Nice Work (King Penguin) - Softcover

Lodge, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140133968 ISBN 13: 9780140133967

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group, 1990

Synopsis

"A funny, intelligent, superbly paced social comedy." --The New York Times

Vic Wilcox, a self-made man and managing director of an engineering firm. has little regard for academics, and even less for feminists. So when Robyn Penrose, a trendy leftist teacher, is assigned to "shadow" Vic under a goverment program created to foster mutual understanding between town and gown, the hilarious collusion of lifestyles and ideologies that ensues seems unlikely to foster anything besides mutual antipathy. But in the course of a bumpy year, both parties make some surprising discoveries about each other's worlds--and about themselves.

About this title

About the Author:

David Lodge is the author of twelve novels and a novella, including the Booker Prize finalists Small World and Nice Work. He is also the author of many works of literary criticism, including The Art of Fiction and Consciousness and the Novel.

From Library Journal:

Robyn Penrose is a lecturer in 19th-century literature at a university located in the fictitious English Midlands city of Rummidge. Vic Wilcox is managing director of Pringle's, an industrial casting company located in a grimy suburb. They are thrown together as part of a "shadow scheme" concocted by their superiors in response to a governmentally ordained "Industry Year." Entering into the arrangement with considerable skepticism and lack of appreciation for the other's mode of life, they get off to a rocky start, but then slowly develop a mutual respect and even liking for each other (and in Vic's case something more). Nice Work is, indeed, a "nice" novel. Lodge spoofs in a nonjudgmental way both the pretensions of academia and the materialism of the upper-middle business class. While lacking in stylistic elegance, this is a well-told tale full of gentle humor that should, despite its setting, have broad appeal to Americans.
- David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0140133968
• ISBN 13: 9780140133967
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288