Is silence really golden?

Deaf Sentence
by David Lodge
Harvill Secker £17.99, pp294

'Deafness is comic, as blindness is tragic,' writes David Lodge in his latest novel. His protagonist, Desmond Bates, is merely hard of hearing, which makes him even more of a joke. Without a hearing aid, the silence can be comforting ('Am I half in love with easeful deaf?'), but deaf people inevitably come across as 'withdrawn, unsociable, curmudgeonly'. With the devices snugly in, the world becomes bewilderingly hyper-real. Parties are the worst; the Lombard reflex causes individuals in crowded rooms to amplify their voices, setting off a cacophonic chain reaction. Desmond is either forced to talk nonstop or mimic comprehension. His interlocutors seem to talk in Dadaist poems or impossible Chomskyan sentences. 'Sadness' becomes 'badness'; 'spoiled by tourism' is heard as 'soiled by Cubism'.

Desmond is enthused to learn of a new book about his condition, Being Deaf, until a trip to Waterstone's reveals this to be Jim Crace's novel Being Dead. We find ourselves earwigging on one such skewed conversation as the novel opens. A tall, bespectacled, grey-haired man is 'nodding sagely' at a young blonde. Desmond cannot understand a word, but pretends to agree wholeheartedly. He later learns he's offered to help a graduate student with her dissertation. Desmond is a professor of linguistics, a fact that only serves to heighten the bathos of his condition.

Deaf Sentence is Lodge's first return to the campus novel since 2001's zeitgeisty Thinks, an audacious fictive take on cognitive science. Now we are back in familiar territory, in a place approximating Rummidge (the name is never given). 'Post-campus' might be a better definition of the genre, for Desmond has recently stopped working. The quiescence of retirement is mirrored by the prose; both the novel and its subject potter agreeably.

Lodgean adultery has given way to a peaceful senescence built around conjugal cuddling and sporadic episodes of uxorious lovemaking. Desmond's wife has recently had surgery to perk up her breasts; she has taken to dieting, exercising and colouring her hair, which contributes to her husband's Betjemanesque feelings of 'late-flowering lust'. (What else, we are presumably meant to think, would account for his interest?) But there are no priapics here: indeed, Desmond is lucky to muster the occasional 'quite promising erection' and achieve the odd bout of release, narrated with a gung-ho primness that can seem almost Blytonesque: 'Winifred treated his penis as if it were a particularly delicious stick of seaside rock.'

Lodge himself is hard of hearing and there is a gently autobiographical tone to this novel. It is poignant, often funny, slightly bland in places; less ludic than vintage Lodge, and less wittily postmodern.