Malcolm in the Middle

...The six novels Bradbury wrote are Eating People Is Wrong (1959), Stepping Westward (1965), The History Man (1975), Rates of Exchange (1983), Dr...

...Petersburg, guest of Catherine the Great as she attempts to remake the city and Russia according to Enlightenment principles and to cinch her ascen-dance—as rivals are tortured in the background...

...In the late 1980s, he summed up his career by noting that he had managed to complete only four novels and a volume of short stories in twenty-five years...

...Bradbury replies that the graduate student has hit on "the vexed issue of the well-known writer 'Bodge.' A great many people ask each of us if we are the other and this has grown extremely confusing to the one or both of us...

...Bradbury then writes up the whole of the professor's story in nothing but description and dialogue—which is to say, the story imitates the dehumanizing thesis of the professor by excluding any inner selves...

...After graduate work in the United States, he received his doctorate in American Studies from the University of Manchester...

...Thus, there is a politician, a philosopher, a professor of literature, and a carpenter...

...about the visits of Franklin and Jefferson to Diderot just after the American Revolution...

...In Rates of Exchange, another tour de force, Bradbury takes a linguist to a fictional Eastern bloc country, and invents both the fractured English of the populace and its native "Slakan," a pastiche of several European languages...

...Indeed, Bradbury's novels tend toward rambling plots and take on the air of shaggy-dog stories—unhurried expeditions through the absurdities of life in general and modern life in particular...

...If so please tell me in your letter, and give me a full bibliography of your writings, under all your names...

...In The History Man, his masterpiece, a history professor uses his swinging, left-wing credentials not to liberate the minds of his students (through the liberal arts) but to make them his slaves, mentally and sexually...

...about the French love for Louisiana...

...Then" is "October" (i.e...

...The professor has written a trendy book that claims modern man is only a set of conditioned reflexes and thus possesses no private self...

...The hero of the novel has his glass refilled by "a shortish dark-haired man," Lodge, "standing nearby with a bottle of champagne in his hand...

...Perhaps you are also T Hardy, M. Beer-bohm, T. Sharpe, and H. Jacobson...

...Criminale (1992), and the volume he finished just before his death, To the Hermitage, which has now been published in America...

...When his protagonist is asked by a Swedish diva (she who sings verses of Eugene Onegin as a type of conversation) who Diderot was, Bradbury cheekily has him tell her the highlights: Well, in a word: French philosophe, the son of a knife-maker in Langres in Burgundy...

...Instead we must go back to the early days of the novel, long before the Victorians got hold of it...

...Here is material that is "novel"—a cabinet of curiosities, as it were...

...All have English academic characters in them—who often seem to travel in Eastern Europe—and the first three are entirely about university life...

...In Unsent Letters—an acerbic collection of fictional letters, the sort of letters one wishes one had the nerve to send— Bradbury receives a request from an importunate graduate student in Germany, "My professor hints me that you and David Lodge are the same person...

...To the Hermitage is not satisfactory as a novel, if by "novel" we mean the classic form of fictional prose with a plot in which character is examined and people change in the course of undergoing adversity...

...Bradbury lacks Lodge's gift of keeping the reader riveted with page-turning plots and sharply realized characters...

...Luckily, Bradbury's first graduate student was Ian McEwan, who insisted upon turning in stories as well as analytical papers for the course and who went on to win many prizes, including a Booker prize in 1998...

...about the missing books of Diderot's library, which—as a form of patronage—Catherine bought and had transported to St...

...He Margaret Boerner teaches English at Villanova University...

...Here is a digression about Sterne's reburial two hundred years after he died...

...He was going to be a priest, but he married a seamstress...

...BY MARGARET BOERNER The novelist Malcolm Bradbury died last winter, succumbing at the age of sixty-eight to a lifelong heart defect so serious that as a child he was featured in the British medical association's journal, the Lancet...

...Bradbury is in such virtuoso form," Anatole Broyard remarked of the novel, "that he can even make you enjoy an entire book in which the majority of the characters speak various degrees of broken English...

...Though Bradbury's prose is much better than Lodge's (which is often pedestrian and colorless), what stands out is his acute observation of the range of human, particularly academic, foolishness...

...Shortly before his death, he had been knighted for "services to British letters"—which must have amused him, since his father was a railway worker and his parents' one bookshelf held only the Bible, Pilgrim's Progress, a railway timetable, and "a very anxious book on etiquette, explaining how to address correctly the dukes and bishops we somehow never seemed to meet...

...In short, Bradbury has garnered unfamiliar bits and pieces of the culture that was planted during the Enlightenment...

...Went to Paris, worked as a hack and teacher, wrote a funny dirty little novel called The Indiscreet Jewels...

...Bradbury and Lodge frequently got letters meant for the other, and in Small World, Lodge makes the two of them into peripheral characters at an MLA book party in New York City...

...It makes for something of a rambling mess...

...The union official on the team is "tall, Nordic, beautiful," and wears denim overalls "plastered with all the usual messages of concerned protest—against air, water, earth, fire, food, smoking, cars, cattle, men...

...All of these are set in two periods of history...

...Traveled to Petersburg in 1773....Died suddenly of an apoplexy while eating an apricot at his own dinner table, 31 July 1784...

...wrote two more novels before his death...

...Petersburg after his death...

...Petersburg just as the Communists in Russia are undertaking a coup against the parliament, resulting in Yeltsin's final ascendance—a coup attempt that flickers on television sets in the background of the story...

...Bradbury conceded that "it may seem a slow record," but then I have been a critic, reviewer, and professor of American studies too, as well as a regular writer for television....My basic themes, though, remain the same: the conflict between liberal humanism and the harsh systems and behaviorism of the modern world, and the tragic implications, which, however, I believe must be expressed in comic form...

...Wrote the big book that changed the world [the Encyclopedia...

...about drunken Finland's winters...

...All right," said the shortish man, "but I daresay people will still get us mixed up...

...But a charming one—if only because we can glimpse in this last novel the child who once perused everything from train timetables to etiquette books...

...A "tallish dark-haired man smoking a pipe," Bradbury, was saying in an English accent, "If I can have Eastern Europe, you can have the rest of the world...

...Bradbury himself was writing fiction...

...The writing crackles with Bradbury's mordant wit: Years of wandering the frontiers of the transgressive postmodern imagination have taught me what its key words mean...

...Gregorian November) 1773, when Denis Diderot travels to St...

...But Lodge and Bradbury actually write different sorts of novels...

...Conceptual' means: We haven't thought about it much, but we're cool, we'll stay cool, and something will happen to which we can add the name of art...

...His teaching appointments finally took him to the new University of East Anglia, at the edge of the English fens in Norwich, where, with the novelist Angus Wilson, he set up England's first course in creative writ-ing—a course thought too touchy-feely and American for serious, analytical, British universities...

...Bradbury claims that Lodge "gets my telephone calls, and I get his telephone bills...

...Postmodern" means: Guess what, we managed to get a corporate sponsor to pay for it...

...For this reason, Bradbury was often confused with David Lodge, also a professor and critic, and the writer of such classic academic comedies as Changing Places and Small World...

...The philosopher is Jack-Paul Verso, who wears a baseball cap that says "I love deconstruction" and is author of The Feminists' Wittgenstein...

...about Sweden's humorless, obedient, clean, smoke- and alcohol-free society...

...Good at books and bad at games, Bradbury survived the boisterous world of the English working-class life...

...Now" is October 1993, when members of a seminar on Diderot travel from Stockholm to St...

...about where Descartes is buried...

...Chapters in the book alternate between "Now" and "Then...

...To the Hermitage is similarly inventive, taking as its model Tristram Shandy, the eighteenth-century classic in which Laurence Sterne, as Bradbury's narrating professor puts it, "used his transverse zig-zaggery to break every rule of the new form so rightly called 'the novel.'" Although Bradbury cannot rival the whimsicality of Sterne, he keeps up a smart pace of asides, colloquies, encyclopedic interpolations on history, snatches of verse from Eugene Onegin, and critical theory...

...A diva is on the Diderot project because the seminar is attempting to recreate the skills needed for those who contributed to Diderot's original encyclopedia...