DEAF SENTENCE: A NOVEL
BY DAVID LODGE
Harvill Secker, 320pp, £17.99 BOTH PHILIP ROTH AND JM Coetzee have lately published novels about elderly writers facing up to failing health and their own mortality, while at th
e same time becoming confusedly involved with attractive young women. In Exit Ghost, Philip Roth's hero Nathan Zuckerman, aged 71, left both impotent and incontinent by a prostate operation, fantasises a romance with a beautiful woman of 30. Roth himself was 74 when it was published. In Diary of a Bad Year, JM Coetzee's alter ego "JC", 72, becoming a bit doddery, hires a sexy 29-year-old half-Filipino to be his secretary and becomes greatly affected by her. Coetzee was 67 when the book came out.
Now we have David Lodge's take on ageing and infirmity. Lodge himself is 73 but as he told us in his last book, The Year of Henry James, he is "famous among my acquaintances for not changing much in appearance and looking younger than my years. (It is just the luck of the genetic draw.)"
The protagonist of Deaf Sentence, Desmond Bates, is just coming up to "the usual retirement age of 65" – but took early retirement four years ago because of his growing deafness. Lodge himself suffers from this affliction, as he disclosed in The Year of Henry James – "in recent years I have become quite deaf, and am obliged to wear a hearing aid in both ears".
Lodge's novels tend to follow a formula: crossing between campus and town life, nodding to his Catholic background – discussing his main topic directly by making it also the main character's area of expertise. He plays knowledgeably with different forms of narrative, as befits the author of such critical studies as Language of Fiction and The Modes of Modern Writing, but resorts to rather crassly symbolic scenes and events.
Deaf Sentence is written by Desmond Bates sometimes in the third person as formal fiction but more often in the first, as "some kind of journal, or notes for an autobiography, or perhaps just occupational therapy". But, in either voice, it remains a pretty straightforward account of his life over a few months, between November 2006 and March 2007.
His father dies; his first grandchild is born; he becomes entangled with a seductive but dangerously nutty American graduate student in her twenties; he visits a Center Parc (disguised as "Gladeworld"), which goes badly, and Auschwitz, which makes him value life anew.
The main topic here, though, remains deafness, described from the inside and thus presumably directly reporting Lodge's own experience. This material is so interesting that the reader sometimes wishes Lodge had simply written a proper memoir of deafness, rather than chivvying it up into fiction.
However, he has made Desmond into a professor of linguistics, with a first degree in English language and literature, so he is expertly equipped to give a precise account of his impairment, while citing Hardy and Larkin. He has even formulated his own syndrome, the Bates Reflex, by which "users develop an unconscious hostility towards their hearing aids which causes them to 'punish' these devices by carelessly allowing their batteries to run down".
At a party, Desmond pretends to be able to understand what "a young woman in her late twenties with bright blue eyes, a pale smooth complexion, shoulder-length flaxen hair centreparted and straight-cut, and a naturally shapely figure" is saying, though he can't make out a word. Alex Loom turns out to be writing a thesis on the stylistic analysis of suicide notes and soon inveigles him into trouble, secretly putting a pair of knickers into his coat pocket and sending him an elaborate invitation to spank her for having defaced a library book. "I must have read this through half a dozen times and every time I had an erection," Desmond records, a bit too keenly.
But nothing much happens and this non-affair is just a vestigial rump of the transatlantic campus romances of Lodge's earlier novels. Desmond is far more preoccupied with being physically up to making love to his wife before falling asleep, a sad little home truth among the many prosaic miseries related here.
Deaf Sentence makes a curious comparison to the titanic raging against mortality in Roth and the pitiless severities of Coetzee. It is, like all Lodge's work, determinedly humdrum, doggedly describing routine and familiar humiliations in a level tone. Even at the end, there's no great vision. Desmond just resolves to "try to value the passing time" and then concludes bathetically: "I always learn something new at the lip-reading class."
The question remains what to call this new genre, in which elderly and ailing male novelists contrive still to imagine, if not actually enjoy, last flings with admiring young women. Exit goat, perhaps.
The full article contains 809 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
