Therapy: A Novel. - book reviews

National Review, August 14, 1995 by James Bowman

Therapy, A Novel, by David Lodge (Viking, 324 pp., $21.95)

DAVID LODGE's new novel is only partly about therapy. Mostly it is therapy for those, like its hero, Tubby Passmore, who are experiencing the various "Internal Derangements" attendant upon advancing age. This seems to be the season for male-menopause novels from Britain, but Lodge covers slightly different territory from that of Martin Amis's more spectacular but less satisfying book, The Information. Tubby is 58, not 40 as the heroes of Amis's novel are, and his belated "mid-life crisis" has none of the apocalyptic overtones of theirs. Instead, it is a quietly and comically desperate grasping at some accommodation with God and guilt and marriage and mortality which has much more the feel of real life about it.

It also has some of the freshness and humor of Lodge's earlier novels, such as Changing Places (1975) and How Far Can You Go? (1980), and it re-traverses some of the ground covered by the latter's witty exploration of the theme of growing up Catholic in the 1950s. Strangely, although Lodge is the professor (at the University of Birmingham), it is Amis who has the more academic style. Lodge's prose does not turn up so many nuggets of verbal gold, but it is less self-conscious, more of a consistent pleasure to read.

Here, for example, is how Tubby, the writer-creator of a TV sitcom, describes himself watching a videotape of arthroscopic surgery on his knee, as performed by a Levantine doctor called Nizar:

It was a brightly lit, colored, circular image, like looking through the porthole of a submarine with a powerful searchlight. "There it is, you see!" cried Nizar. All I could see was what looked like a slim silvery eel biting chunks out of the soft underside of a shellfish. The little steel jaws snapped viciously and fragments of my knee floated off to be sucked out by the aspirator. I couldn't watch for long. I always was squeamish about violence on television.

Not only is such prose unobtrusively sharp and visual, focused on its subject rather than its own brilliance, it is also just right for the voice of Tubby, who is as likable a character as a first-person narrator has to be to take us through an entire novel.

His TV show, called The People Next Door, is about the complexities of class differences in Britain as revealed in the relationship between a progressive-minded but rather hidebound middle-class family and their neighbors, who are of inferior social origins but more laid back and genuine. Tubby is himself the son of a tram-driver from south London who left school at 16 but who, since he has been successful, has started to be curious about intellectual matters. He is forever looking things up, especially words. His mild self-consciousness about his origins comes out in a slightly finicky but endearing concern for correct English.

He has also gone in for therapy in a big way. He goes to a woman called Alexandra for cognitive behavior therapy (an alternative talking therapy to classical psychoanalysis), to a physiotherapist, an aromatherapist, and an acupuncturist. In the past he has even practiced something called "Inversion Therapy" for his baldness, which consists "of hanging upside down for minutes on end to make the blood rush to your head." He juggles his various therapists like rival lovers whom he doesn't want to know about one another, and retains inconsequential odds and ends of advice, none of them of much use in allaying his chronic depression. One day he interrupts his therapy with Alexandra in order to show her how to blow her nose properly: "It's the one thing about yoga that's really stayed with me. How to blow your nose."

Tubby brings to his various therapies the engaging perspective of the simple, the down-to-earth, and the intellectually unpretentious. "Alexandra thinks I'm suffering from lack of self- esteem. She's probably right, though I read in the paper that there's a lot of it about. There's something like an epidemic of lack of self-esteem in Britain at the moment. Maybe it has something to do with the recession." He himself, however, is doing all right. His TV show is a hit and he has plenty of money, so he is a little at a loss when he has to make up a list for Alexandra of the good things and bad things in his life:

Under the "Good" column I wrote:

1. Professionally successful.

2. Well-off.

3. Good health.

4. Stable marriage.

5. Kids successfully launched in adult life.

6. Nice house.

7. Great car.

8. As many holidays as I want.

Under the "Bad" column I wrote just one thing:

1. Feel unhappy most of the time.

A few weeks later I added another item:

2. Pain in knee.

The vague sense of existential angst is genuine enough, but it is also associated with the class dimension of the novel. For the kinds of neuroses that Tubby finds himself developing, and perhaps his therapeutic obsession itself, are among the accoutrements of wealth. Just as he drives a car that he calls "the Richmobile" and indulges himself in expensive Italian loafers, so he turns not only to therapy but to its most top-drawer intellectual antecedents. In particular, he takes Kierkegaard as the explicator of his psychic distress. Nothing but the best for him now, even as he seems to be coming unglued.