British writer David Lodge passed away in January, at the grand age of 89. I was sad to hear of his death, because his work meant a lot to me. He balanced two very different careers – academic and novelist – which had its challenges but also gave him a broad perspective on the world. And one of his novels particularly resonated with me as an undergraduate student, because I was trying to navigate the two different worlds depicted in that novel.

My undergraduate degree is a Bachelor of Business Administration, with majors in business and English. There was exactly one other person among the several hundred students in my BBA program who was also enrolled in business and English (he was doing a minor in English). The business students doing majors or minors in other subjects – and there weren’t many of them  – were enrolled in psychology, economics, or statistics.

I don’t exaggerate when I say that business students despised English students and English students despised business students. The business students thought the English students were fluffy-brained weirdos who sat around all day reading old stuff that had nothing to do with reality, and who were going to be completely unemployable. The English students thought the business students were greedy careerists who sat around all day planning how to exploit workers and society, and who couldn’t understand anything that didn’t involve numbers.

It was an interesting experience for me to go back and forth almost every day between those two mindsets. What was astounding, though, was that the two fields of study overlapped. The old stuff that English students read was all about how people behaved in groups and organizations, and why they acted that way – exactly what organizational theory and organizational behaviour tried to understand in business. And marketing in business is all about learning how to write in ways that appeal to specific audiences and get something across to them – exactly what poets and prose writers have been doing for centuries. I continually marvelled at how business and English, as areas of study, could learn so much from each other, but couldn’t get past the ridiculous stereotypes that they had of each other to make that happen.

David Lodge’s work made me feel much less alone in thinking that English and business had a lot in common. In his academic life, his literary criticism and analysis dealt with the questions that dominated literary theory in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Does the real meaning of the text lie with the author, with the reader, or both? Is fiction really fiction if it draws on real events, or real feelings, or real places, or the author’s own experiences? If a text reminds the reader that the text itself is an artificial construction, how does that affect the reader’s experience of the text? These types of questions were also very relevant to thinking about how businesses and organizations presented themselves and were perceived.

In his life as a novelist, Lodge wrote sixteen full-length books, the best known of which are “the campus trilogy”: Changing Places (1975), Small World (1984), and Nice Work (1988). I didn’t really appreciate Changing Places and Small World when I initially read them, although they were hugely enjoyable. It wasn’t until I started going to academic conferences as a Ph.D. student that I realized how accurately Lodge had portrayed those events and the things that go on before, during, and afterwards. I also discovered that some scenarios that I thought he had exaggerated for dramatic or comedic effect were actually very real – like conference attendees trying to build their own reputations by verbally tearing down other attendees’ work during a discussion, and people flying literally halfway around the world to give a 20-minute presentation.

But Nice Work is the Lodge novel that has a special place in my heart. In the second volume of his autobiography, which I’ve just finished reading, he described the origins of that book. It was inspired, he wrote, by an initiative at his own university that encouraged academics to get into the “real world” by shadowing people in their workplaces – following someone around all day long to see what they did at work.

Lodge had several long conversations with a factory manager who participated in one of these “shadow” placements, and he was fascinated by what that manager told him about the experience. The manager learned a lot from their “shadow”, the “shadow” learned a lot from them – and sometimes, the “shadow” came up with brilliant ideas for the factory because they were entirely unaware of why certain things were done certain ways. They didn’t have the same knowledge as the factory employees and managers – and that, ironically, helped them to see options that had been overlooked by people who knew factories very well.

Lodge decided that this scenario of two different worlds colliding and informing each other would be an excellent basis for a novel. Since he was obviously more familiar with academia than with manufacturing, while he was writing the novel he regularly consulted with that manager to ensure he got the details right in his portrayal of factory life.

The plot of Nice Work is structured around a “shadow” placement. Robyn Penrose, an English lecturer at a university, is assigned to follow Vic Wilcox, the managing director of a manufacturing firm. The larger context of the story is the “Thatcherism” of 1980s Britain, with cutbacks, downsizing, and austerity in both the public and private sectors, and both businesspeople and academics feeling that their jobs were threatened. The other narrative thread throughout the book is the interactions between Robyn and Vic, and their arguments leading to each of them having a better appreciation of the other’s perspectives.

Part of what made me love this book so much is how perfectly Lodge creates two very different characters in two very different worlds – the two worlds that I was living in. The literary analyses that Robyn applies to everything, including her own life, used the same concepts that I was learning in my English courses. The daily workplace problems that Vic struggles to solve were the same type of problems in the case studies in my business courses. And the back-and-forth between Robyn and Vic as they tried to justify their worldviews to each other often included things I had said myself, when trying to explain the importance of English to a business student, or the importance of business to an English student.

But what really made me love Nice Work was that I felt someone else understood that business and English had a lot in common. That was an affirmation that I needed. And knowing that someone else saw what I did was especially important to me on those days when I was very, very tired of explaining yet again that business students weren’t evil and English students weren’t airheads.

Towards the end of his last volume of autobiography, Lodge admitted that some of his work hasn’t aged well, particularly in its earliest depictions of male-female relationships. He also saw literary theory evolving beyond the directions he was familiar with; at one point in that book, he briefly mentions a debate at a conference about whether Joseph Conrad’s work was reinforcing colonialism or criticizing it. Several decades later, colonialism and cultural appropriation are major issues in the literary world, but they were largely absent from the discourse of Lodge’s era.

However, despite some of Lodge’s work being somewhat “of its time”, I hope his writing continues to be read and enjoyed. Obviously I highly recommend Small World (there’s also a fine BBC-TV adaptation of it), but all of his novels are excellent. If you’d like a glimpse into the academic side of his work, a good place to start is The Art of Fiction, a collection of his accessible and insightful newspaper articles on novelists and novels.

I’m very glad that I encountered David Lodge’s work, and I’m grateful for the impact it had on me.