Nice Work by David Lodge (PDF)

Description

When Vic Wilcox (MD of Pringle’s engineering works) meets English lecturer Dr Robyn Penrose, sparks fly as their lifestyles and ideologies collide head on. What, after all, are they supposed to learn from each other? But in time both parties make some surprising discoveries about each other’s worlds – and about themselves.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐The story involves Vic Wilcox, managing director of Pringle, a heavy industry located in Midlands England, possibly in Birmingham. Robyn Penrose, lecturer at the local university, specializes in the Industrial Revolution as seen in 19th-century English literature and also, women’s studies. Vic and she meet as she accepts being the university’s liason with local industry. They start off antagonistic but end up in a romantic involvement, at least on Vic’s part, fruit of his boredom with his wife and indolent children. Robyn, unfortunately, is cast as the heroine of this story, being 1)a brilliant teacher and student of her area of expertise, 2)an arrogantly politically correct young virago who comes equipped with an abundant supply of self-righteousness, 3)who lands on her feet most improbably, when, faced with the precariousness of her job situation,she receives from out of the blue a handsome legacy from a distant uncle-in-law in Australia. She then 4)magnanimously offers to invest in Vic’s plans to set up his own business after he has also been tossed aside by the progress of neoliberalism which permeates Thatcherian Britain, making kings of knaves and casting wise men into the garbage. So, Robyn, having done all these marvellous things, also deigns to remain at her university through a manipulation of the budget called virement, and closes with the words, “I’ll stay.” The story is really not at all amusing, and if there is anything of value to the reader, it is to take Vic Wilcox’ domestic situation as the traditional bad side of male-female relationships and Robyn Penrose as the new type of female best avoided as if a carrier of the most dreadful of plagues. For those who enjoyed Nice Work, I recommend Small World for a more agreeable type of woman on view.

⭐I read this book for a book group and eventually came to be very intrigued by the plot and enjoyed it. Some of the plot was too farfetched for my taste, but fun anyway.

⭐Charming and witty satire. Although it was written several decades ago and would at that point been considered a timely critique, it is still a good read because the writing is so clever.

⭐A brilliant satire of academic life in the 1970’s. Funny and sly with heart. Very clever.

⭐Great on character. Shrewdly observant of modern life in Britain. Highly amusing and analytical. Especially good at mocking pretension of any kind.

⭐It was the Campus Trilogy that hooked me on David Lodge and Nice work is the third selection. The earlier books contrasted American and British college life as experienced in the early 1970’s. Lodge built his humor on the vast difference between California College life and Industrial town college life in England. In the Second Book, Small World, this contrast has dimmed in favor of the life of a “Road Scholar”; that is that portion of the international professorial elite that work the academic conference circuit.The pattern Lodge teaches us to expect is that there is humor in contrasting points of view. Adjectives need not be harsh to paint a critical picture and that being slyly judgmental can be as powerful as being overtly negative.If you have no patience for academia or for the discussion of some fairly esoteric topics, Nice Work will try your patience.In Nice Work we have academia acting as background for a meet up between an extreme, feminist college academic and an equally extreme capitalistic factory president. Visiting Australian professor Robyn Penrose teaches 19th-century literature at the Lodges invented University of Rummidge. She also ascribes to virtually every left wing shibboleth and back them with an impressive intellectual ferocity. Via a town and gown program to match University lecturers with corporate leaders she will shadowed by and in turn shadow Vic Wilcox, managing director of Pringle’s, an industrial casting company located in the neighboring Industrial corridor. Wilcox is as classic as a capitalist as Penrose is liberal. His concerns are making money and mostly ignoring his materialistic and superficial wife and being confused by his wasteful progeny.Loge accomplishes in a relatively brief novel is reminiscent of the fun we have watching the rough edge Spencer Tracy and play against the always more sophisticated Katharine Hepburn. What carries the book beyond this level is the Lodges willingness to make his characters multi -dimensional, sympathetic and sensitive. Each learns to understand and appreciate the other. We see both the weaknesses and the essential goodness in the both leading characters.This is a light novel, but it will ask that you follow some important concepts and by the end watch as each character has to face a very real crises. Rummidge is clearly based on Birmingham, once a major industrial center, now, not so much. Universities have never been a certain place for funding and special programs. These realities are also woven into Lodges humorous word.Almost all of Lodge’s novels can be criticized as being dated. The Campus Trilogy assumes you have an almost insiders appreciation of the world of Academia. Nice Work, in particular calls out a number of politicians whose names will have little resonance with readers in 2014 and less in the future. In the past he has written about Catholic married life before the pill and always there are elements of his books tied to a time and place. Not to class Lodge with the greatests, but many of these same comments can be made about Jane Austin, and Tolstoy. How does one deal with the Science Fiction writers whose worlds are not of any kind previously known? Accept that Lodge is taking you to a setting best known to him, and enjoy his wry and intelligent appreciation for the strengths and foibles of a place and time not so extremely unlike your own.Even as Nice Work is the end of Lodges Campus Trilogy it looks to be the beginning of a shift in the kinds of novels Lodge has since published. The humor that sustains Nice Work will give way to more serious considerations of aging, and of the legacy of writers. I find I like Lodge in either frame of mind.

⭐Lodge makes some pretty pungent contrasts between the lives of those who work in an iron foundry and the English Lit students at our barely-disguised Birmingham University. Having worked in an iron foundry myself, he captures the experience just like it is. Dr Robyn Penrose–the feminist lecturer–gets the full treatment, but unless you really believe in semiotics and the like, it’s pretty hard to take her career seriously. But hey, Lodge is in the same game, and as the novel progresses, Vic Wilcox (the MD of the foundry) falls madly in love with Robyn and makes a total fool of himself. And after leading us down this cul-de-sac, Lodge contrives an ending so corny that it fudges all the issues raised in this otherwise fascinating novel.

⭐Continuing the novels based in and around the English Department of Rummidge University, this features lecturer Robyn, whose tenure is far from safe, as she shadows Vic, manager of a local casting works. Robyn’s preconceptions are partly supported and partly confounded by this experience, as are Vic’s. A number of well-known characters from previous novels make an appearance.David Lodge is the amusing chronicler and perceptive commentator par excellence as always. Highly recommended, though you might wish to start with the first in the series – “Changing Places”, if I remember correctly. If you do, I reckon you’re in for a treat.

⭐A well observed comedy/commentary on industrial and personal relations in Britain of the early eighties. And how dated it , at first sight, appears. Factories full of ancient machinery and work practices. A world without iPads or mobile phones and middle aged men too shy to strip naked in front of their lover without first turning the bed room light off. And yet many truisms remain,highlighted by reference to the Industrial Novels of Dickens and Gaskell, as true today as they were in Victorian times. In parts Nice Work reads as a treatise on Academia and early Thatcherism. It also introduced this reader to the works of Mrs Gaskell and Lord Tennyson, which can’t be bad. Recommended.

⭐I enjoyed the story about two opposites and how they eventually come together. He is the Managing Director of an engineering company and she is a Doctor in English lecturing at university on English literature, especially the role of women in novels of the industrial revolution.I do not like the excess amount of English language theory that gets rather boring but is evident in all David Lodge’s books and is the reason why I could not give it 5 stars. His best book is Paradise News which I would give 5 stars.

⭐David Lodge’s books are always excellent and this one is probably his best. As in his previous books, “Changing Places” and “Small World”,the book centres on two diametrically opposed views and attitudes and explores how these positions can be reconciled, one character existng in the “real” world of work and the other in a cocoon of academia where analysing the work of long-dead authors means she has no experience of the industries where these works are set. Nice Work is well written and the characters are excellently sketched, particularly the family of Vic, the factory MD, with a gone-to-seed wife, and layabout children. The problem with the plot is that, like in his previous works, Lodge works too hard to manufacture a happy ending for everyone; at the end Vic discovers there is more to life than work and learns to appreciate art and literature, and his family, whereas Robyn, when faced with the economic reality of university budget cuts suddenly has a triple whammy of good fortune with a publishing deal, a job offer and bequest from a late relative. All of this happens in such a flurry at the end that the conclusion of the book appears hurried and unrealistic but this is still an excellent read and a compulsive page-turner.

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