Paradise News.

Paradise News, by David Lodge (Viking, 293 pp., $21)

DAVID LODGE is one of those prolific English novelists who finally make the lucrative transatlantic leap with their six or seventh novel. With the appearance of Small World in 1984 the American reading public became Lodge-conscious. Once they pick up on an Englishman like Lodge, moreover, American readers tend to remain loyal. This is probably because English novelists of moderate talent are so dependable. We know exactly what to expect from them, whereas it's anyone's guess what Roth or Mailer or Styron--authors who reinvent themselves with each new book--is going to do next.

Brand loyalty has its rewards. In Lodge's case, we can expect a comedy of manners set in a specific milieu (say, the English department of a university) which is thoroughly researched. Lodge's best novel, Changing Places (1975), was a hilarious sendup of modern academia which contained much absorbing information about the latest fads in literary criticism. His new novel, Paradise News, an account of a family errand that brings two Englishmen to the island of Oahu, has a similar wealth of detail about the vacation industry. Just as Sinclair Lewis had to set up a Bible-preaching school to get material for Elmer Gantry, so we can imagine Mr. Lodge hanging around travel agencies and Waikiki hospitality suites in order to get the details exactly right.

The story line of Paradise News is almost not worth mentioning. Bernard, an excommunicated English priest who has ceased to believe in God but still teaches theology, takes his father to visit a dying relative on Oahu. Once they are there, a minor family drama plays itself out. But when a buxom American matron crosses Bernard's path, the only question is, Can the former priest revive his long-suppressed libido?

The answer is on page 221: "'OK! OK! OK! Oh!' she gasped."

What brought Bernard to this pass, where it takes days of coaching on a hotel bed before he can join the ranks of adulterers? Readers of previous Lodge novels already have the answer: his Catholic upbringing. "Basically I was paralyzed with fear of Hell and ignorance of sex," Bernard informs us. Here we get to the heart of Lodge's "message,"to the extent that he has one. It is that sex, not religion, is redemptive. Just as every D.H. Lawrence novel must have a scene in which a repressed English woman trembles before the "dark beauty" of an illiterate peasant, so in Paradise News we know from the start that the lapsed Catholic priest is going to discover that priapic abandon beats the sacramental order any day.

To make sure that we don't take this flight from God to hedonism lightly, Bernard the theologian gives us pages of serious lectures about the impossibility of believing in any religious creed. Despite the dropping of names like Barth, Tillich, and Rahner, these arguments are about as sophisticated as those of anti-clerical journalists a hundred years ago who asked how anyone in an age of steam engines and telegraphs could believe in God.

Since this is a novel, however, Lodge can have it both ways: he can do his best to persuade the casual reader that there are good reasons for doubting the existence of God, while not having to worry that any competent authority will bother to expose his non-sequiturs and dubious premises because this is, after all, only fiction.

I don't want to make too much of Lodge's shallowness, because he succeeds in the primary task of the novelist, which is to entertain. But it's too bad that he has opted to go flopping along with the spirit of the age, which detracts from his powers as a satirist. The promotional literature accompanying my review copy makes the inevitable comparison with Waugh; but Waugh's comedy is of a much higher order, not least because he had a firmly traditional faith, in opposition to modern tendencies. Waugh's novels provide nourishment along with laughs, while the author of Paradise News is merely being clever.

Still, the novel moves along with a pleasurable hum; turning its pages is as easy as listening to light FM. Lodge's eye for comic detail also remains as sharp as ever. You can take Paradise News to the beach, skip the theological bits, and ponder the bittersweet observations of a sea resort where everyone is strenuously trying to have fun.

Mr. Johnston writes for NR, Commentary, and The American Spectator.