A Tragicomic Meditation on Old Age

...A pretty place, but spoiled by tourism, I’m afraid.’” And here is Desmond in the changing room at a public pool, "lined with lockers that on the insertion of a one-pound coin would allow the key to be turned and extracted attached to a rubber band you wore round your wrist or ankle...

...For some reason, throughout Deaf Sentence I kept being reminded of Ian McEwan's recent novel Saturday—a book that dealt with vastly more sensational subject matter and took itself more seriously than Lodge's, but grappled with the same theme of facing age and mutability...

...On returning to the changing area rather earlier than his companions, having left his glasses and hearing aid safe in the locker, he was unable to read the number imprinted on his rubber band and when he asked passing bathers to read it for him he was unable to hear their replies, so eventually he handed his key to a small child who led him like a helpless imbecile to his locker and opened it for him...

...Lodge’s latest work, Deaf Sentence (Viking, 294 pp., $25.95), is gentler than the aforementioned and cannot be called a comic novel, though it is very funny...

...Theater-in-the-round is equally hopeless...

...There are too many misunderstandings, and the once reliable healing power of sex is getting harder and harder to pull off...

...Everyman in his 60s is more likely—like Desmond—to be a figure of fun to his children and sometimes to his wife (the infrequent and bumbling sexual encounters between Desmond and Fred are simultaneously comic and moving) and to be confronted every day with humiliating evidence of his diminishing powers: Beauty and Strength have long since deserted him...

...The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965) gave some idea of what it was like to be young, horny, middle-class, and Catholic at the moment when the combined forces of Vatican II and the Pill were shaking off centuries of repression and convention...

...Such a scenario may apply to a very few very lucky mortals, but certainly not to Everyman...

...An agnostic, Desmond cannot achieve the necessary sense of transcendence through religion, as Fred does in the Catholic Church to which she has recently returned: "She sits and stands and kneels and sings the hymns and murmurs the responses in a kind of trance, happy to be connected to a general ambience of transcendental faith and hope without needing to enquire closely into the rational basis of it all...

...Desmond clearly feels he can no longer take for granted his easy relationship with his second wife, Fred (short for Winifred...

...We are all haunted by what Desmond qualifies as "the fragility of our grip on life, the ease with which the marks we leave on the surface of the earth are erased...

...Small World (1984) detailed the further adventures of these two and others as they winged round the globe from one literary conference to another to another...

...Inscribed then, within this novel is the darker story of an existential struggle...

...Rather, it is one of those meditations on impending old age that many writers feel moved to tackle...

...His answer, finally, is the timeless one—so hard to achieve—of simply trying to dwell on life and properly value the passing time...

...Desmond Bates, a retired professor of linguistics at a university in the north of England, understands very well that “Deafness is comic, as blindness is tragic,” and is entirely conscious of the foolish aspect he presents...

...Only Good Works remains to accompany him to his celestial reckoning...

...Desmond's academic specialization is something called Discourse Analysis...

...Desmond's thoughts are frequently saddened too, by memories of his first wife Maisie, killed by a drawn-out form of cancer while still a young woman...

...Desmond's mangled cocktail chatter and absurd mishearings at the movies continually amuse us (his misinterpretation of Brokeback Mountain is hilarious), but the overall tale describes a state of near tragic isolation...

...In spite of the general critical enthusiasm for Saturday, it seems to me thatDeaf Sentence gets its message across with much more truth...

...My misfortune is doubly painful to me because I am bound to be misunderstood...

...Late middle age is a very distinct moment in life’s journey, the point where death is suddenly no longer an abstract concept that can safely be ignored but an all too real and proximate event that must be acknowledged and mentally prepared for...

...The composer wrote to his two brothers, "forgive me when you see me draw back when I would gladly have mingled with you...

...The death of one’s parents removes the buffer between oneself and eternity...

...In addition there is Desmond's ancient father, a formerly capable man whose decline has made him a constant source of worry and guilt to his son, who must make frequent trips to far-off London to visit him in the foul, crumbling house he refuses to leave...

...It is a mistake to prize our success and our dignity too highly in our remaining time on what Desmond calls Deaf Row...

...To age is to watch one's world be stripped away bit by bit, and one either comes to terms with that process or is sunk forever...

...Beginning with The Picturegoers (1960), Lodge’s 14 novels have collectively presented a wryly humorous portrait of provincial academics blundering through the social upheavals that transformed Britain in the second half of the 20th century...

...I said, the last time we went to France it was so hot we spent most of the time in our gîte, cowering indoors behind the shutters.’ “‘Oh, hot, was it?’ I said...

...His riffs on the indignities and inconveniences of the condition are brilliant...

...Every utterance or written sentence," as he tells his first-year students, "always has a context, is always in some sense referring to something already said and inviting a response, is always designed to do something to somebody, a reader or a listener...

...But of course, that isn't how it works, not at all...

...Hearing aids create more problems than they solve, while infrared sound systems in theaters make it seem “as if you are listening to the performance through a telephone on stage that has been left off the hook...

...And who am I to say she is deluding herself, left alone in the house with my doubts and my deafness and the shallow excitable chatter of the Sunday newspapers...

...Lodge captures the humor and the pathos in all this by making his hero, like himself, deaf—not profoundly deaf but midlevel “hard of hearing...

...Loss of the sex drive is both traumatic and sardonic, turning a virile man into a ludicrous senex ove r n i ght...

...As in the medieval morality play Everyman, by the time Everyman meets Death he has been forsaken by nearly everyone and everything he had counted on all his life: Fellowship, Kindred Goods, Beauty, Strength, Discretion, the Five Wits—even Knowledge...

...for me there can be no relaxation with my fellow-men, no refined conversations, no mutual exchange of ideas, I must live alone like someone who has been banished...

...McEwan's book, like Lodge's, had obvious autobiographical elements yet seemed unbecomingly triumphalist, what with the hero's glamorous job, sporting and sexual prowess, brilliant children, happy household and adorable wife...

...Changing Places (1975) parodied both British and American academic fashion by contrasting two professors of literature, Philip Swallow of Rummidge University in England (based on Birmingham, where Lodge taught for many years), and Morris Zapp, the superstar literary theorist of an American college named Plotinus in the imaginary state of Euphoria (Berkeley, obviously...

...There also are “those conversations in which your interlocutor says something that sounds like a quotation from a Dadaist poem, or one of Chomsky’s impossible sentences, and you say ‘What?’ or ‘I beg your pardon?’ and they repeat their words, which make a banal sense the second time round...

...Discretion and the Five Wits are on their way out the door...

...Perhaps the reason Desmond quotes Beethoven's so-called Heiligenstadt Testament on the subject is so that he, ironic and self-deprecating in the style of his breed does not have to say these things himself...

...I think one of the reasons I'm so bitter about my deafness," Desmond reflects, "is that having got through all that, survived that, and then found new happiness with Fred I somehow thought I had suffered my fair share of misfortune, paid my dues as the Americans say, and that life would be plain sailing from then on...

...The curse of deafness is its removing that context...

...The pastime of the dance went to pot,’ Sylvia Cooper seemed to say, ‘so we spent most of the time in our shit, the cows’ in-laws finding they stuttered.’ “‘What?’ I said...

...That must have been the summer of 2003.’ “‘Yes, we seared our arses on bits of plate, but soiled my cubism, I’m afraid.’ “‘I’m sorry?’ “‘We were near Carcassonne...

...It’s like listening to a play through a door which keeps opening and shutting...

...Retirement and the departure of the kids provide unaccustomed swaths of time when the thoughts of eternity we have comfortably held at bay during busy decades come crowding in...

...The conversations between Desmond and his father, who is also deaf, are excruciatingly funny in terms of discourse analysis but will induce pit-of-the-stomach anxiety in anyone who has had to deal with failing parents...