Author:David Lodge
David Lodge’s first full-length play examines that curious fixture in the writing game where the amateurs meet the professionals – on a course in creative writing. Maude, author of nine bestsellers, and Simon, with one sensational success to his name, are veterans of this particular course: Leo, a campus-based American novelist astounded by the dilettante approach of the English, is the odd man out.
The idea is to put the students under pressure, but in the converted barn that houses the tutors, professional and sexual tensions, past slights and current rivalries rapidly build to a fierce head of steam. Out of these pressures, David Lodge distils a sharply observed comedy of the problems and preoccupations of the writer as the professionals, striving to explain to enthusiastic beginners how to do it, are forced to confront an altogether trickier question: why on earth do they themselves write in the first place?
Delicately probing, nimbly parodic, uncomfortably on target, Lodge’s incisive study of writers at work and at odds will bring the pleasure of recognition to all readers of fiction – and to most of those in the game.
Prances and bubbles along with the gay insouciance of a compulsive storyteller
—— ObserverMary Wesley is high-spirited and inventive, and keeps her wayward plot moving forward at a spanking pace
—— Daily TelegraphWesley's narration is as fast and surprising as ever; her subplots are well worked out and rich in detail
—— Times Literary SupplementA charming love story and social comedy
—— Philip Howard , The TimesOnce again she deploys her admirably comic skill to good effect; puncturing the pompous, exposing humbug, nudging our perceptions in the direction of the absurd
—— Financial TimesIncendiary
—— New York Times Book ReviewThis mesmerizing novel places a mathematical mind, poet's imagination, and voodoo queen's superstition in an athlete's body and sets to work, in a town stark as a blackboard, on the problem of Death. Pitting axes against angst, kids against cancer, soap against sex, wax numbers against depression, and love against the certainty of the beloved's doom, Aimee Bender nevertheless arrives--with wit, grace, and proof (that math is funny)--at compassion
—— David James Duncan, author of The Brothers K and River TeethAimee Bender writes in a skillfully minimal way, everything very tight and poignant and sharp and often burning, quick to get to things and out of them, but still providing us with significant characters of emotional depth
—— Stephen Dixon, author of Frog and 30: Pieces of a Novel
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