Lodge looks soberly at death's 'long silence'
Deaf Sentence
By David Lodge
Viking, 294 pp., $25.95
What linguistics professor Desmond Bates hears: "I do mend sherry. Crap and sargasso pained there." What was actually said to him: I do recommend Céret. Braque and Picasso painted there.
Such is a man's fate when his hearing starts to go, David Lodge is at pains to show us in "Deaf Sentence," his 13th novel, providing a litany of the woes his hard-of-hearing hero must endure as he struggles through his days, a restless retirement prompted by his inability to accurately discern his students' lecture-hall questions or his colleagues' department-meeting banter. He can't hear the dialogue in movies, can't whisper to his wife in bed, can't keep his hearing aid from draining its batteries, can't distinguish "deaf" from "death."
"Deafness is comic, as blindness is tragic," Desmond asserts in the journal that forms the narrative of the novel, and comedy is certainly Lodge's bread and butter. In such breezy works as "Changing Places," "Small World," and "Nice Work," Lodge gently skewered, in his decidedly British manner, the world of academia by rummaging through its low-stakes, high-brow posturings and its higher-stakes, low-life sexual dalliances. Through much of "Deaf Sentence," though, there's little to laugh at in Desmond's life - and even less sex, a point of wistful melancholy to Desmond as he trolls through the spam in his e-mail account: "Boost your manhood to astonishing levels," he reads. "Everything a real man would ever need . . . Just imagine your new happy life with more size, more adoration from females and more self-assurance."
Desmond's ambitions these days are decidedly less grand. He tries to keep up with the busy schedule of his entrepreneurial and ever-more-youthful wife, Winifred, between doleful trips down to London to visit his aging father, a former musician besieged by deafness as well as an enlarged prostate and an encroaching dementia that renders him suspicious of just about everything and everyone he encounters.
It's dreary going for both Desmond and the reader until graduate student Alex Loom steps onstage. (Actually, she has been there all along; she appears at a gallery reception on the novel's first page, Desmond inadvertently peering down her red silk blouse as she leans near his ear to speak. But Desmond, of course, much to his later dismay, can't hear her.) As it turns out, Alex is an American come to England to pursue doctoral work on the linguistic properties of suicide notes, a disturbing topic that nevertheless sparks Desmond's interest. But it is Alex's expert manipulation of Desmond that drags him ever deeper not only into her dissertation but into her disturbed life and prompts the novel's most hilarious moment. After Desmond sternly scolds Alex for defacing a library book with a turquoise-colored highlighter - "I'm afraid I could never trust someone who would make irremovable marks in a library book," he says - she invites him via an explicit e-mail to come to her apartment and punish her. He does not, of course, but he can't stop himself from entertaining the fantasy. "I had committed spanking," he says, "in my heart."
Desmond's entanglement with Alex careens toward disaster just as his father's health declines, and the reader winds up engrossed in a novel that has decidedly veered away from comedy toward tragedy - toward the awful despair that can accompany loss, toward the sense that life is indeed both too painful and too short. "Deafness is a kind of pre-death," Desmond says, "a drawn-out introduction to the long silence into which we will all eventually lapse." And the reader comes to understand that it is the prospect of this "long silence" that Desmond sees looming before him.
That he finds some real comfort in the end is perhaps less convincing than it is satisfying. Clearly, we're meant to like Desmond, to cheer him on in this losing battle.
Riding the tube in London, Desmond laments the sad state of the graffiti there, which he finds linguistically impoverished. "When was the last time I laughed at a graffito? Years ago I spotted one which still makes me smile when I think of it: under a sign, 'Bill Posters Will Be Prosecuted' some wag had written, 'Bill Posters is innocent.' "
Bill Posters is indeed innocent, as is Desmond Bates, as are we. But we'll all in the end be prosecuted, David Lodge reminds us in "Deaf Sentence." We're all just waiting to hear the verdict get read.
John Gregory Brown's novels include "Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery" and "Audubon's Watch." He teaches at Sweet Briar College, in Virginia. 