SOURCE: “Right, Here Goes,” in Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 277, No. 4, April, 1996, pp. 119-24.

In the following review of Therapy, Stossel provides an overview of Lodge's fiction and career, and discusses recurring motifs and postmodern devices in his novels.

For some years now literature has been under siege by “theory” in its various incarnations: deconstructionism, post-structuralism, Marxism, cultural criticism, and historicism, among other esoteric isms. Although most of the reading public continues to approach books and literature in much the same way that it has for at least a century or two, reading for plot, character and meaning, anyone even dimly aware of the tenor of current academic literary criticism knows that literature has been cut adrift from its ontological moorings. Plot? A flimsy technical device, used to propagate consumerist cant. Character? A bourgeois myth, an illusion created to reinforce capitalist domination. Meaning? No such thing; post-structuralism has shown that...