David Lodge is probably best known for a series of campus novels—Changing Places, Small World, and Nice Work—that, back in the 1970s and ’80s, deftly exposed the pretensions and foibles of academic life. Lodge’s erudition and skills as a parodist have made him popular with highbrow readers. But his novels are also often funny, in a rueful way, making them strong sellers throughout the world.

Wells and Orson Welles after ‘War of the Worlds’ (1938)

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Of course there’s no lack of good novels satirizing academics, and some of the most celebrated examples (Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim and Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution) belong to the postwar era when higher education in both Great Britain and the United States began its big boom. Lodge, who grew up in a working-class London suburb, is himself a product of that expansion: In the 1950s and ’60s he was the first in his family to attend a university, and to earn a Ph.D. Lodge taught for many years at the University of Birmingham. He has published widely as both a literary scholar and a creative writer. And so he knows the world of professors of literature as Dick Francis knew the world of jockeys—from the inside.

Lodge’s own academic career coincided with the rise of critical theory, which by the end of the 1980s had largely transformed English in the academy. “Theory,” as it was called, reverentially or not, created a slew of critical schools with their own ardent disciples and stars: Deconstructionists, Structuralists, Post-Structuralists, Postcolonialists, Russian Formalists, and New Historicists, among others, all of them eager to confound the uninitiated while blasting away the intellectual assumptions of yore. The cocky American Morris Zapp, who appears in several of Lodge’s campus comedies, is especially good at exploiting the latest critical fashions for his own professional ends.