Nice Work

Fülszöveg

Nice work
It is January, 1986. Rummidge, that sprawling industrial conurbation in the English Midlands, reluctantly confronts another working week. Two cars, as yet unconnected, traverse the city in opposite directions, and, as befits their drivers' occupations, a little apart in time.
Vic Wilcox, managing director of a struggling engineering firm, finds the drive to work in his gleaming Jaguar a relaxing interval between hosts of domestic anxieties and the barrage of problems that lie in ambush at the factory. In her aging Renault, Robyn Penrose makes her way to the university Vic has passed some hours earlier: her temporary appointment there seems all too likely to evaporate in the next round of cuts.
The only things Vic and Robyn have in common are a deep suspicion of the world the other inhabits and a looming sense of financial crisis—for if the city's once thriving metal-bashing industries have dwindled into a rust belt, an acid rain is falling on the groves of academe.... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Nice work
It is January, 1986. Rummidge, that sprawling industrial conurbation in the English Midlands, reluctantly confronts another working week. Two cars, as yet unconnected, traverse the city in opposite directions, and, as befits their drivers' occupations, a little apart in time.
Vic Wilcox, managing director of a struggling engineering firm, finds the drive to work in his gleaming Jaguar a relaxing interval between hosts of domestic anxieties and the barrage of problems that lie in ambush at the factory. In her aging Renault, Robyn Penrose makes her way to the university Vic has passed some hours earlier: her temporary appointment there seems all too likely to evaporate in the next round of cuts.
The only things Vic and Robyn have in common are a deep suspicion of the world the other inhabits and a looming sense of financial crisis—for if the city's once thriving metal-bashing industries have dwindled into a rust belt, an acid rain is falling on the groves of academe. They have no notion of each other's existence: the piece of paper that will bring them together lies buried this chilly morning in someone else's in-box.
Their meeting triggers a deliciously comic head-on collision of life-styles and ideologies, motives and methods. Vic's outrage at being lumbered with a trendy leftist feminist lecturer is exactly matched by Robyn's dismay at being pressed into a world of infernal machinery and seedy capitalist machismo. It is an uncompromising conjunction that seems unlikely to contribute much sweetness or any light, but, in the course of a bumpy Industrial Year, both parties make some surprising discoveries about each other's worlds—and about themselves.
(Continued on back flap)
(Continued from front flap)
David Lodge takes as model the Condition-of-England novel of the nineteeth century, and causes that neglected prototype to dance to a startlingly modern and infectiously entertaining tune. Nice Work confirms Lodge's rare capacity to be at once thought-provoking, moving, and mordantly funny within the covers of a single book.
David Lodge's Nice Work was the winner of England's Sunday Express Book of the Year Award as well as being shortlisted for the 1988 Booker Prize. He has published seven previous novels, including Changing Places and Out of the Shelter (available from Penguin), and Small World (shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1984). He is Honorary Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Birmingham in England, where he taught from 1960 to 1987, and is the author of several works of literary criticism. David Lodge is married with three children, and lives in Birmingham.
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