Postscript: David Lodge 1935 - 2025

David Lodge (Photo by Leonardo Cendamo)

I see in the Times that David Lodge has died. He’s probably best known as a novelist. But he was also an excellent literary critic. Three of his reviews that I remember with pleasure are “Simon Gray’s Diaries” (The Guardian, November 22, 2008; included in his 2014 Lives in Writing), “The Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall of Kingsley Amis” (The New York Review of Books, May 31, 2007; also included in Lives in Writing), and “Sick with Desire: Philip Roth’s Libertine Professor” (The New York Review of Books, July 5, 2001; included in his 2002 collection Consciousness and the Novel). 

In another piece, “History Boy” (The New York Review of Books, May 11, 2006; also included in Lives in Writing), a review of Alan Bennett’s Untold Stories, Lodge made a comment that went straight into my personal anthology of great literary quotations:

Again and again in this book he [Alan Bennett] demonstrates that almost anything that happens to a person can be interesting, moving and entertaining if you write about it well enough.