SOURCE: “Nice Work If You Can Get It,” in Times Literary Supplement, January 3, 1997, p. 25.

In the following review of The Practice of Writing, Taylor commends Lodge's critical writings, though finds the collection as a whole to be a “mixed bag” of varying importance and interest.

The nine years since David Lodge gave up his professorship at the University of Birmingham in order to devote more time to his writing have been highly productive. Three novels, a volume of heavyweight literary criticism (After Bakhtin, 1990), screenplay adaptations of his own and other people’s work, a cache of reviews, a “fiction masterclass” in the Independent on Sunday (collected as The Art of Fiction, 1993): the life of the postmodern, transmedia ex-academic has many compartments, and nearly all of them get turned out, in one way or another, in The Practice of Writing.

It is tempting to see Lodge’s bustling post-campus...