Rating: 
Summary: Another fine book by the gentle humorist
Review: This is yet another book of Lodge's that I've read, for me his latest. And, again, I find his humor gently heartfelt, his guy-perspective identifiably familiar to me, and his craftsmanship assured. This is a more somber effort, about a man in mid-life neurosis, an artist at the end of his commercial rope, his lovable marriage at a sudden end. While it sustains a humor that derives from an understanding and ultimately lighthearted attitude towards the modern urban environment, and the distresses of the middle-age male, it also delves the intellectual and emotional depths that approach the shadowy landscape of despair. And Lodge does some showing off, in taking ont he voices of the women characters only to reveal the "author's" voice. And his style moves from Neil Simon-like one-liners to a more somber and perceptively introspective mode, as part of Passmore's journey towards a renewed maturity. Lodge does seem to flail a bit to find a resolution to these new depths and tone of his work, between the nostalgia of a first-love renewed and a still-loved but lost wife. He does not surrender to gross sentimentality. But the book does paint itself into a corner, in which only sentimentality of some sort is possible. Lodge is a most likeable writer. And one who respectfully confronts the male world with a smile.
Rating: 
Summary: Salvation or how to survive midlife crisis
Review: This review is about Therapy the latest Novel by David Lodge. Lodge was born in London in 1935. Today he is Honorary Professor of Modern English Literature at Birmingham and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He is well introduced as novelist and critic by several novels and books about literary criticism. His best-known novels are entertaining satires on academic life, e.g. Small World or Changeing Places, and his novel Nice Work is a hybrid of the campus novel with the 19th-century 'condition of England'tradition. Therapy's four parts are in the form of a journal with the exception of part two which seems to be a collection of authentic monologues containing statements, description and recorded conversation of people related to the main character. It turns out to be the journal of Laurence"Tubby" Passmore, a successful play-write.Tubby's is the only authentic viewpoint the reader gets.He researches works by Soeren Kierkegaard (1813-55), which helps him to find relief from his latent unhappiness by taking responsibility for himself and defining his individual needs and aims. The novel intelligently combines phenomena of modern life e.g. society's fashion to solve personal problems by physical treatment or the help of other people in general, with the philosophy of Kierkegaard, the founder of Existentialism. Kierkegaard rejected the spiritual authority of "organised ideologies" and emphasised the centrality of individual choice as tool to find fulfilment. What he meant is that the individual has to define and take its own reality with the attempt to realise it in its actual existence. Tubby has to learn this lesson and the reader accompanies him on this process by reading his journal. He writes frankly about common days idleness, e.g. taking pills due to make you fit for showing off at the Gym and other things done to be appreciated by our fellow beings. Therapy is not merely a novel to be read for entertainment. Its postmodern conception as well as its subject wants the reader to use his or her mental faculties to identify the developement of Tubby's consciousness.
Rating: 
Summary: Laugh out loud funny!
Review: Thoroughly enjoyable and very funny. As you turn the pages of Passmore's mid-life crisis, you will laugh, cry, empathise and sympathise with our hero. And just as you knew all along that he was a good bloke, the closing chapters prove it. Got to go for my aromatherapy now
Rating:
Summary: Therapy, anyone?
Review: what i loved about this book was that david lodge took a character that was worthy of contempt and made me sympathize with him...the story is a first person journal told by Laurence " Tubby " Passmore, with other dialogues from friends and and ex-wife. while tubby seems to have it all: a great job, a nice home, fancy car, a big bank account, and a loving wife, he feels empty; and then it all comes apart : his wife leaves him, telling him, she couldn't stand him, his job as a scriptwriter for a sitcom is catapulted into a state of flux and and he starts to doubt his sexual worth...so what does he do? dabbles in exstitentialism...without giving away the rest of the story, the book can serve as an introduction to kierkegaarde for the layman. tubby uses kierkegaarde-ian philosophy and applies it to his life, using it as his moral compass, to guide himself through his turmoil.... several twists happen: tubby befriends a homeless man named grahame, who sleeps on the porch of his london flat, and he goes in search of a lost love. this book tells about therapy in its many forms: writing,telling your soul to someone, or taking a journey to " find yourself " lodge takes a heady subject like exstitentialism and makes it souffle-light and easy to digest...
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