THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, August 30, 1995 TAG: 9508300045
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E6 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY KEITH MONROE, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 65 lines
``I'M GAME FOR almost any kind of therapy except chemotherapy,'' says Laurence ``Tubby'' Passmore, the sadder but no wiser protagonist of David Lodge's richly comic novel, ``Therapy'' (Viking, 321 pp., $22.95).
Passmore is the 58-year-old writer of the most popular sitcom in Britain, ``The People Next Door.'' He's well-paid and happily married. He drives a car his grown children call the Richmobile. Needless to say, he's a mess.
He's got a bad knee and a mass of festering neuroses. To feel better, he avails himself of physical therapy, acupuncture, psychotherapy and aromatherapy. Before it's all over, he will take to reading Kierkegaard and hike the pilgrim's route to Santiago de Compostela.
He will also have a lot more to worry about than a twinge in a knee and suburban angst. The star of his sitcom will quit; his wife will dump him; he will chase younger women with humiliating results; and will wind up on the front of the tabloids, the subject of mocking cartoons.
The tale of Tubby is narrated by Tubby in the form of a journal he keeps for - you guessed it - therapeutic reasons. The unraveling of his story is done with great technical cleverness and includes several surprising plot twists. It would spoil your enjoyment to elaborate further. Suffice it to say that the path through this midlife crisis is by way of Tubby's youth and takes him from the ridiculous to the sublime by the time the final credits roll.
David Lodge works in the great English comic tradition that runs from Henry Fielding and Jane Austen through Evelyn Waugh to Kingsley Amis. Unlike Americans who equate comedy with triviality, the Brits understand that serious business can be contained in a comic package.
Novel by novel, Lodge has treated heavier themes without diminishing the fun. All of his tales revolve around a similar situation: The hero is yanked out of his everyday reality and forced to deal with something rich and strange.
In his hilarious academic trilogy (``Small World,'' ``Changing Places'' and ``Nice Work''), a simple rural poet wins a prize and finds himself in the murky groves of academe; professors from the the English midlands and California swap places for a year of culture shock; and a feminist professor is forced by a sappy town-meets-gown program to enter the world of a factory owner. The latter winds up reading Victorian novels, and she winds up wearing a hard hat.
In ``Paradise News,'' a drab British theologian must visit the deathbed of his long lost aunt in vivid Hawaii. The change does him good.
And here, in ``Therapy,'' sitcom writer Tubby Passmore finds himself wearing the scallop shell of St. James. Along the road, he encounters a BBC crew filming a documentary about the famous pilgrimage. This is a typical bit of Lodge comedy, since he has hosted just such a TV show.
You may have noticed a religious tinge to some of Lodge's plots. This is no accident. Lodge was raised a Catholic and most of his comic characters are trying to quench some sort of spiritual thirst. It is a tribute to Lodge's dexterity that he juggles a serious subtext and slapstick, foolish mortals and social satire, so effortlessly. His subject is the search for grace; his performance is graceful.
In a time when so much fiction is hobbled by wooden prose and wooden characters and awkward plots, reading Lodge is, well, therapeutic. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
David Lodge works in the English comic tradition in ``Therapy.'' by CNB