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‘A superb demonstration of the fact that a serious professional criticism can be focused close a genuine creative career, that the two activities are not distinct but lie in one field. That field requires all the resources of intelligence, moral humanity and logic: and these are the qualities that come out in this book in full measure. ‘ Malcolm Bradbury, New Society
‘We are conscious of ourselves as unique, historic individuals, living together in societies by virtue of certain common assumptions and methods of communication; we are conscious that our sense of identity, of happiness and unhappiness, is defined by small things as well as large; we seek to adjust our lives, individually and communally, to some order or system of values which, however, we know is always at the mercy of chance and contingency. It is this sense of reality which realism imitates; and it seems likely that the latter will survive as long as the former.’ – David Lodge, The Novelist at the Crossroads
The Novelist at the Crossroads contains some of the sharpest and most insightful pieces of David Lodge’s literary criticism, spanning the topics of fiction and Catholicism, modernism and utopia. From the titular essay, where Lodge defends a critical pluralism, to the concluding chapter where he identifies three types of critic – the ‘academic’, the ‘creative writer’ and the ‘freelancer’ - the essays exhibit Lodge’s acknowledgement of human beings as fragile yet resourceful and are shot through with a characteristic liberal humanism.
The most revealing parts of the book, however, are Lodge’s critical appraisals of writers as diverse as Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, William Burroughs, Samuel Beckett , HG Wells and John Updike. The book also includes Lodge’s short story, The Man Who Wouldn’t Get Up.