SOURCE: “Aromatherapy and Kierkegaard,” in Cross Currents, Vol. 46, No. 1, Spring, 1996, pp. 130-3.

In the following review, Gaffney offers a positive evaluation of Lodge's novel Therapy.

Most of David Lodge’s earlier novels involve academics as the principle subjects. In The British Museum Is Falling Down, Changing Places, Small World, Nice Work, and Paradise News he proved himself a master teacher and a sparkling parodist of the academy. Adept both at enabling the general reader to comprehend the academic enterprise and at spoofing professorial pretensions, Lodge has produced fiction in which imaginary lives are palpably real. His stories about English and American dons are more convincing than earnest biographies by scholars about scholars—or than the even more earnest autobiographies of scholars about their stuffy and pretentious lives.

Alfred Kazin once noted that there are two radically different kinds of autobiography. The first sheds light on history; it enables...