Word: vics
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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...
Reading Nice Work simply for the story is a waste of time. The characters are almost entirely one-dimensional. After introducing Vic and Robyn in the first section of the book, Lodge simply turns them loose--they almost automatically begin to lose their disrespect for one another, become friends and wind...
...beauty of Nice Work is that abstract literary concepts take on a real meaning in determining the lives and outlooks of the characters. Vic, for example, sees the feelings he develops for Robyn as "love," while Robyn says that love is "a rhetorical device," a "bourgeois fallacy" and a "literary conjob." It's just another word used to exploit people...
Lodge sets up a neat tension in the novel between the analytical literary world of Robyn, who doesn't believe that anything exists beyond text, and the bottom-line-conscious world of Vic, where only real things matter...