Word: worked
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Like its predecessors, Changing Places and Small World, Nice Work is both a novel and an ironic commentary on itself. Along the way, Lodge also manages to take a few jabs at the 19th century industrial novel, the state of 20th century literary criticism and the lyrics of pop singer Jennifer Rush...
...takes place in roughly the same universe as Lodge's prior two novels: the imaginary campus of Rummidge University in England. But unlike the two earlier works, which ranged over the entire globe, Nice Work confines itself almost entirely to the city of Rummidge, which, as the author explains, "occupies, for the purposes of fiction, the space where Birmingham is to be found on maps of the so-called real world...
...while Changing Places and Small "campus" novels, that description only half fits Nice Work. This novel concerns itself as much with the world of industry as with acadamia, as Lodge sets up a modern parallel to the world of 19th century industrial novels...
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...