SOURCE: “Holding the Floor,” in Times Literary Supplement, October 23, 1992, p. 23.

In the following unfavorable review of The Art of Fiction, Kemp finds shortcomings in the volume's lack of focus and consistency.

“This is a book for people who prefer to take their Lit Crit in small doses, a book to browse in, and dip into”, David Lodge declares in his introduction to The Art of Fiction. It is also a book—that description could, unfortunately, be construed as confessing—strung together from short newspaper pieces, lacking any guiding structure, and fairly shallow in content.

What makes this a particular pity is that its intention is admirable: to discuss aspects of the novel in a manner accessible and attractive to the “general reader”. What is presented to that reader between Chapter One (“Beginning”) and Chapter Fifty (“Ending”), though, is a random-looking miscellany, with Lodge skipping, apparently at whim, from...