Consciousness and the Novel : Connected Essays

Boston Globe

[This] is not a book of popular science but of literary criticism. Lodge has a different set of problems in mind: "how the novel represents consciousness; how this contrasts with the way other narrative media, like film, represent it; how the consciousness, and the unconscious, of a creative writer do their work." Most other critics would make heavy weather of such topics, but Lodge always scintillates.
— George Scialabba

Columbus Dispatch

Citing the works of writers ranging from Jane Austen to John Updike, and Virginia Woolf to Philip Roth, Lodge examines how the novel represents consciousness; how such representation has changed through time; how the novelist's consciousness and unconsciousness function creatively; and what, if any, is the role of the critic's formal analysis in the process...One reason Lodge's creative and critical works are such joys to read is their sense of play...If you like being in smart company, get to know David Lodge.
— Robert Flanagan

Commonweal

David Lodge's recent interest in neuroscience and contemporary debates about consciousness has been developed in a lively collection of lectures and essyas...If consciousness is now a central concern of philosophers and neurologists, it has been equally so for novelists ever since the end of the nineteenth century. Lodge illuminatingly develops ideas set out in his last novel, Thinks..., where he dramatized this opposition...In this book, Lodge's parallel but separate careers as novelist and critic harmoniously converge.
— Bernard Bergonzi

Financial Times

The abandonment of civilized talk about literature by the "theory" fraternity would leave us very short if it were not for the likes of Lodge, the quality of whose prose and insights, not least because they both come matured from the casks of his own vocation, is a high treat. Leave consciousness to the neurophysiologists and philosophers, and explore human experience and selfhood with Lodge and the novelists, and enjoy.
— A. C. Grayling

New York Sun

[An] impressive new collection...Mr. Lodge has the ability to make familiar writers, seem new...He also writes snappish prose...Mr. Lodge here writes about fiction like a novelist and not a professor and makes his arguments like a major critic.
— Tim Marchman

Providence Journal

This collection of essays is what we have come to expect from [Lodge]: companionable and provocative prose...Lodge's essays meander in a way that strengthens rather than weakens the reader's faith in him as a guide. We read about a wide range of texts, scientific and creative...Consciousness and the Novel brilliantly succeeds in bringing the reader into the ongoing conversation about consciousness. Above all, it reveals just why the novel remains an irreplaceable hearth at the center of the human world.
— Tom D'Evelyn

San Francisco Chronicle

Consciousness and the Novel makes a bright, instructive introduction to David Lodge—as critic and novelist—for anyone who does not know his work.
— Kenneth Baker

Seattle Times/ Post Intelligencer

[Lodge's] project in Consciousness and the Novel is to affirm the value of the novel in describing or representing the human experience and to celebrate the literary intelligence that portrays human consciousness--the uniqueness each person feels when surveying the world from inside his or her own skull. What makes his writing so dynamic is that Lodge seems quite taken with the ideas about consciousness he finds in the fields of neuroscience, philosophy and cognitive and evolutionary psychology, but he is also confident that those fields have something to learn from literature...Witty, cogent and finally courageous.
— Wingate Packard

Seattle Times/Post-Intelligencer

[Lodge's] project in Consciousness and the Novel is to affirm the value of the novel in describing or representing the human experience and to celebrate the literary intelligence that portrays human consciousness—the uniqueness each person feels when surveying the world from inside his or her own skull. What makes his writing so dynamic is that Lodge seems quite taken with the ideas about consciousness he finds in the fields of neuroscience, philosophy and cognitive and evolutionary psychology, but he is also confident that those fields have something to learn from literature...Witty, cogent and finally courageous.
— Wingate Packard

Times Higher Education Supplement

This book...is a visit backstage, where we can peer at the smoke and mirrors of the novelist's art...What a joy, finally, to clamber back and forth across the crumbling old chasm of arts versus sciences to contemplate such a multifaceted and defiant mystery as consciousness.
— Susan Greenfield

Toronto Star

You won't get a much more authoritative view of contemporary English literature than David Lodge's...In his latest book, Consciousness and the Novel, Lodge, fortified by learning and practice, touches on a number of issues, including the transformation of the "literary" novelist from a lonely, dedicated devotee of his craft, like James Joyce, to a candidate for international celebrity.
— Philip Marchand

Washington Times

David Lodge is ever tactful, the gentleman-as-critic. His responses to differing theories of art and consciousness are respectful, and his interest in novelists is unfailingly generous. In an age when the novel has been pronounced dead by more than one cultural observer, Mr. Lodge stands as the novelist's greatest advocate.
— Daniel Mark Epstein

Library Journal

British literary critic-turned-novelist Lodge has made a name for himself as author of highly entertaining and well-crafted satirical novels (e.g., Small World, Changing Places). As a critic, he is interested in the phenomenon of human consciousness and the way it finds expression in the British novel. In these previously published essays, Lodge presents lucid summaries of current consciousness research to investigate the novel's access into the vagaries of the human psyche. However, his insights into the literary imagination and individual works are not entirely original, and he revisits terrain and recasts arguments overly familiar from his previous studies. Lodge's prose is perfectly pleasant to read but neither particularly elegant nor sufficiently idiosyncratic to engage a reader fully. His deliberate and complacent indifference to literary theory, so amusingly spoofed in his novels, apparently blinds him to concerns that could shake his liberal faith in literary culture and the corresponding liberal suspicion of the economic forces behind it. Even at their most interesting, Lodge's essays can sound as if they were meant to be offered on tape by long-distance learning centers catering to those in search of highbrow validation. Recommended for large academic libraries only. Ulrich Baer, NYU Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Esteemed English novelist Lodge (Home Truths, 2000, etc.) explores the relationship between consciousness and literature. Intrigued by the way the very notion of consciousness seems to be evolving in an age of cyber and virtual reality, the author focuses here on a wide range of topics that offer perspective on consciousness in fiction. He discusses, among other things, recent theories of artificial intelligence, the historical give-and-take of literature and literary criticism, the timelessness of Dickens, and E.M. Forster's juggling of the various English class-consciousnesses in his seminal novel Howard's End. Delving into the recent popularity of filming Henry James's fiction, Lodge reveals the disparity between James's in-depth examination of human consciousness and the usually inadequate attempts to replicate it onscreen. He explores the work of the prominent American postwar authors John Updike and Philip Roth, with particular emphasis on Roth's prolific body of work and daring (or reckless) plumbing of the depths of sexual consciousness. Lodge also provides an affectionate portrait of England's father-and-son novelists Kingsley and Martin Amis (whose relationship was as special as it was famously troubled), and sympathetically assesses Experience, Martin's account of the years in the mid-1990s when his father died and his marriage broke up, among other life crises. In a warm appraisal of Evelyn Waugh's work, Lodge contrasts his own lower-middle-class origins in postwar England with the sparkling appeal of the glittering Brideshead Revisited cosmos, affectionately dissecting Waugh's precise and unerring comic flair. Finally, Lodge describes the rationale behind one of his ownrecent novels, Thinks . . . (2001), in which he pursues the subject of consciousness in a fictional form. All of these pieces have the well-crafted tone of an assured master who knows writers and the business of writing extremely well. Lodge offers a kaleidoscopic adventure into the potentially forbidding realm of "consciousness studies," sticking with familiar elements (well-known authors and books) and skillfully breaking his larger, more amorphous ideas into digestible bits. Provocative and fascinating.