Word: swallowable
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This type of self-criticism and analysis will be familiar to readers of Small World and Changing Places, as will the characters of Phillip Swallow and Morris Zapp, who both play cameo roles here...
...sneak the first assumption past the grader, then the rest is clear sailing. If he fails, he still gets a fair amount of credit for his irrelevant but fact-filled discussion of scientific progress in the 18th century. And it is amazing what some graders will swallow in the name of intellectual freedom...
...managers claim that Japanese guests fill up the tubs, leave the taps on, then pull out the drain plugs to ensure a constant flow of clear water. The result: heavy damage from the overflow flooding through carpets and cascading into rooms below. Says Geoffrey Gold, general manager of the Swallow International Hotel, where 20% of the guests are Japanese: "It got to the point where an average of one bathroom a day was flooded." Some hotels are warning Japanese guests that flooders will face fines; others have made a simple but costly technological adjustment: installing drains in bathroom floors...
...from academe and leave him adrift. This theme weighs a bit heavily on the book and keeps it from having quite the buoyancy and sparkle of Lodge's earlier campus novels, Small World and Changing Places. However, a pair of holdovers from those novels, the long-suffering Professor Philip Swallow and his American counterpart, the wheeler-dealer Morris Zapp, put in welcome minor appearances...
...more verve in academic settings than in his conscientiously worked-up factory scenes, and naturally so. He taught literature at the University of Birmingham from 1960 to 1987, and still holds an honorary chair there. But in either sphere his writing displays the wicked eye of a born satirist. Swallow's smile exposes teeth set at odd angles, "like tombstones in a neglected churchyard." A receptionist at Vic's factory strokes her platinum-blond hairdo "as if it were an ailing pet." This is a novel that lives up to its own billing: it's nice work...