- Paperback: 352 pages
- Publisher: Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd (1 Mar 2001)
- ISBN-10: 0436280132
- ISBN-13: 978-0436280139
- Product Dimensions: 23.8 x 15.6 x 3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (36 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 5,498,134 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Thinks...
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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?"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 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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."
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First Sentence
One, two, three, testing, testing ... recorder working OK . . . Olympus Pearlcorder, bought it at Heathrow in the dutyfree on my way to . . . where? Can't remember, doesn't matter . . . The object of the exercise being to record as accurately as possible the thoughts that are passing through my head at this moment in time, which is, let's see ... 10.13 a.m. on Sunday the 23rd of Febru - San Diego! I bought it on my way to that conference in . . . Isabel Hotchkiss. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
One, two, three, testing, testing ... recorder working OK . . . Olympus Pearlcorder, bought it at Heathrow in the dutyfree on my way to . . . where? Can't remember, doesn't matter . . . The object of the exercise being to record as accurately as possible the thoughts that are passing through my head at this moment in time, which is, let's see ... 10.13 a.m. on Sunday the 23rd of Febru - San Diego! I bought it on my way to that conference in . . . Isabel Hotchkiss. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
28 of 29 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
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.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
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.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A wonderfully innovative narrative and so very glad to see Professor Lodge back on the university campus - the place he really knows best (I'd leave Hawaii well alone !!). Love the monologues and the stream of conscious motif. The character of Ralph Messenger is alos a triumph: a self indulgent, philandering academic trapped in his own narrow confines - sound familiar?
This is Lodge at his very best: waspish and ironic. Up there with 'Nice Work' 'Therapy' and 'Deaf Sentence.'
This is Lodge at his very best: waspish and ironic. Up there with 'Nice Work' 'Therapy' and 'Deaf Sentence.'
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
I liked NICE WORK but I'm not very good at science
David Lodge's 'Nice Work' appeared on my university reading list and I devoured it, transposing my lecturers onto my reading and identifying with figures of the industrial world I... Read more
Published 8 months ago by Ms Cherry A. Coombe
Thinks - just not quite deeply enough
Once upon a time David Lodge wrote satirical novels about a fictitious University, involving a little bit of good healthy sexual innuendo and quite a lot of wit. Read more
Published 9 months ago by Ms. Fiona Allen
A fun take on the science of mind and brain
This novel is light and inconsequential but fun. I read it years ago, when it first appeared, and when I was in the community of researchers into the science of consciousness. Read more
Published 14 months ago by Andrew Ross
More entertainment from an excellent author
David Lodge is at his best when writing about what he knows and he knows campus life well. His protagonist, Ralph Messenger, is a cognitive scientist who is trying to record all... Read more
Published 18 months ago by Moonlit
Boring
David Lodge is not the kind of writer you would call boring; "brisk", and "funny" are probably two of the words that come off the top of your head. Read more
Published 18 months ago by JJ Merelo
A GOOD READ
I have to say that I was glad that I did not read all the reviews for David Lodge's novel Thinks, as I do not think that I would have bothered to read it, as it would appear to be... Read more
Published on 19 Feb 2010 by bibliophile
Made me laugh out loud
I first read this book in 2001 and have just re-read it with much enjoyment. It made me laugh out-loud: partly because of the familiarity of the setting in a university, the story... Read more
Published on 13 July 2009 by Bluebell
Entertaining if not thought provoking
This book is an entertaining story, and it's as simple as that. The male hero reminds me distinctly of the real-life zoologist Dawkins, in his arrogant assuredness of the... Read more
Published on 11 Nov 2005 by Oliver Lea
Oh dear!
By far David Lodge's worst novel, I like to think of it is a blip. A tired and embarrassing rehash of the campus novel that he is so justly famous for, "Thinks" is ...well, awful. Read more
Published on 30 Sep 2005 by "bigphilip"
Clash of disciplines
A novel about cognitive science, and there are a lot of quite long conversations between the two principal characters about mind-body philosophy which, though central to the... Read more
Published on 10 Mar 2005 by Ralph Blumenau
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