deeply influenced him. It contributed to his decision to retire from academia and turned him in on himself. Struggling to keep up with conversations, he said, had stopped him being amusing. Lodge often spoke of his feelings of anxiety, undiminished by literary success or academic standing. Yet the deafness that depressed him in life became comic in his novel.
Admirers of Lodge’s novels were often surprised to find him, in person, dolefully reflective. This was the spirit of his memoir, Quite a Good Time to Be Born, published in 2015. Covering the period from his birth to his breakthrough, at the age of 40, with Changing Places, it gives (despite the title) a glum and minutely circumstantial account of growing up a Roman Catholic in the 1940s and 50s.
Lodge looks back with some amazement at his younger self’s respect for Catholic doctrine. Two further volumes of memoirs, covering later periods of his life, followed. Writer’s Luck (2018), should have relished his middle years of celebrity and success, but is more precise about the small disappointments of his literary life. Varying Degrees of Success (2020), covering the years after academia, lets us know just how wearying the business of writing can be.
His last published work of fiction was The Man Who Wouldn’t Get Up (2016), a collection of short stories mostly composed between the 1950s and 90s. Humorously fable-like, they serve as a reminder of this melancholy man’s comic instinct. Fiction allowed him to combine his literary-critical intelligence with a gift for observing absurdities, in order to fashion his own peculiarly bleak brand of comedy.
Mary died in 2022. He is survived by their three children, Stephen, Christopher and Julia.