Word: vic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Through a university exchange scheme, she is assigned to spend one day a week as the "shadow" of Vic Wilcox, the managing director of a Rummidge engineering firm and a man who doesn't know--or care--that such a thing as literary theory exists...
Despite her field of expertise, Robyn doesn't know the first thing about industry. At one point, when touring a factory, Robyn has to ask Vic what a foundry is. And when she arrives at the factory for the first time, she naively expects it to be something out of a Victorian novel; "Where are the chimneys?" she asks...
Lodge takes care to keep these two evenly matched, each as disconcertingly perceptive and sweetly ridiculous as the other. Sexually, it is Robyn who is the lighthearted aggressor and Vic who, after spending a single night with her, turns into a love-sick calf and begins making alarming declarations about leaving his "podge" of a wife. Robyn, ever the teacher, expounds poststructuralist literary theory to him in bed, explaining that what he mistakes for love is merely a rhetorical device, a bourgeois fallacy. "Haven't you ever been in love, then?" he asks. "When I was younger," she replies...
Bright as its comedy is, Nice Work takes place within a sort of psychological smog spread by England's economy. All the characters, whether they know it or not, are indirect victims of Thatcherism -- Robyn because of the cuts in public spending that have ravaged her university's budget; Vic because of Rummidge's desperate rust-belt competition, which causes his firm to be taken over and him to get the sack; even Robyn's lover Charles because of the post-Big Bang financial speculations that lure him from academe and leave him adrift. This theme weighs a bit heavily...
...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...