Therapy by David Lodge

Despite several recommendations from various sources, I never managed to read a David Lodge book before but I hope this won’t be my last.

Therapy. Definition: remedial treatment of mental or bodily disorder.

Laurence Passmore, a 58 year old sitcom writer, known to everyone as Tubby, experiments with all kinds of therapy in an attempt to find a solution for his bodily disorder, a mysterious pain in his knee diagnosed by his doctor, Nizar, as IDK, Internal Derangement of the Knee or by another of his therapists as I Don’t Know.

‘We watched the video of my operation together…It was a brightly lit, colored, circular image, like looking through the porthole of a submarine with a powerful searchlight. “There it is, you see!” cried Nizar. All I could see was what looked like a slim silvery eel biting chunks out of the soft underside of a shellfish. The little steel jaws snapped viciously and fragments of my knee floated off to be sucked out by the aspirator. I couldn’t watch for long. I always was squeamish about violence on television.’

His mental disorder is even harder to define and diagnose; a general sense of unhappiness and malaise unjustified by his apparent success in life. Tubby is well-off due to the popularity of his TV show ‘The People Next Door’, has a long-standing marriage to an independent, sexy woman, as well as a platonic mistress, ‘which is a sort of therapy too, I suppose.’

He undergoes physiotherapy, cognitive behaviour therapy, aromatherapy and acupuncture but nothing seems to erase his sense of ”dread’. It sounds more like what I suffer from than ‘anxiety’. Anxiety sounds trivial, somehow. You can feel anxious about catching a train, or missing the post. I suppose that’s why we’ve borrowed the German word. Angst has a sombre resonance to it, and you make a kind of grimace of pain as you pronounce it. But ‘Dread’ is good. Dread is what I feel when I wake up in the small hours in a cold sweat. Acute but unspecific Dread.’

The style is a first person patchwork of stream of consciousness sprinkled with vignettes written by Tubby from the perspective of others in his life, a self-description and a short memoir. What makes it work so well is that Tubby is an enjoyable companion who, as in an explanation from his wife of why she married him in the first place, is fun to be with. He has an appealing habit of stopping to check out words and their origins and in one of these excursions he discovers Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher whose pessimistic approach to life rings a chord with him. But just as Kierkegaard gives him a new appreciation of the state of marriage, Tubby’s wife decides to leave him.

In shock, Tubby finally has a concrete reason for his melancholy and tries to find understanding and ultimately therapy in a desperate but fruitless search for sex, a spontaneous trip to Denmark in a crusade to find Kierkegaard and eventually embarks on a pilgrimage through Europe to find his first teenage love again. In a touching short memoir of Maureen, this lost love, Tubby recalls the selfishness, the joy and the insouciance of teenage love. When he does find her she has aged and lost that right breast that he had loved as an entity by itself to cancer but his renewed relationship with her brings a contentment and acceptance that he had not found before.

David Lodge captures very well that very modern anxiety of feeling purposeless in our lives and the desperate search to fill the void we persist in gazing into. Tubby finds part of his therapy in his relationship with Maureen although, (and this is one of the few things in the novel that I wasn’t entirely convinced about) I found the tying up of this particular loose end a little pat. Maureen is in a sexless marriage to Tubby’s old rival from the past, Bede, but she cannot leave him because of all the ties life has created between them. In an arrangement that seems to suit all three, they travel on holidays together while Maureen and Tubby have occasional, comforting sex which is a form of therapy for both of them.

Although less obvious, I thought David Lodge gave a inkling in his novel of another powerful form of therapy: humour. Throughout the novel, he walks a fine line between making Tubby a object of ridicule or pathos and making his predicament banal and self-indulgent but he succeeds perfectly. Tubby is very likeable and not least because he refuses to take himself too seriously. Just before he delves too deeply into his existential problems of life, he manages to stand back and laugh at himself and this keeps him firmly on the right side of pretentiousness.

For those who would like a life-tonic laced with a healthy dose of wit and intelligence (and don’t we all need that) then I strongly recommend Therapy.

Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics); First Thus edition (July 1, 1996) 336 pages ISBN-10: 0140249001