Product Description

Ralph Messenger is an international academic star in the highly trendy field of language and thought research. Novelist Helen Reed arrives at the university to teach creative writing and to recover from the unexpected death of her husband. Despite huge differences in belief and temperament, they begin a secret affair - with complicated consequences, comic and tragic, for those around them. Witty, elegant and timely, THINKS is a dazzling exploration of love and deception, the enigmas of consciousness and the intricacies of the human heart.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #49744 in Books
• Published on: 2002-05-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
In Thinks..., David Lodge writes another witty satire on the vagaries and triumphs of contemporary British academic life and achieves a fine balance between multiple points of narrative interest. He gains much momentum from psychologically nuanced romantic intrigue, and also manages to offer intelligent speculation on the state of play in the scientific and philosophical investigations into the nature and workings of human consciousness, without preaching or becoming ponderous.

Thinks... recounts the experiences of Helen Reed, distinguished novelist, who accepts a creative writing teaching gig at the fictional University of Gloucester after the sudden death of her husband. Here she meets Ralph Messenger, scholar, spin doctor, philanderer and head of the illustrious Colt Belling Centre for Cognitive Science. Scientist and novelist spar:

She asks them what they were working on. Jim says robotics, Carl says affective modelling. Kenji says something indistinct that Ralph repeats for her benefit--genetic algorithms. "I can guess what robotics is," says Helen, "but what on earth are the others?"
Carl explains that affective modelling is computer simulation of the way emotions affect human behaviour.
"Like grief?" Helen says, glancing at Ralph.
"Exactly so," he says. "Though Carl is actually working on a program for mother-love."
"I'd like to see it," says Helen.
"I am not able to give a demonstration, I'm afraid," says Carl. "I am rewriting the program."

The form of the novel carefully mirrors its intellectual concerns. We are given Ralph's attempts to tape-record his random thoughts; Helen's more introspective diary and the often hilarious writing assignments of Helen's motley crew of students, who attempt literary solutions to the problems Ralph poses Helen. Written with enviable deftness, Thinks... manages to be generous to its characters and serious about the intellectual and ethical questions it poses for itself without losing satiric bite. --Neville Hoad

About the Author
David Lodge is the author of ten bestselling novels and a novella. He also wrote two highly successful TV adaptations: his own novel NICE WORK and Dickens' MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT. He taught for many years at the University of Birmingham, where he is now Honorary Prof. of English. Though a south Londoner by upbringing, he continues to live in Birmingham.

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Customer Reviews

A dazzling feast from David Lodge
One of David Lodge's recurring themes is the tension between two different worlds. In "Nice Work", the sparks flew between an industrialist and the modernist English literature lecturer Robyn Penrose (who, promoted to Professor, makes a cameo appearance in "Thinks" - brief reappearance of characters from previous novels being another Lodge trademark).

In "Thinks", Ralph Messenger, a cognitive scientist at a modern but already decaying university, spars with Helen Reed, an attractive widow and English novelist whose books, written in the third person and past tense, are "so old-fashioned in form as to be almost experimental". Debate is joined as to the meaning of consciousness, with Helen doubting Ralph's beliefs that it can be reduced to a series of impulses in the brain. The intellectual sparring develops into a deeper relationship, as Helen is confronted with a revelation about her past life which leaves the reader stunned in sympathy.

Lodge himself reserves the third person past tense stuff to the last chapter. Earlier, he dazzles us with his vast array of styles, ranging from stream of consciousness (self-deprecatingly referred to at one point as an outdated literary form), diary, present tense narrative, e-mail exchange and a series of hilarious parodies of other novelists' styles as Helen's students are deployed by her to prove to Messenger that consciousness has an essential human element (I particularly enjoyed the Irvine Welsh parody). There are other classic Lodgeisms along the way: no other writer has his gift for observational humour. Congress with a woman of ample proportions is compared to "making love to a bouncy castle", and I won't spoil another analogy involving a bird's nest by saying anything more than that it had me in stitches of simultaneous laughter and revulsion!

As with all Lodge's books, once taken up it has to be read to the end in one sitting, even into the small hours on a weekday with work beckoning. I am not sure that "Thinks" is his best book (cognitive science did not grab me as much as some of his other themes), but it is streets ahead of anything else around. The tragedy is that his books are so long anticipated and so soon read. At one point in "Thinks", Helen wonders why, with the histories of so many people on the earth destined to remain forever unknown, novelists should bother to invent so many additional characters and work so laboriously to give them colour. Before long, she fears, readers forget most of the novel's contents anyway. If this is David Lodge speaking, sending out a cri de coeur to his readers, wondering whether his efforts are worth it, the answer from this reader at least is a resounding yes. Please do not make us wait 5 years for your next book Mr Lodge.

Witty, intriguing, and lots of fun.
This captivating comedy of academic manners has a satisfying weightiness lacking in most other books of its genre because it is also intellectually challenging. Here Lodge indulges his interest in the esoteric subject of cognitive science--the study of consciousness and the processes of thought--by giving us two intriguing characters at opposite extremes of the cognitive spectrum and then letting the sparks fly, at first intellectually, then "socially."

Ralph Messenger is the clever and manipulative Director of the Holt Belling Center for Cognitive Science at the imaginary University of Gloucester, a nuts-and-bolts scientist investigating the physical, quantifiable aspects of thought and consciousness. Helen Reed, a visiting lecturer and grieving widow, on the other hand, is an artist, a novelist who celebrates feeling, imagination, and creation. When Ralph, an unapologetic woman-chaser, finds Helen irresistibly attractive, their totally different worlds collide, exposing the reader to various theories of cognitive science but also illuminating the limitations in explaining the soul, love, relationships, imagination, and the creative life.

The sometimes farce-like action which follows is kept in check by the very real presence of death, which hovers over the action and grounds the comedy, adding to the realism and providing a setting for arguments about whether the soul and Heaven can exist in a strictly scientific world. The many delights of this novel are highlighted by Lodge's choice of appropriate points of view for his characters from stream of consciousness to journal entries and daydreams about sex. Parodies of Martin Amis, Irvine Welsh, Samuel Beckett, Fay Weldon, Henry James, and Gertrude Stein by Helen's students add literary excitement to this cornucopia of delights. Mary Whipple

An elaborate joke?
Lodge's new novel is a romping good read but it's also deeply unoriginal: everything you expect to happen does happen so that a grieving woman finds out that her dead husband wasn't such a saint after all and so is able to move on (Yawn); while when the police arrive looking for a member of department who's been downloading child porn from the Net the culprit is exactly who you think it is. I found myself wondering if Lodge is attempting a literary joke, setting himself the task of writing the archetypal academic-adultery novel.