SOURCE: “Only Connect,” in New Republic, September 18, 1989, pp. 46-8, 52.

In the following review, Salter offers a positive evaluation of Nice Work and comments favorably on Lodge's metafictional style in this and previous novels.

What is nice work? According to Robyn Penrose, young, leftist, feminist, deconstructionist critic and badly paid lecturer at the University of Rummidge, nice work is “meaningful. It’s rewarding. I don’t mean in money terms. It would be worth doing even if one wasn’t paid anything at all.” Nice work if you can keep it: Margaret Thatcher’s budget cuts in education may soon put Robyn and a lot of people like Robyn out of a job. In 1986, the penultimate year of her contract at Rummidge (fertile imaginary ground for David Lodge’s other comic “campus novels,” Changing Places and Small World), Robyn’s full schedule of lecturing on the industrial novel and...