Lorin Kleinman   Reading, writing, and occasionally eating.

Desmond Bates is, on the face of it, a recognizable David Lodge character–a hapless retired professor of linguistics at a fictional northern university–but both he and Deaf Sentence, Lodge’s fourteenth novel in which he stars, are, while still funny, more melancholy than Lodge’s previous work.

Desmond left the university when a departmental reorganization, along with his increasing deafness (which mirrors Lodge’s own hearing loss), made retirement appear to be a good idea. Four years later, he is increasingly restless and plagued by physical problems. By contrast, his wife Fred is running a successful interior design shop; and having updated her appearance to befit an upscale shop owner, she now looks younger and more beautiful than ever. To Desmond, the eight-year gap between their ages–which hadn’t seemed very large–appears to be an ever-widening chasm, exacerbated by the fact that he finds it more and more difficult to hear his wife.

Into this rather fraught situation comes Alex Loom, a graduate student working on the linguistics of suicide notes, whom Desmond has unwittingly agreed to meet. (The novel opens on Desmond pretending to follow what Alex is saying at a noisy and crowded party.) As Desmond becomes her unofficial thesis adviser, she is gradually revealed to be both mendacious and unstable, in a way that threatens to unravel Desmond’s quiet existence.

As the pun of the title suggests, Deaf Sentence makes much of the humor of deafness. Blindness is tragic and deafness comic, Desmond explains, and there are a number of deeply funny situations in which he misunderstands what he is hearing. Milton’s lament: “Oh dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon/Irrecoverably dark, without all hope of day” doesn’t have quite the same pathos when applied to deafness, he notes: “Oh deaf, deaf, deaf, amid the noise of noon…”

But deafness is in fact tragic. Desmond speaks movingly of Beethoven and Philip Larkin’s loss of hearing, and often refers to the similarity between the words ‘deaf’ and ‘dead’, in both wordplay and more serious allusions to the eternal silence that looms over him. Gradually, Desmond achieves a kind of acceptance of both.

Deaf Sentence is not all it could be: the Alex Loom story peters out rather than being resolved more effectively. But it is funny and profound and full of lovely and fascinating allusions to linguistics and art and literature; to my mind, it is Lodge’s most successful novel since Small World.