Nice Work

By David Lodge

Viking Books

$18.95, 277 pp.

THERE are books. And there are books about books. In the most erudite of literary circles, people have even been known to write books about books about books. It uses up a lot of paper.

And then there are those conservation-minded writers who try to squeeze fiction, criticism and metacriticism into a single volume. Nice Work, the newest novel by the British writer and English professor David Lodge, is the result of just such an effort.

Like its predecessors, Changing Places and Small World, Nice Work is both a novel and an ironic commentary on itself. Along the way, Lodge also manages to take a few jabs at the 19th century industrial novel, the state of 20th century literary criticism and the lyrics of pop singer Jennifer Rush.

It all takes place in roughly the same universe as Lodge's prior two novels: the imaginary campus of Rummidge University in England. But unlike the two earlier works, which ranged over the entire globe, Nice Work confines itself almost entirely to the city of Rummidge, which, as the author explains, "occupies, for the purposes of fiction, the space where Birmingham is to be found on maps of the so-called real world."

And while Changing Places and Small "campus" novels, that description only half fits Nice Work. This novel concerns itself as much with the world of industry as with acadamia, as Lodge sets up a modern parallel to the world of 19th century industrial novels.

WHICH subject just so happens to be the specialty of Robyn Penrose, a radical feminist scholar who has a temporary teaching post at Rummidge.

Through a university exchange scheme, she is assigned to spend one day a week as the "shadow" of Vic Wilcox, the managing director of a Rummidge engineering firm and a man who doesn't know--or care--that such a thing as literary theory exists.

Despite her field of expertise, Robyn doesn't know the first thing about industry. At one point, when touring a factory, Robyn has to ask Vic what a foundry is. And when she arrives at the factory for the first time, she naively expects it to be something out of a Victorian novel; "Where are the chimneys?" she asks.

Reading Nice Work simply for the story is a waste of time. The characters are almost entirely one-dimensional. After introducing Vic and Robyn in the first section of the book, Lodge simply turns them loose--they almost automatically begin to lose their disrespect for one another, become friends and wind up in bed.

At this point Lodge simply pulls an ending out of a hat--every one gets saved. The novel simply falls back on what Robyn describes as the standard solutions of the Victorian novelist: legacy, marriage, emigration and death.

But the beauty of Nice Work is that abstract literary concepts take on a real meaning in determining the lives and outlooks of the characters. Vic, for example, sees the feelings he develops for Robyn as "love," while Robyn says that love is "a rhetorical device," a "bourgeois fallacy" and a "literary conjob." It's just another word used to exploit people.