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Country for Old MenDavid Lodge's touch wavers when the topic is aging.

By Peter D. KramerPosted Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2008, at 12:04 PM ET

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Meanwhile, the plotline that is meant to draw readers in surfaces only sporadically. Alex disappears for 50 pages at a time. When she re-emerges, her efforts to stir up some action seem desperate, as, finally, do Lodge's. Des deduces that Alex has defaced a library book, so she writes offering penitence. She invites Des to visit her apartment at a designated hour. A red bulb will light the living room. "You'll see me bent over the table, with my head on a cushion. I'll be naked from the waist down. Come up behind me and position yourself to spank my butt." Des is to hit hard and not stop if Alex cries out. And so on, in an enactment of a Viagra-induced fantasy.

Lodge the entertainer wants to hold our interest through titillation. But Lodge the realist knows that a young woman who makes this proposal might be mentally unstable. Alex is undertaking a stylistic analysis of suicide notes; the self-destructive thoughts include her own. And it seems she's conducted an affair with the university English chair whom she's now shaking down for a fellowship. How convenient—Alex is naughty, but not with Des. The plotline climaxes with a self-diagnosis and a threat, which I won't be a spoiler and spell out—though, given her dissertation topic, it's probably obvious. Both Des and the department head are relieved, although, to be fair, they assume that the siren has merely popped off to the States.

What is meant to get everyone off the hook—us as voyeurs, Des as a dirty old man—is the revelation that Alex is not so much depressed as manipulative. Alex's shortcomings allow for a tidy resolution: The chair may yet face his comeuppance, Des can put himself in Fred's good graces—and because Alex was crafty, no real harm's been done to her. But this plotline never sits right. I don't think it's merely my training as a psychiatrist that leads me to imagine that Alex could have used some help from her elders. Altogether, it never seems comfortable that a suicidal young woman should bear the comedic burden in a novel that is so sympathetic with old men's ruminations on death and disability.

Des's thoughts are crammed with the homey specifics that, in other Lodge novels, serve to provide verisimilitude: "I got my first hearing aid from the National Health Service, a rather clumsy device in two pieces, one about the size of a tangerine segment that fitted behind the ear, containing the microphone, amplifier, battery and controls, with a little transparent plastic tube attached which conveyed the sound to the other bit, a custom-made transparent mould seated in the ear." Des goes on to describe problems with batteries, volume controls, and earpieces that act like earplugs. But here, Lodge is not amassing details so that we'll enter the fictional trance and buy the outlandish sexual intrigue. He merely wants to talk about aging—seemingly, his own.

This tendency is familiar in the novels of fine writers' later years. In Ravelstein, Saul Bellow included an unnecessary account of his recovery from food poisoning. In Exit Ghost, Philip Roth conveys his response to George Plimpton's memorial service. Fiction becomes a portmanteau for discursive memoir about mortality.

Like Bellow, like Roth, if never at their level, Lodge is a raconteur. Devoted fans won't mind spending time with him, even when the subject is hearing aids. And certain set pieces work well: a cafeteria meal shared by elderly father and son and, later, a failed family Christmas dinner. But the warm-hearted incontinence and impotence humor, the dry comments about women and plastic surgery, the children saying the darndest things ("Mummy bought it at Marks and Spensive")—it could all come from an opinion column in a small-town newspaper.

Lodge might have moved in the opposite direction—dropped the memoirish passages and stepped back from Des, letting him fall prey to an old man's delusions and desires, endangering his marriage and his integrity as an academic. It's not that Lodge is ever terribly deep—as I say, his novels are a guilty pleasure. But when he's at the top of his game, Lodge avoids lecturing readers on particular social issues like contraception, artificial intelligence, or, as here, the aging of the pre-Boomer middle class. Instead, he puts the local material to work in a greater cause. Using the structure of farce, Lodge elaborates absurd entanglements that expose our foibles as humans and then, once the price of humiliation has been paid, allow a modest opening for forgiveness and, perhaps, wisdom.