Product Description

David Lodge's extended novella is a delicious contemporary comedy on the perils of celebrity. It concerns a plot for revenge hatched by two writers, Adrian, a distinguished novelist seeking obscurity in a cottage near Gatwick and Sam, a successful scriptwriter who drops in on his old university friend en route to LA. The object of their revenge is one of the new breed of Rottweiler interviewers, a young woman who writes vicious profiles for a paper and who has just published a particularly nasty profile of Sam. Naturally, it all goes completely wrong.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #237022 in Books
• Published on: 2002-08-29
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Adrian Ludlow was "the white hope of the English novel once", his first effort, Hideaway, a searing exposé of adolescent angst. But now Hideaway is an A-level set text, and Adrian "stagnates", compiling the Paragon Book of Whatever's Been Commissioned, in unromantic seclusion with wife Eleanor in a cottage under a Gatwick flightpath. Their quiet life is cruelly disturbed when college friend Sam Sharp re-enters their life. A prolific and successful scriptwriter ("three BAFTAs, two Royal Television Society Awards, one Emmy, one Silver Nymph, one Golden Turd from Luxembourg"), Sam is now reeling from being "shat on from a great height by a bilious bird of prey", his treatment at the hands of The Sentinel on Sunday's celebrity interviewer Fanny Tarrant. It's not long before Sam and Adrian have invented a scheme to get even with Fanny, but in executing it, they only end up revealing more than anyone wants about the college threesome's complex history.

Based on his 1998 play, Lodge's novella is, in truth, little more than a slim script with some rather full stage directions. It's mildly diverting trying to pin down "educated estuary" Fanny to aspects of Lynn Barber and Julie Burchill, and there are a few thoughtful observations on the art of interview and "the culture of gossip", but what makes this of more than passing interest is its early treatment of the real news story of summer 1997--Diana and Dodi. That inevitably makes Home Truths impossibly dated, but it also provides its most telling statement on the fleeting phantom that is celebrity. --Alan Stewart

From the Author
My titles
You may be puzzled to find two books available by me, both called "Home Truths", and both published in 1999 by Secker & Warburg. The explanation is as follows. In February 1998 I had a play called "Home Truths" premiered at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. When Secker & Warburg published the text of this play a year later, several people in the media and the book trade assumed it was a work of prose fiction and seemed to lose interest when they discovered it wasn't. This made me think that it might be a good idea to turn the play into a short novel, in which form it could reach a lot of people who would never see it on the stage and might not be inclined to read the script of a play. Since the subject matter has a certain contemporary relevance, I decided that the sooner I did it the better. In the process I changed some things and added others. But it is essentially the same story, so I kept the original title, though with a new subtitle: "Home Truths: a novella".

About the Author
David Lodge is Honorary Professor of English at the University of Birmingham, where he taught from 1960 until 1987. He is the author of ten bestselling novels, including NICE WORK, SMALL WORLD and most recently THERAPY - all are published by Penguin. He lives in Birmingham.

Customer Reviews

Fun and engaging read
A home truth is a wounding mention of a person's weakness. In his Home Truths, novelist David Lodge does not leave any character's weakness unturned. Each has to confront a flaw or a mistake of the past, and no one escapes unscathed by his or her choices.

Lodge based Home Truths on his play of the same title, and at times his scenic descriptions sound a bit like stage directions. The upside of this theatrical tendency is Lodge's ability to reveal his characters through dialogue and action. He seldom tells the reader about his characters, opting instead to let them show their personalities through what they say and what they do.

Adrian Ludlow is a novelist who has stopped writing, save for his work on anthologies. He is living in an isolated Sussex, England, cottage with his wife, Eleanor, when their college friend Sam Sharp comes back into their lives. Sam is a successful screenwriter whose reputation has been attacked by newspaper interviewer Fanny Tarrant. The columnist is young, ambitious, bitter, and known for devouring men like Sam for breakfast.

The outraged Sam fears that his public image will be tarnished by the unflattering column and asks Adrian to help him get revenge on Fanny. For Adrian, this means stepping back into the spotlight and giving up his cherished privacy. At first, Adrian's wife is a supportive spouse, serving as his voice of reason. Soon, the reader learns that Eleanor has home truths as well, ones she did not expect to surface in the war Adrian and Sam attempt to wage on Fanny.

"The thing is," Sam says, "to find her weak point, her Achilles heel, her guilty secret." When Adrian replies that she might not have one, Sam replies, "Everybody's got one." As in a Greek tragedy, Lodge finds his characters' hamartia, or flaw, and plays it up until the man or woman breaks down as a result. Home Truths explores celebrity, notoriety, and the demands of writing with satiric wit. The fast-paced prose and sharp observations throw the reader into the world of the self-centered and self-conscious, the worldly and the gullible, the famous and the infamous. What does celebrity mean to a writer, and what price is the writer willing to pay to achieve it or avoid it? Lodge delves deep into his characters to answer these questions, and the result is a fun and engaging read.

Funny - but too short.
A short and entertaining read which does have a serious meditation on the problems of celebrity, particularly expressed in the discussion of Princess Diana. There are some particularly good jokes about modern culture generally - the joke about Damien Hirst for example. My advice to other readers however is that it is only a small book - wonderful for a laugh, but perhaps only really for the true Lodge enthusiast.

open wider please
This is a rather slight addition to David Lodge's long and impressive fiction list. All he has done, really, is extend the text of the play that appeared in the West End. That said, it's still entertaining. Lodge has clearly observed with fascination the childish behaviour to which the discontented middle-aged are prone; Adrian's wilful snubbing of his wife when they are alone compared to his sham good nature when they are with family and friends is just the sort of thing narked couples get up to. I rather wish the author had built a novel rather than a novella round his play, extended it much more, so there was more development of it's themes, especially the mutual detachment of a couple whose relationship has become jaded by resentments.