SOURCE: A review of Nice Work, in World Literature Today, Vol. 64, No. 3, Summer, 1990, p. 464.

In the following review, Quinlan offers a positive assessment of Nice Work.

“We have a lot of Anglophiles here,” Morris Zapp, chair of the English Department at Euphoria State, informs Robyn Penrose in a transatlantic phone conversation from his home in the Bay area. “It must be because we’re so far from England.” Indeed, the landscape of British academia is looking even bleaker now in 1986 than it did when Zapp first visited there—reluctantly—decades earlier in David Lodge’s Changing Places. That novel was the opening number in a trio of studies of the academic community that have proved to be both enormously entertaining and rather shrewd reports from the front lines of the profession itself. Now, in the third in the series, Mrs. Thatcher has imposed severe cuts on the university...