> At St. Custards there are: > Wot fun, swotting up the dialects. I didn't realize that "fuzz" had crossed the pond. "Cheese it, da Fuzz!" was common radio/movie talk when I was a kid in the NYC area (and, for all I know, actual gangster talk). I guess the movies themselves are enough to widen its circulation. OTOH, its use in *this* novel might well be the professor (or the author) showing off his transatlantic connections. Of all David Lodge's novels I have *only* read *Thinks*. I was disappointed and irritated, a reaction only sharpened by my awareness of Lodge's considerable reputation. The characters are cardboard and the plot is boilerplate. At one level, the novel reads as if Lodge wanted a ready-made scaffold on which to hang a distance-ed course on consciousness and artificial (machine) intelligence. A conversation in which one party is giving a lecture and showing off his learning is not much of a conversation. Worse, the presentations themselves are plainly pre-rehearsed, like Coles Notes, and too fond of themselves to be critically engaged. According to the scheme, the role of critic is played by a recently widowed georgeousleggy english prof whose oddly swooning scepticism is too true to type to be interesting. The two cultures: can't we just get along? These people are very happy with themselves and the whole business comes across as a mode of foreplay. One must hope so, since as intellectual life it needs a massive dose of spam, er, I mean v**gr*. That this glib fellow is, too boot, a rising academic star places perhaps the final strain on the reader's good will. Which is to say, I didn't care for this novel at all: People's magazine pays a visit to the Pepsi Cola Centre for Consciousness Studies at the University of the Sea and Sky. Sorry to be so negative ... To make up for this, allow me to recommend the indescribably wonderful *Austerlitz* by the recently departed WG Sebald. (Among other possibilities, you could count it as a serious study of consciousness.) best wishes, Stephen Straker <straker@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Vancouver, B.C. ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html