Nice Work:

...In Nice Work, which was shortlisted for Britain's prestigious Booker Prize, he brings together two unlikely soulmates, Robyn Penrose, a young, strikingly attractive Cambridge-trained Temporary Lecturer in English Literature at a down-at-the-heels provincial British university, and the unprepossessing Vic Wilcox, a middle-aged manager of a middle-sized machine foundry in the British Midlands...

...Lodge's Robyn, a Marxist-feminist-deconstruction specialist in the nineteenth-century industrial novel, is a woman of great character and individuality who feels compelled to argue-on the basis of theory, of course-that both character and individuality are bourgeois myths...

...Robyn and Vic are thrown together when in the spirit of Thatcherism the government creates a plan to bring the universities and businesses closer together...

...Vic becomes fascinated with literature, awakens to his emotions and is genuinely swayed by what Robyn has said about women, and removes the porno posters from the factory walls...

...Robyn, the specialist in the industrial novel who has never been in a factory, is selected tc bridge the gap between the two terrains b> following Vic Wilcox around...

...One of the cardinal tenets of decon-structionism is that we are trapped inside language so that all writing refers to earlier writing...

...Lodge, who has a fine feel for social detail, is a sprightly writer with a sharp sense of comic juxtaposition...

...In on( particularly powerful exchange, Robyn who has begun to realize that Vic is a mat of some integrity, tries to explain why hii treatment of workers is morally unaccept able...

...But even as it fits the format, it breaks it by illustrating as no essay can the almost comic limitations of a theory meant to be left in the seminar room...

...Though Lodge sustains a high quality of writing throughout, the last third of the book falters as the hard edge of the two characters' mutual disdain dissolves in a warm bath of reconciliation...

...Capi talism, in short, screws its workers...

...But if you thought yourself a literate person and yet are too embarrassed to admit that you haven't the faintest idea what some of your literary friends mean when they carry on about some trendy theory called deconstruction...

...if you've suffered the special disdain reserved for the uninitiated when you admit to being mystified by the decon-structionist claim that "you are what you speak" or even more mysteriously that "you are what speaks you," David Lodge's new novel may be just the ticket...

...Robyn learns something of the relentless logic of economic competition from Vic...

...Lodge is engaged in a double missioi for most of the first two-thirds of Nia Work...

...to be pointed out," Robyn tells her class "that industrial capitalism i; phallocentric...

...But to her dismay, when confrontec not with metaphor but with the pressing reality of an Asian worker about to b< unjustly fired, she finds she is forced t( appeal to Vic with a "suspiciously human ist train of thought" that deconstruction ists were taught to dismiss as an "instru ment of bourgeois hegemony...

...Like David Lodge's earlier comic novels, Changing Places and Small World, Nice Work is largely set in the academy, though the writing is anything but academic...

...Underlying this mission of reconciliation is a sense that for all their differences Robyn and Vic are both products of an industrial England threatened by Thatcherism...

...For Robyn as foi the deconstructionists, for whom all the world is simply an extension of language the factory "is just another set of metonymies and synecdoches...

...The clash between the two which drives the first half of the novel creates some memorable confrontations as Robyn, whc is economically illiterate, and Vic, who is culturally illiterate, each-initially the un-self-conscious product of their respective institutions-try to batter each other intc intellectual submission...

...This is a book of gentle humor by a writer who instructs even as he entertains...

...But both-Robyn loses her university job in a funding crunch and Vic is fired when his company is swallowed up in a takeover- seem to have no place in the new Thatch-erite England in which the paper economy of the financial markets rules the roost...

...It hardly need...

...For his part, Vic, a taut terrier of a man, is a dogged utilitarian who, struggling to keep a failing foundry alive, has contempt for the university in proportion to his admiration for Margaret Thatcher...

...the factory chimney is alsc metaphorically a phallic symbol...

...He's teaching some of the eco nomic facts of life to the professors o good think while instructing the Gradgrinds of the world about how even the most hard-boiled of men-consider the metaphor-are partly shaped by the words they use...

...To that extent Nice Work, a late-twentieth-century "condition of England" novel, that revolves around the arguments advanced by a character studying the nineteenth-century "condition of England" novel, fits the mold nicely...

...Everyone becomes simply too nice...

...Good Grief...

...For both Vic and Robyn the manufacturing world provides the structure of discipline, the moral matrix which creates meaning for their lives...