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batrock 's review for:
Changing Places
by David Lodge
A lively predecessor to Small World, Changing Places is a story about two English professors doing an international University exchange which is a quarter over before they even get off the planes in their opposite number's country. This book isn't entirely good - the racial and sexual undertones of a paragraph set in a felon holding tank is particularly retrograde - but it is mostly entertaining and amusing. The men aren't entirely clean and the women are allowed independence and intelligence quite separate from the men in their lives.
Lodge also plays with structure, as when one chapter consists solely of newspaper headlines and another of only correspondence between the husbands and wives (including one reference to the death of the epistolary novel). This falters somewhat when Lodge transforms the final chapter into a film script so that he can get away without ending the book - but he did follow it up ten years later, I suppose.
I like Lodge and I don't mind saying so. If this was his breakout novel, then it's certainly deserving of bringing him into the public sphere.
Lodge also plays with structure, as when one chapter consists solely of newspaper headlines and another of only correspondence between the husbands and wives (including one reference to the death of the epistolary novel). This falters somewhat when Lodge transforms the final chapter into a film script so that he can get away without ending the book - but he did follow it up ten years later, I suppose.
I like Lodge and I don't mind saying so. If this was his breakout novel, then it's certainly deserving of bringing him into the public sphere.