Here, in these three novels, are three representations of the state of the art. In The Satanic Verses the narrator, who may or may not be the Devil, confides that 'what follows is tragedy.- Or, at least, the echo of tragedy, the full-blooded original being un-available to modern men and women, so it's said.- A burlesque for our degraded, imitative times.' The Lost Fattier recounts a domestic tragedy which, in the end, is knowingly undermined by a narrator who recognises that the story she has reconstructed is only a 'family romance', an operetta played out on her own toy stage. And David Lodge's heroine complains that she is 'getting dragged into a classic realist text, full of causality and morality. How can I get out of it?' Trust the contemporary novelist for that, we might think - though, for Lodge's characters, it's a close shave.

LRB 29 September 1988 | PDF Download