literature

What is happening to David Lodge? Time was when he wrote wry, pithy Bradburyesque tomes in which young Catholics committed acts of sacrilege, and academics flirted and fretted round the world. But his latest novel, Therapy, is distinctly flabby round the waist: all fret and no fretwork. The town of Rummidge, his regular suburban dreartopia, seems to be having the last laugh, lending the narrator, Tubby Passmore, a monochrome earnestness. A successful middle-aged TV sitcom writer, Tubby's knee pains become symptomatic of a repressed angst. As his psychotherapeutic quest continues, the life he has built around his physically uninhibited wife and platonic mistress starts to fragment.

Of course, the title alone indicates that Therapy wants to wear its unsexiness on its sleeve; if its jokes are thin on top, then they are tidily and proudly arranged; it aspires to the status of couch potato ("Working out... bears the same relation to real sport as masturbation does to real sex"). The degree to which this delve into the menopausal male psyche is autobiographical - middle-aged Martin Chuzzlewit adaptor living in Birmingham etc - is currently exercising the minds of many, but seems a distraction.

What is more interesting is whether Lodge is simply using the idea of therapy as an excuse for aimless narrative musings or whether the book's epigraph - Graham Greene's remark that "writing is a form of therapy" - taps into a much richer seam of literary argument.

David Lodge talks to Blake Morrison, 9pm, Wed, Blackheath Concert Halls, SE3 (0181-463 0100) £6/£4