Deaf Sentence: A Novel by David
Lodge
Smartest Novelist Writing Today
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 personal life. Without the
purposeful routine of the academic year, he finds his role reduced to that of
escort and house-husband while his wife’s late-flowering career as the
owner of a home design store flourishes. The monotony of his days is
relieved only by wearisome journeys to London to check on the welfare of
his querulous, elderly father, an ex-dance musician. But these discontents
are nothing compared to the affliction of hearing loss, which is a constant
source of domestic friction and social embarrassment. It is through his
deafness that Desmond inadvertently gets involved with a young woman
who seeks his support in matters academic and not so academic; and
whose wayward and unpredictable behavior threatens to destabilize his life
completely. Deaf Sentence is a funny, moving account of one man’s effort
to come to terms with deafness and death, aging and mortality, the
comedy and tragedy of human life.
Personal Review: Deaf Sentence: A Novel by David Lodge
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?
For More 5 Star Customer Reviews and Lowest Price:
Deaf Sentence: A Novel by David Lodge 5 Star Customer Reviews and Lowest Price!