SOURCE: “Vacation or Vocation,” in Times Literary Supplement, September 27, 1991, p. 25.

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

David Lodge’s latest novel [Paradise News] is a very hodge-podge affair. Fictional kinds and methods clash brusquely in it. Tonally, it is an unresolved mixture of the earnest and the comic. It reads as if the satirico-autobiographical Roman Catholic Bildungsroman mode of How Far Can You Go? were bumping noisily and lumpily around in an old kitchen blender with the academic-travelogue matter of Changing Places and Small World, and refusing quite to blend.

Bernard Walsh, aged forty-four, is the latest in Lodge’s lengthy line of screwed-up Catholic boys who will, or might just, be saved by a guilt-free screw. A spoiled priest from a South London Irish family who lectures in negative theology at an interdenominational theological college in the Midlands city of Rummidge...