SOURCE: “Recycling Metafictions,” in New Statesman & Society, September 27, 1991, p. 53.

In the following review, Quinn offers an unfavorable assessment of Paradise News.

While transporting his characters to more exotic climes, David Lodge does not appear to have noticed just how small his own world has become. His latest novel, Paradise News, borrows its main hinge—cloistered academic visits new world and discovers a new self—from Changing Places, but that’s not the half of it. Lodge here is not revisiting old themes and motifs so much as recycling them. Readers who have delighted in his previous work—I count myself among them—may well come away from it with a bad case of déja vu.

The book opens at Heathrow, where Lodge assembles a motley package of holiday-makers all bound for Hawaii. The travel rep surveys the party with “an expression of mingled pity and contempt”, hardly...