tfw a novel towards which you're immensely predisposed does everything in its power to disabuse you of your predisposition ( )

A short, comic novel, from 1965 and tied to its era, although not as securely as I'd wish. Adam Appleby is a graduate student in literature, commuting to the British Museum's reading room every day to work on his thesis. The thesis is going too slowly, his scholarship term is running out, and he, his wife, and their young children are squeezed into a too-small flat. As Catholics, Adam and Barbara are hoping fervently that the ongoing Vatican II council will allow the faithful to use more reliable means of birth control than the rhythm method they now follow. Meanwhile, though Adam is only 25 years old, they have three little ones - and Barbara's period is late.

The book follows Adam through a single day, as he tries to make scholarly progress while wondering how they'll feed a fourth child. The day proves to be an unusual one, with comic mishaps variously foreshadowing brighter or dimmer futures for Adam and his family. Lodge includes in each chapter a pastiche of one of the twentieth-century authors Adam is studying, including Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, and James Joyce, to name just the ones I was able to identify - e.g., to renew his admission card to the reading room, Adam gets a turn with the Museum's Kafkaesque bureaucracy. He must cope with eccentric colleagues and a mysterious American, and struggle to keep his aged motor scooter on the road. I laughed a few times, and smiled often.

My edition has an introduction written by Lodge in 1980, outlining his circumstances and thinking at the time - his life was not nearly as exigent in 1965 as Adam's, as he began his own career as a literary academic and author of comedies of academic life. He muses that Adam and Barbara eventually would have opted for the pill, regardless of Humanae Vitae.

It would be lovely to think of this novel only as a funny record of a vanished past. But I write the month after the overturn of Roe v. Wade, and the right wing in the US is now calling for restricting the availability of contraception. An entire genre of story, once relegated to history, becomes currently relevant again. We will see many more young couples face Adam and Barbara's troubles - and worse. For me, that made the novel less enjoyable, seeming to look back not to 1965, but the introduction's 1980, a time that now seems more innocent. ( )

A hilarious and self-conscious examination of Catholic views towards sex, marriage, and birth control, and a great parody on academia. The scene with the woman sobbing to save her doctoral dissertation is so spot-on, I howled with laughter. I've been there. ( )

Hilarious. ( )

Een amusant boekje over het dag uit het leven van Adam Appleby, gelukkig getrouwd katholiek en zijn problemen met geboorteplanning en het niet mogen gebruiken van voorbehoedsmiddelen. De verschillende hoofdstukken zijn geschreven in verschillende stijlen, geïnspireerd op schrijvers als Graham Greene en Franz Kafka. ( )