Therapy: A Novel.

Therapy, A Novel, by David Lodge (Viking, 324 pp., $21.95)

DAVID LODGE's new novel is only partly about therapy. Mostly it is therapy for those, like its hero, Tubby Passmore, who are experiencing the various "Internal Derangements" attendant upon advancing age. This seems to be the season for male-menopause novels from Britain, but Lodge covers slightly different territory from that of Martin Amis's more spectacular but less satisfying book, The Information. Tubby is 58, not 40 as the heroes of Amis's novel are, and his belated "mid-life crisis" has none of the apocalyptic overtones of theirs. Instead, it is a quietly and comically desperate grasping at some accommodation with God and guilt and marriage and mortality which has much more the feel of real life about it.

It also has some of the freshness and humor of Lodge's earlier novels, such as Changing Places (1975) and How Far Can You Go? (1980), and it re-traverses some of the ground covered by the latter's witty exploration of the theme of growing up Catholic in the 1950s. Strangely, although Lodge is the professor (at the University of Birmingham), it is Amis who has the more academic style. Lodge's prose does not turn up so many nuggets of verbal gold, but it is less self-conscious, more of a consistent pleasure to read.

Here, for example, is how Tubby, the writer-creator of a TV sitcom, describes himself watching a videotape of arthroscopic surgery on his knee, as performed by a Levantine doctor called Nizar:

It was a brightly lit, colored, circular image, like looking through the porthole of a submarine with a powerful searchlight. "There it is, you see!" cried Nizar. All I could see was what looked like a slim silvery eel biting chunks out of the soft underside of a shellfish. The little steel jaws snapped viciously and fragments of my knee floated off to be sucked out by the aspirator. I couldn't watch for long. I always was squeamish about violence on television.

Not only is such prose unobtrusively sharp and visual, focused on its subject rather than its own brilliance, it is also just right for the voice of Tubby, who is as likable a character as a first-person narrator has to be to take us through an entire novel.

His TV show, called The People Next Door, is about the complexities of class differences in Britain as revealed in the relationship between a progressive-minded but rather hidebound middle-class family and their neighbors, who are of inferior social origins but more laid back and genuine. Tubby is himself the son of a tram-driver from south London who left school at 16 but who, since he has been successful, has started to be curious about intellectual matters. He is forever looking things up, especially words. His mild self-consciousness about his origins comes out in a slightly finicky but endearing concern for correct English.

He has also gone in for therapy in a big way. He goes to a woman called Alexandra for cognitive behavior therapy (an alternative talking therapy to classical psychoanalysis), to a physiotherapist, an aromatherapist, and an acupuncturist. In the past he has even practiced something called "Inversion Therapy" for his baldness, which consists "of hanging upside down for minutes on end to make the blood rush to your head." He juggles his various therapists like rival lovers whom he doesn't want to know about one another, and retains inconsequential odds and ends of advice, none of them of much use in allaying his chronic depression. One day he interrupts his therapy with Alexandra in order to show her how to blow her nose properly: "It's the one thing about yoga that's really stayed with me. How to blow your nose."

Tubby brings to his various therapies the engaging perspective of the simple, the down-to-earth, and the intellectually unpretentious. "Alexandra thinks I'm suffering from lack of self- esteem. She's probably right, though I read in the paper that there's a lot of it about. There's something like an epidemic of lack of self-esteem in Britain at the moment. Maybe it has something to do with the recession." He himself, however, is doing all right. His TV show is a hit and he has plenty of money, so he is a little at a loss when he has to make up a list for Alexandra of the good things and bad things in his life:

Under the "Good" column I wrote:

1. Professionally successful.

2. Well-off.

3. Good health.

4. Stable marriage.

5. Kids successfully launched in adult life.

6. Nice house.

7. Great car.

8. As many holidays as I want.

Under the "Bad" column I wrote just one thing:

1. Feel unhappy most of the time.

A few weeks later I added another item:

2. Pain in knee.

The vague sense of existential angst is genuine enough, but it is also associated with the class dimension of the novel. For the kinds of neuroses that Tubby finds himself developing, and perhaps his therapeutic obsession itself, are among the accoutrements of wealth. Just as he drives a car that he calls "the Richmobile" and indulges himself in expensive Italian loafers, so he turns not only to therapy but to its most top-drawer intellectual antecedents. In particular, he takes Kierkegaard as the explicator of his psychic distress. Nothing but the best for him now, even as he seems to be coming unglued.

He stumbles on Kierkegaard as he is looking things up. At first he finds him hard going -- "dead boring and very difficult to follow" -- but he soon begins to recognize himself and even his fellow Britons in Kierkegaard's description of the unhappy man, caught between hope and remembrance. For him the moment of happy remembrance is England's winning the soccer World Cup in 1966. Since then, "We've become a nation of unhappy hopers." At other times, Kierkegaard offers Tubby food for more idle thought, as when he quotes from The Seducer's Diary and thinks of his philandering agent, Jake Endicott: "Perhaps that's how Jake pulls the birds." But Tubby actually seems to get something out of Kierkegaard, too, to assuage his dissatisfaction with his own life. In particular, he comes to a new appreciation of his marriage -- just before his wife announces that she is leaving him.

At this point in the novel, the first-person narrative is apparently discontinued, and we are treated to a series of "dramatic monologues" in the voices of various people involved in Tubby's life at this stage, including his wife. From these we are able to piece together an account of the breakup and Tubby's desperate attempts to do something about it with all the comic and even farcical elements intact. Having read through them, however, we learn that they have all been written by Tubby himself -- as part of his therapy. They are an amazing tribute not only to his dramatic skills (The People Next Door must be quite a show) and his self-knowledge but also to Lodge's masterly manipulation of irony and point of view. Tubby's clear-sightedness extends not only to the breakup of his marriage and the threatened loss of his TV show but also to his increasing obsession with Kierkegaard, whom he has begun to identify with his own conscience.

He thinks it owing to Kierkegaard when his conscience begins to nag at him with guilty memories of his behavior toward his first girlfriend, Maureen Kavanagh, whom he knew when they were schoolchildren in the early 1950s in south London. As part of his therapy he also writes a touching "Memoir" of their relationship, evocative of youth and innocence and of a happier time both in his life and in the life of the nation. This effort inspires him to go and search for Maureen, who is now married to his teenage rival. He finds her engaged in "a kind of therapy" of her own -- a pilgrimage on foot to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, mourning the loss of a son. It is Tubby's arrival that enables Maureen to complete her pilgrimage when she is on the point of giving up, and it is his attentions that assuage her losses, including the loss of a breast to cancer. The description of the virginal Tubby's teenage encounter with the same breast is a particularly memorable part of the "Memoir."

As they are coming out of the cathedral at Compostela, whose splendors Tubby compares to the shabby little Kierkegaard museum in Copenhagen, he wonders "whether, if Kierkegaard had been a Catholic, they would have made him a saint by now, and built a basilica over his grave. He would make a good patron saint of neurotics." The suggestion is of a kind of absurd synthesis of Kierkegaard and the remains of Maureen's Irish Catholicism, which once drove her and Tubby apart but now serves to reunite them. That the two of them -- along with Maureen's dry old stick of a husband, a retired civil servant who regards his life (rightly) as having been wasted -- are at last prepared to go off on a pilgrimage to Copenhagen together may seem an implausibly happy ending for people who have been so battered and broken by their middle age, but it worked for me. This is a wonderful novel.