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A review by juliamielerodas
Out of the Shelter by David Lodge
4.0
I thought of my father a great deal as I read this early David Lodge novel. Set largely in post-war Germany among an American military set, this tender coming-of-age story has a strong air of the autobiographical and it lent some flavor to my dad's tales of being stationed in Germany in the early 1960s. It was great to get another version of the paternal narrative but with Lodge's voice; defamiliarizing the story has given it dimension, has made me think about the various players in that arena as having more real humanity.
Like Lodge's other writing, this is an unapologetically comic text. Though it lacks the literary maturity and complexity of the campus novels and his other, later fiction, Out of the Shelter is still decidedly Lodge-y, looking keenly at situations of conflict from a number of sympathetic perspectives, even when these might otherwise seem oppositional.
Perhaps because it's a story of adolescent becoming, I'm a little more struck by the sexual situations and conflicts in this novel than in some of the others. While Lodge always lingers over this stuff in ways that are clearly shaped by his Roman Catholic upbringing, I haven't found the sexual aspects of his other books as troubling as in this one; particularly poignant is his description of early erotic play with a girl neighbor during their nights in a London bomb shelter, the combination of innocence and experience of this moment resonating strongly with the narrator's larger story and identity.
17 April 2012
Like Lodge's other writing, this is an unapologetically comic text. Though it lacks the literary maturity and complexity of the campus novels and his other, later fiction, Out of the Shelter is still decidedly Lodge-y, looking keenly at situations of conflict from a number of sympathetic perspectives, even when these might otherwise seem oppositional.
Perhaps because it's a story of adolescent becoming, I'm a little more struck by the sexual situations and conflicts in this novel than in some of the others. While Lodge always lingers over this stuff in ways that are clearly shaped by his Roman Catholic upbringing, I haven't found the sexual aspects of his other books as troubling as in this one; particularly poignant is his description of early erotic play with a girl neighbor during their nights in a London bomb shelter, the combination of innocence and experience of this moment resonating strongly with the narrator's larger story and identity.
17 April 2012