Deaf Sentence Read online

  Table of Contents

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Acknowledgements

  Praise from America and England for Deaf Sentence by David Lodge

  “Deaf Sentence showcases the author’s ability to use sympathy and slapstick humor to create an appealingly hapless hero and to recount his adventures with Waugh-like verve. . . . The novel occupies a similar place in Mr. Lodge’s career as Exit Ghost does in Philip Roth’s, and Villages does in John Updike’s: the book is a veteran novelist’s meditation on aging and death and the diminution of youthful dreams. . . . Lodge has written a novel that not only hits the bright comic notes of his best earlier fiction but also deftly downshifts to play the darker, more minor scales as well.”

  —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

  “Deaf Sentence is funny, all right, but it is funny in the way deafness itself is funny. . . . Here Lodge goes wider and further by creating a man who learns to be clear to the increasingly inaudible years of late life—and not only to deal with death, but also to see and, despite his encroaching affliction, to hear.”

  —Roger Rosenblatt, The Washington Post

  “Mordantly funny and poignant.”

  —Joyce Carol Oates, Times Literary Supplement (Books of the Year)

  “Terrific . . . Lodge manages to balance Desmond’s amusing disquisitions on subjects like Wonderbra ads and hearing aids with somber reflections on mortality, a balancing act that few authors could pull off with such grace.”

  —Jennifer Reese, Entertainment Weekly

  “In Deaf Sentence, David Lodge moved beyond comic, satiric, and intellectual fiction to moral realism, teasing humor from the most unpromising subjects—deafness, aging, suicide, death, and evolution—and finding tender insights into the human condition behind the irony of the crustiest curmudgeon.”

  —Elaine Showalter, Times Literary Supplement (Books of the Year)

  “Funny and touching . . . As readers of Lodge’s wonderful campus comedies of the 1980s and ’90s know well, he is masterful on the subject of academic egos, the barely submerged competitiveness of so-called colleagues and the eager (sometimes reckless) sexual appetites of many men in the profession.... Throughout Deaf Sentence, Lodge layers his lively, comic scenes with the sobriety brought on by Desmond’s thoughts on mortality. If this makes the novel sound heavy or laborious, its isn’t: Lodge has always been able to wear his erudition and philosophical interests with deceptive lightness.”

  —Sylvia Brownrigg, Los Angeles Times

  “A touching and humane treatment of deafness, disability, and aging, at once sad and stoic and intermittently witty, and, as always with Lodge, it is readable and accessible, a fine addition to his oeuvre.”

  —Margaret Drabble, The Guardian (London)

  “Rarely are we fortunate enough to find such witty, affecting, and ultimately transcendent treatments of the human slide toward oblivion as we do in [Deaf Sentence]. . . . Glows with a sepia-toned, elegiac sadness that is occasionally leavened by bright comic interludes. Desmond’s monologues are frank, funny, and captivating.”—Julia Keller, Chicago Tribune

  “Who knew deafness could be this funny—that it could be such a useful engine of comic haplessness? This engaging novel is full of information.”

  —Lorrie Moore, The Guardian (London)

  “I liked Deaf Sentence very much. I dread losing my own hearing, which is more or less inevitable if you live long enough, and Mr. Lodge’s hero, Desmond Bates, is in denial. What Mr. Lodge does so well is simultaneously mock and lament his hero’s predicaments.”—Cynthia Crossen, The Wall Street Journal

  “An entertaining narrative, to which [Lodge] adds fascinating and instructive layers . . . The book’s triumph is to infuse all of this with appealing vitality, both through the witty verve of Lodge’s prose and this exhilaratingly sharp scrutiny of the world around him.”

  —Peter Kemp, The Sunday Times (London)

  “Terrific . . . You wouldn’t think Lodge could make all of this funny, but somehow he does, with a wry wit that reveals the lighter side of Bates’ various dilemmas.”—Melinda Bargreen, The Seattle Times

  “A novel as richly textured and thought-provoking as any Lodge has written . . . Probably no other work of fiction (and possibly no medical account) has described so successfully the multiplicity of confusions, frustrations and social stratagems deriving from deafness.”

  —Alan Brownjohn, Times Literary Supplement

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  DEAF SENTENCE

  David Lodge is the author of twelve novels and a novella, including Small World, Nice Work (both of which were finalists for the Booker Prize), Paradise News, Therapy, Thinks . . . , and, most recently, Author, Author. He has also written many works of literary criticism. He lives in Birmingham, England.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in Great Britain by Harvill Secker,

  an imprint of Random House Group Limited 2008

  First published in the United States by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2008

  Published in Penguin Books 2009

  Copyright © David Lodge, 2008

  All rights reserved

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following coyprighted works: “Days” and excerpt from “Aubade” from Collected Poems by Philip Larkin. Copyright © 1988, 2003 by the Estate of Philip Larkin.

  “Inside Our Dreams” from Toffee Pockets by Jeanne Willis, published by Bodley Head/Red Fox.

  Excerpt from “Clearing” from Collected Poems by Tony Harrison (Penguin Books Ltd, 2007).

  By kind permission of the author.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product

  of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,

  living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Lodge, David, 1935-

  Deaf sentence / David Lodge. p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1
-101-14056-7

  1. Older deaf people—Fiction. 2. Aging—Fiction. 3. Marital conflict—Fiction.

  4. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PR6062.O36D’.914—dc22 2008001772

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means

  without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only

  authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy

  of copyrighted materials.Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  Dedication

  Conscious that this novel, from its English title onwards, presents special problems for translators, I dedicate it to all those who, over many years, have applied their skills to the translation of my work into various languages, and especially to some who have become personal friends: Marc Amfreville, Mary Gislon and Rosetta Palazzi, Maurice and Yvonne Couturier, Armand Eloi and Beatrice Hammer, Luo Yirong, Suzanne Mayoux, Renate Orth-Guttmann, and Susumu Takagi.

  D.L.

  Sentence noun. Middle English [Old French from Latin sententia mental feeling, opinion, philosophical judgement, from sentire feel] 1. Way of thinking, opinion, mind . . . 2b. The declaration in a criminal court of the punishment imposed on a person pleading guilty or found guilty . . . 5. A pithy or memorable saying, a maxim, an aphorism . . . 7 . . . A piece of writing or speech between two full stops or equivalent pauses.

  The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary

  1

  THE tall, bespectacled, grey-haired man standing at the edge of the throng in the main room of the gallery, stooping very close to the young woman in the red silk blouse, his head lowered and angled away from her face, nodding sagely and emitting a phatic murmur from time to time, is not as you might think an off-duty priest whom she has persuaded to hear her confession in the midst of the party, or a psychiatrist conned into giving her a free consultation; nor has he adopted this posture the better to look down the front of her blouse, though this is an accidental bonus of his situation, the only one in fact. The reason for his stance is that the room is full of noise, a conversational hubbub which bounces off the hard surfaces of the ceiling, walls and floor, and swirls around the heads of the guests, causing them to shout even louder to make themselves heard.This is known to linguists as the Lombard Reflex, named after Etienne Lombard, who established early in the twentieth century that speakers increase their vocal effort in the presence of noise in the environment in order to resist degradation of the intelligibility of their messages. When many speakers display this reflex simultaneously they become, of course, their own environmental noise source, adding incrementally to its intensity. For the man now almost nuzzling the bosom of the woman in the red blouse, as he brings his right ear closer to her mouth, the noise reached some time ago a level that makes it impossible for him to hear more than the odd word or phrase of those she addresses to him. ‘Side’ seems to be one recurring word - or is it ‘cider’? And ‘flight from hell’ - or was it ‘cry for help’? He is, you see, ‘hard of hearing’, or ‘hearing impaired’ or, not to put too fine a point on it, deaf - not profoundly deaf, but deaf enough to make communication imperfect in most social situations and impossible in some, such as this one.

  He wears a hearing aid, an expensive digital device, with little beige plastic earpieces that fit snugly in both ears like baby snails in their shells, which has a program for damping down background noise, but at the cost of also damping down foreground sounds, and at a certain level of decibels the former completely overwhelms the latter, which is now the case. It is not helpful that the woman seems to be an exception to the rule of the Lombard Reflex. Instead of raising the pitch and volume of her voice like everybody else in the room she maintains a level of utterance suitable for conversation in a quiet drawing room or a tête-à-tête in a sparsely peopled tea-shop. They have been talking, or rather she has been talking, for some ten minutes now, and strive as he may he cannot identify the conversational topic. Is it the art on the walls - blown-up coloured photographs of urban wasteland and rubbish tips? He thinks not, she does not glance or point at them, and the intonation of her speech, which he can just about register, does not have the characteristic declarative pattern of art-speak, or art-bollocks as he sometimes disrespectfully calls it to tease his wife. It has rather the tone of something personal, anecdotal and confidential. He glances at the woman’s face to see if it gives a clue. She fixes him earnestly with her blue eyes, and pauses in her utterance as if expecting a response. ‘I see,’ he says, adjusting his countenance to express both thoughtful reflection and sympathy, hoping that one or the other will seem appropriate, or at least not grotesquely inappropriate, to whatever she has been saying. It seems to satisfy her, anyway, and she begins speaking again. He doesn’t resume his former posture: there really is no point in aiming his right earpiece to receive her speech when the party babble is pouring into the left one, and if he should try to cover his left ear with his hand it would only produce a feedback howl from his hearing aid as well as an eccentric-looking posture. What to do now? What to say when she pauses again? It is far too late to confess, ‘Look, sorry, I haven’t heard a word you’ve said to me for the last ten minutes’ (a quarter of an hour it might be by now). ‘I’m deaf, you see, can’t hear a thing in this din.’ She would reasonably wonder why he hadn’t said so before, why he let her go on talking, nodding and murmuring as if he understood her. She would be annoyed, embarrassed, offended, and he doesn’t wish to appear rude. She might be one of his wife’s customers, for one thing, and for another she seems rather nice, a young woman maybe in her late twenties with bright blue eyes, a pale smooth complexion, shoulder-length flaxen hair centre-parted and straight-cut, and a naturally shapely figure - he can tell from the shadowy separation of her breasts just visible at the unbuttoned opening of her blouse that they are not artificially enhanced by silicone, or thrust forward and upward by underwiring, but have the trembling plasticity of real unfettered flesh, with a faint surface transparency of the skin like good porcelain - and he doesn’t wish to make a bad impression on a comely young woman who has taken the trouble to talk to an old fart like himself even if it is a random encounter unlikely ever to be repeated.

  She pauses again in her monologue and looks expectantly at him. ‘Very interesting,’ he says. ‘Very interesting.’ Playing for time, waiting to see if this will do, he puts his wine glass to his lips, only to discover that it is empty and that he has to tip it up into an almost vertical position and hold it there for some seconds in order to make the dregs of Chilean Chardonnay trickle down into his throat. The woman watches with curiosity as if she thinks he is going to perform some kind of trick, balancing the glass on his nose for instance. Her own glass of white wine is almost full, she has not taken even a sip from it since she started talking to him, so he cannot suggest they get themselves refills from the bar, while to go off on his own to recharge his glass, or to propose that she accompany him on this errand, seem equally discourteous options. Fortunately she seems to appreciate his plight - not his real plight, his total ignorance of what she has been saying, but his need for another drink - and smiling she says something with a gesture at his empty glass which he is fairly confident of interpreting as encouragement to go and get himself a refill. ‘I think perhaps I will,’ he says, ‘Can I get you another?’ Stupid question, what would she do with two glasses of white wine, one in each hand? And she is obviously not the kind of person who would eagerly gulp down one drink while you fetched her another. But she smiles again (a nice smile, disclosing a row of small even white teeth), declines with a shake of her head, and then to his dismay asks a question. He can tell it is a question by the rising intonation and the slight widening of her blue eyes and arching of her eyebrows, and it evidently demands an answer. ‘Yes,’ he says, taking a chance; and as she seems pleased he boldly adds: ‘Absolutely.’ She
asks another question to which he also replies in the affirmative, and then, rather to his surprise, extends her hand. Evidently she is leaving the party. ‘Very nice to have met you,’ he says, taking the hand and shaking it. It is cool and slightly damp to the touch. ‘What did you say your name was - I’m afraid with all this noise I didn’t quite catch it.’ She pronounces her name again but it is hopeless: the first name sounds faintly like ‘Axe’, which can’t be right, and the surname is completely inaudible, but he can’t ask her to repeat it again. ‘Ah, yes,’ he says, nodding, as if pleased to have pocketed the information. ‘Well, it’s been very interesting talking to you.’

  ‘Who was that young blonde you were deep in conversation with?’ Fred asked me in the car on the way home. She was driving because she hadn’t had much to drink and I had had quite a lot.

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ I said. ‘She told me her name, twice in fact, but I couldn’t make it out. I didn’t hear a word she was saying. The noise . . .’

  ‘It’s all the concrete - it makes the sound reverberate.’

  ‘I thought she might be one of your customers.’

  ‘No, I’ve never seen her before.What did you think of the exhibition? ’

  ‘Drab. Boring. Anybody with a digital camera could take those pictures. But why bother?’

  ‘I thought they had a kind of interesting . . . sadness.’

  That is a condensed account of our conversation, which actually went something like this: