Review: Changing Places, by David Lodge

Review: Changing Places, by David Lodge 

a review by Rich Horton

David Lodge was born in 1935, and died, less than a month short of his 90th birthday, this past New Year's Day. His first novel was published in 1960, and he published a total of 15 novels, as well as plays and short fiction. He was also an academic, primarily at the University of Birmingham, with a couple of interludes in the US, including at Cal Berkeley. He wrote a lot of nonfiction as well, primarily criticism, and some memoirs late in life. I read a few of his novels a number of years ago, with considerable enjoyment, and also some of his critical works, particularly The Art of Fiction. Upon his death I realized I should continue and read his best known three novels, the so-called "Campus Trilogy". The first of these is Changing Places (1975). 

Changing Places opens with the two main characters on airplanes flying in the opposite direction. Philip Swallow, a lecturer at Rummidge University, a "redbrick" institution in the industrial town of Rummidge (obviously modeled on Birmingham) is heading to Euphoria State in Plotinus, near Esseph (even more obviously based on Berkeley and San Francisco) to spend an academic year as a visiting Professor. This is part of an annual exchange between the two universities, and Swallow's counterpart, Morris Zapp, is thus heading to Rummidge. We learn about their motives -- Philip had been feeling stuck -- hadn't published anything in years; while Morris, a much more successful Professor (modeled on Stanley Fish) is having marriage problems: his wife wants a divorce, and he thinks perhaps a year in Europe might give her time to reconsider.

Both of them are at first very much struggling to adapt to their new positions. Philip has no idea what to teach in his assigned classes -- one being on writing a novel (something he has never done.) Zapp is amused and to some extent horrified by the looseness of the teaching at Rummidge, and by the mostly somewhat grimy and underheated accomodations.

One prime mover of the plot is the late '60s student unrest, which has completely engulfed Euphoria State. Swallow never seems to do much teaching, partly because the students go on strike. But he gets involved in their protest movement, sort of by accident, and becomes a surprisingly popular figure. One of the leaders is an old student of his, Charles Boon, who had caused all kinds of trouble at Rummidge and is now heading a late night call in radio show. At the same time Morris gets heavily involved in campus politics at Rummidge, which is also mildly affected by student protests but also affected by such things as who will get the next promotion and who will run the English department after the retirement of the previous rather superannuated leader.

The other issues are more personal, and turn somewhat on their precarious housing arrangements. Philip's house is in a mudslide area, and is subdivided into two flats -- one for him, and the other for three young women, one of whom turns out to be Morris Zapp's daughter thought Philip doesn't know that. They introduce him to pot, and he sleeps with Zapp's daughter before she takes up with Charles Boon. Morris, on the other hand, has vowed to stay celibate while away from his wife (though he had never been faithful before) and he has to deal with the extremely eccentric Irish doctor who lets him the upstairs of his house. And won't say much more except to note that things progress to the point where each of Swallow and Zapp are offered jobs at the university they are visiting ...

The real interest of the novel isn't in the plot, to be sure, but in the comic elements. Lodge has great fun with the academic maneuvering at each college, and also of course with what might be called sex comedy elements. He plays some formal games, too -- each of the six sections is told in a different fashion, including one entirely in letters between the Swallow and Zapp and their respective wives; another uses found text -- newspaper excerpts and such, another is in screenplay form. This is the book in which Lodge introduced the game Humiliation, in which each participant (typically literature academics) cites a very well known text that they have not read, and gets points for how many of the other participants HAVE read it -- so that you do better the more you humiliate yourself by confessing to not have read something everybody else has. 

I liked the book, but found it a bit uneven. Some of the sections were outright hilarious, but some dragged a bit. The student unrest part, and the entire portrayal of what people in those days called the "hippie subculture" seems dated. The academic maneuverings, on the other hand, and the sexual politics, are both essentially timeless, and they work pretty well. Lodge is an enjoyable writer -- often very funny indeed -- and I'll be reading at least the two loose sequels to this novel (Small World and Nice Work) -- I'd already ready a good sampling of the rest of his work.