David Lodge is best known for his novels satirizing academic life, Nice Work, Small World and Changing Places.  His new novel also has an academic for its main character, Desmond Bates, but the most interesting parts of his life for readers are his thoughts about his growing deafness and his elderly father who is in decline.  Bates has been retired for four years, and he still has an academic frame of mind that explains his meditations on deafness.  But the presence of the weird American graduate student who wants his attention and ultimately causes him lots of problems feels like a plot device to give the novel more events. 

The emotional heart of Deaf Sentence is outside of the academy, in Bates' diary entries about his experience of living with impaired hearing, and his relationships with his father, wife, and children.  While it has some great scenes and is often laugh-out-loud funny, it is also a novel preoccupied with loss and the inability to control what is happening.  Bates can no longer hear what people are saying when he is not wearing his hearing aids, and even when he has them in, it is often hard for him to decipher people's words if there is significant background noise.  He had to retire early because he was no longer able to teach, and since retiring he has given up on his research projects.  Now, while his wife is busy with her own life running a retail business, he spends most of his time at home, watching TV, reading the newspaper, and napping.  Occasionally he goes down to London to visit his father, who lives alone in a run-down and grimy house.  He father is also hard of hearing, and when they go out for lunch together at the local supermarket café, he finds himself shouting at his father and causing people to look around at them. 

The main source of movement in the plot is Alex, an American student who is working on the literature of suicide notes for her graduate degree.  It gives Bates some reason to think about declarations of desperation, which suits much of his mood regarding his increasing loss of hearing.  Many of his thoughts relate to the fact that with his hearing aids, he cannot tell the difference between "deaf" and "death" unless the context makes it clear.  He quotes various luminaries on the subject of gong deaf, and educates the reader about some basic details about what it is like to wear a hearing aid, making the book potentially useful to those who want to know about deafness. 

Deaf Sentence is at its strongest, however, in Bates' interactions with his father, especially when his father comes to stay for Christmas.  These are fine comic scenes that are also richly emotional.  In the Acknowledgements section, Lodge says that the novel has its sources in his own hearing problems and his relationship with his father, and one wonders whether he might not have done better to write in memoir form rather than give his experiences to his character.  Yet the fictionalized versions are reason enough to read this uneven novel. 

© 2009 Christian Perring

Christian Perring, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Dowling College, New York.

Keywords: fiction, deafness