Deaf Sentence

by David Lodge

Book Overview

A witty, tender novel about the travails of old middle age, from a Booker finalist Desmond Bates is a recently retired linguistics professor vexed by his encroaching deafness and at loose ends in his... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0143116053
• ISBN13: 9780143116059
• Release Date: September 2009
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.0" x 7.6"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Spot-on

David Lodge's style is a delight - beautifully simple and natural, without straining after effect, ideally suited to humour, but also to more reflective passages. And this book has plenty of both. I have to use a hearing aid myself, though I am not as severely afflicted by deafness as is Desmond Bates, and therefore I don't mishear as hilariously as he does; but I also have to laugh wryly at his spot-on descriptions of the rituals connected with hearing aids, and the trials and tribulations at parties, at the theatre, or in restaurants. And he is so right that having to ask people to repeat themselves is exasperating for all concerned. Desmond's family relationships are beautifully conveyed: the love he had for his first wife and now has for his second (a pretty strong, healthy and no-nonsense character) and the exasperated affection he has for his even deafer old father, who lives a lonely life of self-neglect. Desmond himself, a retired Professor of Linguistics, is in his sixties, and is experiencing other signs of advancing years apart from deafness, for example a reduced potency, until ... Well, no: a subplot - rather more substantial, actually, than a subplot - about a flaky young American woman student at his university keeps you pleasantly on tenterhooks, but promises more, I think, than it delivers. Linguistics is one of those typically modern subjects in which, through theoretical analysis of texts (is a particular suicide note a locutionary, illocutionary or perlocutionary utterance?), `we murder to dissect'. Lodge/Bates describes it in a deadpan way in all its dry absurdity. (Apologies to linguisticians and perhaps to Lodge himself.) In the last part of the book, the humour, which has pervaded most it, fades away in moving episodes which seem to suggest that the afflictions of being hard of hearing need to be kept in proportion. What, after all, according to the life-affirming David Lodge, is a deaf sentence when compared with a death sentence?

Lodge keeps to his own high standards

I've been a fan of Lodge's fiction ever since his second novel, _Ginger, You're Barmy,_ came out in 1962. His first few books were considered amusing but nothing special by the critics, but he hit his stride with _Changing Places_ in 1975. This latest work of fiction (because, as a professor of English, now retired, he has also written dense works on critical theory) is his fourteenth and it's an excellent example of how his early propensity for domestic comedy has evolved into commedia in almost the Dantean sense. Lodge is from southeast London but has spent all his adult academic life in Birmingham, and the present narrative, like several of his others, is set in both places. It's difficult to know how much of the detail of his books derives from his personal experiences but Desmond Bates, a retired professor of linguistics (not languages -- "it's a common mistake"), who is becoming more and more deaf, is certainly based on Lodge's own situation. In fact, the narrator's explicit puns on deafness (including the title) and the implicit frustration it causes him are very much the focus of the story. Though he's helped by high-tech hearing aids, and though more theaters are making wi-fi headphones available for deaf patrons, deafness makes social intercourse extremely difficult -- and yet it's not as dramatic and sympathy-drawing as blindness. It's hardly worth it to Desmond to try to teach, or to attend public functions or even dinner parties, since he misses so much now of what's going on. And since his somewhat younger second wife is becoming very successful with an upscale home decor business even as Desmond is entering the downside of his life, he feels even more isolated and frustrated. Then he's approached by a personable and blondely attractive American graduate student seeking advice (apparently) on her doctoral dissertation, the focus of which is a textual analysis of suicide notes. Desmond was a teacher for too long not to be aware of the pitfalls of becoming involved -- or even appearing to become involved -- with female students, and he doesn't even have official standing with the university any longer, but his loneliness seduces him into going beyond what his good sense warns him about. Still, he never does anything that quite stoops to B-movie farce, though he worries that he might have. Especially as he realizes that the girl is even weirder than he at first thought. Lodge is a master of the British art of drollery and wry self-observation and Desmond's interior monologues -- the only sort of conversation he's really comfortable with these days -- are smoothly developed in a complex way that seems effortless. That's the mark of a first-rate writer. Two of his novels have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize (Lodge himself chaired the committee one year), and I wouldn't be surprised if this one were as well.

david lodge's best novel

I loved the book. perhaps i am prejudiced because i am hearing impaired and wear 2 hearing aids, but i bought a copy for a friend(and wife) and both found it uproarious until it became terribly moving. my husband loved it as well and he hears perfectly. the one sentence i memorized and wrote down was"if there have been at various times in our life, trivial misunderstandings, now i see how one was unable to value the passing time". these are words i try to live by every day.

Interesting Character & Poignant Descriptions

Lodge gives a detailed picture of what it's like to go deaf in middle age and all the limitations deafness brings. The deep description of a deaf man's life feels familiar when he faces the same issues everyone does as they age and terribly sad when his hearing loss isolates him from people he cares about. The main character would be interesting even if he weren't deaf, and his deafness adds poignancy that makes this book special.

"What shall I do with myself today?"

David Lodge's "Deaf Sentence" is a seriocomic novel about a man whose quality of life is steadily declining. Desmond Bates, a former professor of linguistics, takes early retirement, mostly because of a hearing loss that began twenty years earlier. He suffers from "high-frequency deafness...caused by accelerated loss of the hair cells in the inner ear...." Since there is no treatment for this condition, Desmond resorts to hearing aids, which prove to be inconvenient and, in some circumstances, useless. As he dourly observes, "deafness is a kind of pre-death, a drawn-out introduction to the long silence into which we will all eventually lapse." Now in his sixties, Desmond's existence settles into a boring routine. His wife, Winifred (whom he calls Fred), on the other hand, is rejuvenated, partly as a result of the flourishing new interior design business that takes up most of her time. Adding to his gloomy disposition is Desmond's concern for his eighty-nine year old father, Harry, who lives alone in London. Not only is Desmond's father also going deaf, but there are alarming signs that he is no longer able to care for himself adequately. Unfortunately, Harry refuses when Desmond offers to hire someone to look in on him and lend a hand with household chores. "Deaf Sentence" is a deeply affecting novel that springs from the author's personal experience with high-frequency deafness. The book succeeds on many levels and is enhanced by Lodge's clever use of language, entertaining literary and cultural references, and vivid descriptive passages. One day, when Desmond is strolling across the campus where he used to teach, he encounters a horde of students pouring out of their classes. "I floated on their tide like a piece of academic wreckage," he muses with a hint of self-mockery. The author elevates the mundane by poignantly exploring the ebb and flow of marital relationships, the physical and mental decline that accompanies aging, and the toll that illness and disability take on both the victim and his family. Lodge conveys his knowledge of all these themes subtly, sensitively, and with a healthy dose of bracing humor. Desmond is an engaging first-person narrator, who sometimes lapses into the third person, presumably to give himself a breather. Fred is a devoted and sympathetic spouse, but as the years go by, she is becoming more and more exasperated by her husband's habits, especially his increasing reliance on alcohol as an anesthetic. Desmond is beginning to feel like "a redundant appendage to the family, an unfortunate liability" who no longer commands the respect that he once took for granted. To complicate matters further, an attractive but unstable young student named Alex Loom threatens to upend Desmond's already shaky existence when she asks him to supervise her dissertation on "the stylistic analysis of suicide notes." Should he risk getting involved with this possibly predatory female? The novel draws us in more and more as the s