Nice work: David Lodge

Poor David Lodge. The standard way to begin an interview with the author of our most hilarious postwar novels - and why should I be any exception? - is to remark that, in person, he is, well, not exactly a hoot. Jokes? He makes none. Nor does he resemble the most famous and well-loved of his characters, Professors Morris Zapp and Philip Swallow, who tend to be a bit randy, even if they cannot always get their way, what with modern women being so difficult and demanding and generally elusive.

If Professor Lodge were to cast a surreptitious look at your bottom or to clasp his hand firmly on your thigh as you and he discussed structuralism or Henry James, you would faint with surprise and not only because he is now in his seventies. As he sits opposite you in the study of his bright, modern house in Birmingham, high on his German office chair, you observe his buttonhole mouth, anxious brow and modish lace-up shoes, a fresh take on the Hush Puppies beloved by several generations of academics, and you smile inwardly at the contrast between what you've been reading on the train up and what is now before you. Writers, eh? The stuff that goes on in their heads.

In fact, as far as his new novel goes, these contrasts are less pointed than usual. The hero of Deaf Sentence, Professor Desmond Bates, certainly has the odd frisky thought; he is always gazing longingly at his wife's neat bum as she moves obliviously through her bedtime routine, and when he receives a risqué missive from a PhD student whom he is coaching on the sly, he gets quite hot and bothered. But he does not act on his impulses. In the case of his wife, this is physiological: a glass of wine too many and Eros is dealt a knock-out blow.

In the case of the naughty PhD student, he is both too wise and too afraid to take her up on her... kind offer. Bates is, you see, a retired professor, just like his creator, though while Lodge left academia early, in 1987, so that he could work full-time on his novels, Desmond misses university life far more than he cares to admit, especially since his wife's career as an interior designer is undergoing an alarming late blossoming.

So how does Desmond's deafness compare to Lodge's? If this were Deaf Sentence, Lodge would shout: 'How does Desmond's wetness come to be shown?' But in fact, he just frowns, and says: 'It's a heightened and altered version of my experience. Actually, while I was writing the book, my hearing wasn't as bad as I thought it was. My hearing aid had given out. So in some ways, I had a slightly gloomier view of my deafness when I wrote it. Though I shall get to his stage, of course.' But still, though he once complained that deafness was treated in fiction, as in life, as a comic disability rather than a tragic one, such as blindness, he decided to make his novel funny rather than sad.

One farcical misunderstanding follows another until, finally, at his wife's Christmas party, his hearing-aid batteries having again packed up, Desmond gets pissed, which makes him wildly sociable but, because he can hear nothing anyone says, he also ends up insulting everyone in the room. Like Lodge, Desmond suffers from high-frequency deafness, caused by accelerated loss of the hair cells in the inner ear that convert sound waves into messages to the brain; background noise can make life especially difficult.

'Well, it came to me as a comic novel, as I was shaving and thinking about some recent humiliation,' he says, when I bring this up. So he finds his deafness humiliating? 'That may be overstating it, but I have certainly been embarrassed. What's difficult is when you think someone is saying something nice about you, but you're not quite sure. You hesitate to respond appropriately. One thing I greatly regret [as a writer] is that I no longer pick up nice, juicy dialogue on the bus.'

When Lodge is working, he takes his aids out, unless his wife Mary comes in the room, at which point he quickly shoves them back in. 'Sometimes, I try to get by without them, but I usually get something wrong. Deafness does tend to make people rather withdrawn and grumpy - I'm aware of that, and I try to control it - and then it makes other people irritated. There's a great irritant quotient involved all round.'

Does his wife get as cross as Desmond's? 'Fortunately, she speaks very clearly. I can always hear her. [I start to laugh at this, but then I realise he's not being funny.] Sometimes, she gets fed up, but I don't blame her. There's inevitably a certain amount of domestic friction.'

But what is so good about Deaf Sentence - and it is very good, deeply enjoyable and satisfying - is that it is more than a funny story about a man with a bleeping hearing aid. Like so many of Lodge's books, it's a Trojan horse of a novel, wheeling in grand themes under cover of jokes (this is why he is sometimes underrated as a writer). There is the problem of work and what to do when it ends - not a problem for writers, whose working lives are longer than most people's, but a problem for Des and the rest of us - and there is the problem of ageing parents.

Desmond's widowed father is marooned in his decaying semi in south London (Lodge grew up in Brockley and his father, like Desmond's, was a jobbing dance-band musician). Regular day trips must be made to check up on him and some of the book's finest passages detail father and son's painful lunches together in the cafe at a local Sainsbury's.

As ever, the novel is also rich with satirical setpieces. Once, such satire was reserved for campuses and academic conferences; here, he turns his attention to, among other things, a holiday resort in a forest - Gladeworld - that bears an uncanny resemblance to Center Parcs. Desmond and his wife go with another couple. If it had been the Lodge of the Seventies or Eighties, a little light wife-swapping might duly have followed. Now, there are only the creaky indignities of age; an excessively hot sauna at their luxury 'villa' results in temporary catastrophe for poor Desmond.

Lodge does not agree that Deaf Sentence is as much a book about the importance of work as it is about hearing loss, but he will admit that his self-esteem is almost wholly bound up in his writing. 'I would say so. What else would it be about?' Your family, I suggest, your long marriage, your three children? 'I take pride in those things, but they're not basically what I measure my sense of worth by. Bringing up a family is something lots of people do well, nor are you subjected to reviews for it.' The creative impulse is, then, a constant burden, and you can see it crouching debilitatingly on his back even as you tell him how much you admire him.

'You're constantly assessed, measured, judged. You're always aware of the league table, the virtual pecking order. You can't ignore it. If you do, you're not competing, and if you're not competing, you're not going to be very good. Nor are you ever wholly satisfied with what you've achieved. You have ephemeral moments of satisfaction, even euphoria, when you finish a good chapter, but they don't last long.' The main thing is not to get too caught up in all this insidious grading: 'The danger is that you become obsessed and are constantly watching the graph of other people's perception. And that way madness lies.'

He knows this madness, though when he finally succumbed to it - when, in 2004, he and Colm Tóibín both produced novels about Henry James at around the same time, only for Tóibín's to be more the praised, and to make the Booker shortlist - he channelled the resulting cry of pique and frustration into a long essay called The Year of Henry James, the only one of Lodge's books that I wish he had not published.

Lodge will be read long after most of his peers for the simple reason that, in his early work, he captured Britain so perfectly. A world in which postwar austerity melted into the sunnier hues of Sixties liberalism; in which privilege and deference finally looked like being washed away by education and merit; in which money sloshed through our institutions of higher education like icy water through an aqueduct. I said he wasn't funny in person, but he is pleasingly wry when he talks about getting started - the boy from Brockley who, encouraged by the headmaster at his Catholic grammar school to go to university, was put off applying to Oxbridge because he'd read enough Waugh to know that it was 'all getting debagged in the quad by raving drunken aristocrats'.

Was he a chippy young man or a humble one? 'I was fairly naive. National Service was my first real encounter with the class system. All those upper-class chinless wonders. It was a shock. It was institutionalised - you were an erk.' He saw the first production of Look Back in Anger during his leave: 'It said exactly what I felt, what my generation felt.'

Later, pursuing his academic career (he did his degree at University College London), he felt the power of Oxbridge when it came to jobs. 'But I had the confidence of youth. I was a Lucky Jim figure breaking into this privileged world. And my friends, like Malcolm Bradbury [with whom he worked in the English department at Birmingham University], were the same.'

At 18, he met Mary, a fellow student; they married at 24. 'Looking back, the early years of our marriage were very precarious financially. Things were far from certain, yet I don't remember being depressed or worried. Other upsets - far lesser ones - in later life would cause me great depression.' Do people plan too much now? 'Well, if you were young and Catholic, you didn't have much control. We didn't plan to have children immediately. We were attempting to use the permitted form of Catholic birth control that didn't work very well. We had two children within four years, and then another one, and then we made a rational decision to use birth control.' He smiles. 'I know it's hard to imagine. It's hard for me to imagine! How in thrall we were to the orthodoxy. In those days, if you wanted to consider yourself a Catholic, you had to consider the whole rule book; if you didn't, you were making a conscious decision to leave the church. So we struggled on until it became palpably obvious that it was ridiculous.'

Later, he put all this - and the crushing disappointment young Catholics felt after the Second Vatican Council and the 1968 papal encyclical against contraception - in a brilliant novel, How Far Can You Go? He describes himself now as a 'very marginal sort of Catholic' and thinks that it is possible to trace the disappearance of his literal belief in his novels, which, perhaps, is one reason why his male characters are so lacking in guilt, for all that they are so anxious and inept.

Their anxiety and the awe in which they hold women may have something to do with feminism. Lodge belongs to that generation of men who were close to their mothers - the men were all away fighting the war - but who had to learn, smartish, that their wives were going to be very different. 'My women are stronger characters than my men, on the whole. Women just became more assertive. It happened to my wife. She changed considerably! But it may be, too, that I myself am a rather unassertive person.'

Was feminism scary? 'I accepted it as part of a general revolutionary atmosphere. I welcomed it on the whole. But our lives were complicated by the fact that we had a disabled son. It meant that Mary had to give up the idea of resuming her career as a teacher. It was very hard. There wasn't any possibility of employing full-time care; we didn't have the money. Then, as he grew up, she went back to work and I had to do more on the domestic side. It was only fair.'

How did he find time to write? 'I don't know, frankly. I have been rather cautious. I've stayed in one place. Having a stable married life is important. People who get into divorce, remarriage, custody and all that. It's terribly consuming of time and energy.' He saved these antics for the fictional denizens of Rummidge University, and other such establishments, and plugged away gratefully at his university job.

Christopher, who has Down's syndrome, was born just as people with learning disabilities 'moved from the custody of the Ministry of Health to the custody of the Ministry of Education'. Even so, he and Mary were wildly misinformed. 'We were told he'd never read or write or live much beyond 25. It was a health visitor who told us this and it was totally wrong.' Lodge is not, though, someone who glosses over the difficulties of having such a child. 'You're never free of it. I can't say it is a blessing in disguise or anything. He's had as good a life as he could. Most of the time he's been happy, but it's not an idyllic scene.' It was Mary who got them through it in the beginning. 'A wife with a very strong character. A lot of people are completely shattered by it or one partner is. Marriages break up.'

Lodge knows how lucky he has been - he says now that there are lots of people far less well-off than himself - but the truth is that it is not in his temperament to be able to feel it. When I describe his life, so replete with love and success - a bestselling, prize-winning novelist, an emeritus professor of English - he looks at me as if I'm talking about someone else.

'When you describe it, it sounds terrific. So why don't I feel the same? Anxiety is my main psychological problem. That's my really neurotic trait. It prevents me from enjoying my life. When I was young, these were not concepts that were bandied about. There was something called a nervous breakdown that people had every now and again. But anxiety and depression were not common currency.'

He has tried cognitive behavioural therapy and found it 'helpful', but I suspect that the best balm is his wife, who is better able to show anger, a more positive disposition and wholly able to enjoy herself. There is nothing that Mary likes more, I gather, than a swanky hotel. Her husband, on the other hand, would probably be content in a bed and breakfast with Formica cupboards and low-watt light bulbs. He laughs. 'Yes. A different kind of wife and we'd have arranged a suicide pact by now.' As he says these words, as if by magic, Mary appears, his opposite not just in temperament, but in looks: she is tall and slim with the most striking cap of blonde hair. For the next 20 minutes, she regales me with tales of her art class and mildly takes the mickey out of her husband, who, I notice, is cheering up with every crack that she makes.

· David Lodge's new novel Deaf Sentence is published by Harvill Secker, price £17.99, on 1 May.

Lodges life

Born 28 Jan 1935 in south-east London. Attends St Joseph's Academy, Blackheath

1959 Marries Mary Frances Jacob; graduates from University College London with an MA.

1960 Begins teaching English Literature at Birmingham University. Publishes first novel, The Picturegoers, thought to reflect his experience of growing up Catholic. Has since published 14 further novels, 11 non-fiction books, and two plays; four books adapted for TV

1987 Retires to devote more time to writing

Awards

1980 Whitbread Book of the Year for How Far Can You Go?

1984 Shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Small World

1988 Shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Nice Work

1989 Royal Television Society Award for best drama series for Nice Work

He says: 'Novels are business and they are art, and they have always been both. I always say that you've got to be an artist when you write a novel, and a businessman when you publish it - but it's quite difficult to keep that separation'

They say: 'Its trick - common to nearly all memoirs by writers - is to convey, without sentiment or vainglory, the utter isolation of the novelist, at any rate in professional terms, from the world he inhabits' - DJ Taylor on The Year of Henry James

Méabh Ritchie