HAPPILY EVER AFTER...

Thinks...
David Lodge
Viking, $24.95, 342 pp.

Why does anyone ever write a novel? When a novelist asks himself that question, watch out: the answer may take the form of a novel. So it is in David Lodge's latest. Helen Reed, a novelist co-starring in it, worries in her journal: "Are we in danger of accumulating a fiction-mountain--an immense quantity of surplus novels, like the butter mountains and milk lakes of the EEC?...Of course one can argue that there's a basic human need for narrative: it's one of our fundamental tools for making sense of experience--has been, back as far as you can go in history. But does this, I ask myself, necessarily entail the endless multiplication of new stories?"

Helen's question is not so much why anyone ever wrote a novel but why anyone would, just now, want to write yet another. Does the accumulation of successive novels accrue in any way? Is there any other good that the goodness of a good novel might seem to serve, some research project to which a novelist like her might aspire to contribute?

If there were, then it would be a research project in human consciousness, Lodge suggests through the confrontation he has astutely contrived for Helen. Ralph Messenger, the cognitive scientist who is her co-star and campus colleague, reminisces about a certain Ludmila on a certain well-remembered evening in Prague when "all the time hovering over our conversation, like 'Thinks' bubbles in a cartoon, were our respective speculations about how the evening would end. 'Does he want to sleep with me?' and 'Does she expect me to sleep with her?'"

Ralph is reminiscing into his tape recorder in an attempt to capture, purely for research purposes, the bubbly stream of his own consciousness. What he is engaging in is not, as he sees it, fiction but science, yet scientific ambition in his chosen area--the study of human consciousness--is turning him into a novelist malgre lui.

In Thinks..., scientist Ralph on his tape recorder alternates with novelist Helen in her journal and with magister ludi Lodge giving us, as it were, the facts of this fiction. Imagine a melody of recurring triplets as in, say, Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring, and you will have both the structure and the lilting, processional bounce of this book.

Ralph is an atheist of the intermittently indignant sort. Helen is a lapsed Catholic of the intermittently wistful sort. Lodge, between them, smiles at the comedy of indignation and wistfulness; but this is a novel far less about belief and unbelief in God than about the same in fiction as an irreplaceable tool of human self-knowledge. There happens, just now, to be something of a dialogue between religion and cognitive science. Cambridge University Press has announced a book titled Religion in Mind: Cognitive Perspectives on Religious Belief, Ritual, and Experience. But Lodge, who is rather too automatically called a Catholic novelist, has other fish to fry this time out. He takes his cognitive science seriously enough that the acknowledgments page includes a bibliography with twenty-some titles, but none has much of a theological edge.

The edge here, and it is a subtly cutting edge, is located in the contrast between Ralph, who though undeceived about his rakish past is somehow not in possession of it, and Helen, who though deceived about hers (she learns only after her beloved husband's death that he was a serial adulterer), is somehow in possession of it after all. Language makes the difference. When Ralph suggests that they exchange his tapes for her journal, Helen declines, and Lodge's point is made.

The alternation of high and low is familiar in much if not most contemporary fiction, but an American reading this English novel of ideas will experience the familiar alternation with a distinct jolt, for Thinks... is peppered with English slang: snog, swot, stroppy, chuffed, tup, chivvy, gobsmacked, canoodle, and many another. English in another way are the literary imitations turned in by Helen's students on the theme, borrowed from cognitive science, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" We are offered one by M*rt*n Am*s, another by S*lm*n R*shd**, and so forth. These parodies, and a second set of writing exercises interrupting the triplet structure, are wickedly clever, if barely plausible for student writers, but one wonders whether Lodge isn't settling a few scores.

Yet what is most admirable about this book is also what is most amiable about it--namely, Lodge's way of tucking his characters in at night, their sins forgiven, and their circumstances mercifully ameliorated. A contrast is sometimes drawn between the classic British detective story (think Agatha Christie) and the classic American detective story (think Dashiell Hammett). In the former, order is restored after disruption; in the latter, order is revealed by disruption to be disorder. But at this point, it is surely the American alternative that has triumphed, triumphed so completely and in so many different artistic media that the exposure of order as disguised disorder has become the most tiresome of cliches. Lodge breaks with this cliche in the postmodern manner--that is, by flouting the modernist canon according to which if we have been there and done that, we must never go there and do that again. Like decoration in postmodernist architecture, the passe/outre happy ending of a Lodge novel is unabashed, undisguised, artistically self-conscious, and--for all those reasons--only the more satisfying as entertainment. Lodge risks being called merely clever just as certain postmodern architects risk being called merely amusing, but the best of the architects know just what they are doing, and so does this clever, yes, and endlessly amusing, but also sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued novelist.

Jack Miles is the author of Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God, forthcoming in the fall from Knopf, Heinemann (UK), Laffont (France), and Hanser (Germany).