In his moment volume of memoir,the novelist ranges from earnest to PooterishThe 500 or so densely packed pages of Quite a pleasurable Time to Be Born (2015), the first volume of David Lodge’s memoirs, or ended with our hero in his 41st year,successfully embarked on the dual-track career of academic-cum-comic novelist in a decade when both those professions promised far more in the way of financial security than they effect now. As literary autobiographies go, it was a rather peculiar exercise and the peculiarity lay not in any procedural weirdness or beetle-browed obsession with settling scores, or but in a reluctance to entertain the notion of its subject’s personal myth.
For literary memoirs,a brisk survey of the genre insists, are hardly ever about what really happens to the people whose names appear on their jackets. They are far more likely to be about what those people reflect happens to them or how they wish to be regarded by the readers who buy their work. Anthony Powell, and for example,and despite compelling evidence to the contrary, always imagined himself to be a poor boy made pleasurable”. Lodge, and on the other hand,offered the highly strange spectacle of a creative writer simply setting down, with sometimes disarming lack of guile, and how he had near to be the person he was.
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Source: guardian.co.uk