[In the following review of Therapy, Korn finds Lodge's satire generally entertaining, but concludes that Lodge's attempt to make light of Kierkegaard's existential philosophy is unsuccessful.]

Asked by one of his various healers (the cognitive behaviour therapist, as it happens) to compile a list of the good and bad things in his life, balding, fifty-eight-year-old-in-1993 Laurence “Tubby” Passmore has no problem with the left-hand column: he is scriptwriter to a successful sit com, consequently rich, apparently healthy, his marriage stable, his children out of his hair, he has a nice car (after inexplicable difficulty in deciding to buy it), and a nice house in second-city Rummidge, not to mention a flat in London, where he spends quality time (asexually and therefore without threatening item four) with nice tolerant Amy, who has her own agenda as well as her own therapist. With the other side of the balance sheet he has more trouble: all he can come up with is “feel unhappy most of the time”.

Clearly the list of blessings, not unlike Job’s, is vulnerable to a late-mid-life spiritual emptiness rite-of-passage novel, technically a Pinfold. The health goes first: Laurence’s knee is the site of mysterious pangs; these continue even after surgery, as is the way of metaphorical pangs, and lead to loss of sexual potency, a frequent complication of knee problems in Pinfold subjects. Younger novelists, in early-mid-life spiritual emptiness rite-of-passage novels, often report similar symptoms, but in their case it is due to fall-out; in Laurence’s age group it is caused by Weltschmerz, and cannot be helped by acupuncture nor aromatherapy, which he has on Fridays, nor by surgery. His knee operation is performed by a Mr Nizar, which enables Passmore to make a joke (“Knees R us”). Unreconstructed commentators might say it gives Lodge a chance to make such a joke. The Nizarness of Mr Nizar is not otherwise portrayed. Amy’s psychoanalyst is a Hungarian named Kiss.

So why has wretched “Tubby” Passmore become a sounding brass and a tinkling symbol? Can it be because he has not charity? But he has: he has paid a thousand pounds for a special cheque-book to optimize the effectiveness of his charity (“Of course I could afford to give much more”) and is quite decent to Grahame, who sleeps in his doorway in Charing Cross Road. One of Laurence’s few endearing characteristics is that he likes to look things up. (It is wonderful how much material there is in a good dictionary.) Unfortunately, Amy idly uses the word Angst, and quite soon Laurence is up to his elbows, or at any rate his popliteal crease, in Søren Kierkegaard. He begins a masterclass in Dread.

This is deepened by trouble at t’sit-com, as you might say: longstanding, long-suffering wife, mainstay of plot, wishes to go elsewhere. At which point, by one of those parallelisms that make fiction stranger than fiction, Laurence’s wife Sally, a figure who has never been very distinct, at any rate not to Laurence, tells him she wants a separation. Actually she had told him earlier that evening, but he didn’t hear, being in the middle of explaining Kierkegaard at the time.

The second section of [Therapy] deals with Laurence’s response to the loss of the loved object, less philosophical than Søren’s. A comically misdirected burst of jealousy (towards his wife’s tennis coach) is followed by a swift tour of all his female acquaintances to see if they want to take over her sexual chores. Several disasters ensue: with Amy, on an improbable dirty weekend in Gran Canaria; in Los Angeles with Stella, who had expressed a passing fancy to him one evening several years earlier, and then with an unattached friend of hers; with his new script assistant in Copenhagen, where the ghost of Kierkegaard hilariously intrudes.

There is an entertaining medley of narrative voices in this section, but if we think we are escaping Laurence Passmore’s gloomy interior, we are deceived.

Now, Laurence digs deeper, locating the root of evil in his betrayal of his calf love, Maureen, whose Catholic and virgin scruples he treated disobligingly in 1951. This is the warmly remembered landscape of austerity Britain and the sexual austerity of adolescence, which Lodge wrote of in Out of the Shelter (1970, in mutilated form; restored 1985). He pursues the adult Maureen, hot for absolution, and runs her to earth on a foot-slogging pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. This does wonders for his knee, and his peace of mind. The purification through loss which Kierkegaard speaks of so highly is brought about with a satisfactory series of ironies.

No book by David Lodge is ever without incidental pleasures. There is an effective narrative trick I don’t recall having played on me before. And there are plenty of good jokes and crowd-pleasing editorials about BritRail, the NHS, porno visiting cards in telephone kiosks: a debilitating excess of topicality. At best, he catches the essence of someone in a word, as with the prescient throwaway on page 47 (“waving discreetly to Stephen Fry, who was just leaving”); at worst, he waffles like a stand-up satirist in a thin week for sleaze.

But the problem is the suitability of Scandinavian Christian Existentialism for extended comic treatment: not that Lodge doesn’t extract fun from the incongruities of it, not that he doesn’t nudge the reader to believe that the book is the therapy it describes. “The most dreadful thing that can happen to a man”, says Kierkegaard, “is to become ridiculous in his own eyes in a matter of central importance.”

Well, no actually. The worst thing that can happen to a man is to see his children butchered by the Interahamwe. Or to be unable to prevent his children dying of famine. This probably does not make him feel ridiculous, though it may have similar effects on his manhood. Like the path to salvation, like the dark night of the soul itself, the book can be a little slow-moving in places. But if David Lodge (who was fifty-eight in 1993) had a bet with himself that he could write a funny novel which would quote extensively from Fear and Trembling, The Concept of Dread, and Either/Or, he should probably pay up.