In the trilogy’s second book, “Small World” (1984), Morris Zapp, a slick theoretician delivering a lecture at a conference, uses the striptease style supposedly popular in the all-nude go-go bars of Berkeley, Calif., as a metaphor for what continental theory has uncovered about language:
“This is not striptease, it is all strip and no tease, it is the terpsichorean equivalent of the hermeneutic fallacy of a recuperable meaning, which claims that if we remove the clothing of its rhetoric from a literary text we discover the bare facts it is trying to communicate.”
It’s the beginning of a long and hilariously comic monologue on poststructuralist theory, all the more effective because, like the above, it is actually parsable. It is also obscene, so much so that in the course of its delivery “a young man in the audience fainted and was carried out.”
The character of Zapp was inspired by the American literary theorist Stanley Fish, who enjoyed the homage so much that he replaced the name on his own office door at Duke University with Zapp’s. (The third novel in the trilogy is “Nice Work,” published in 1988.)
Graham Greene was an early admirer of Mr. Lodge’s fiction, going so far as to send Mr. Lodge’s third novel, “The British Museum Is Falling Down” (1965), which concerns the Roman Catholic Church’s antipathy toward contraception, to Cardinal John Heenan, then the church’s highest-ranking official in England.
Anthony Burgess called Mr. Lodge “one of the best novelists of his generation,” and John Banville, writing in The New York Review of Books in 1995, described Mr. Lodge’s work as “wonderfully funny, in that rueful, lugubrious way that is characteristic of precursors such as Evelyn Waugh and Henry Green.”
