Trish’s Blog

This being my first David Lodge novel, I was not familiar with his writing style nor could I compare it with what he has done in the past. I just happened to catch the title of the book while at the library which led me to read the inside cover. I felt that I could definitely relate to hearing loss being “a constant source of domestic friction and social embarrasment.” My hearing loss is a perfect graph of high frequency loss that is easiest to correct with hearing aids. They have certainly made my life easier (and everyone else’s around me), but they are not foolproof. It’s still very hard to hear what someone is saying in a crowded or noisy place. So everyone in my family has felt the frustration of having to repeat themselves to me. My husband has to consciously tell himself to have patience, but there have been more than one incidence of him asking, “Do you have your hearing aids in?”

Growing up, I didn’t have hearing aids. I told my mom that I didn’t want them because I didn’t want to be different. I was defiant. I never sat in the front row in order to hear the teacher better. And while I probably missed a lot, I was still able to get straight A’s. Still, every year when the school did their annual screening, my mother was told that I failed the hearing test and she would take me to a specialist to get tested. I always cheated on the hearing test. I know it wasn’t in my best interest, but perhaps the unwillingness to fail was too strong. I still cheat, apparently. My hearing specialist told me last month that I don’t test the same as I hear. I just laughed knowing that my mom would think it was funny, too.

It has just occured to me that perhaps the reason why I could not fail the hearing test is because of what Lodge writes about in his book about the difference between the disability of seeing versus hearing. He says that blindness is tragic, but deafness is comic. And it’s true! No one pities the deaf. My family has often laughed at me when I answer the phone when one rings on the TV (even if it doesn’t sound anything like our phone ring). If a blind person were to walk into a wall, no one laughs, but they jump to the rescue to help the poor soul. Did anyone pity me and care to repeat the punchline to jokes? Nope. They were too busy laughing, so I would laugh along with them. If someone happened to ask me what the punchline was, I would have to break cover and acknowledge that I had no idea. They would look at me with a raised eyebrow and ask, “So why are you laughing?” No one asks the blind why they stumble. “Deafness is always comic.”

There are many such truths in Lodge’s book, and the lengths that his character goes to in order to keep his deafness under wraps is comic and a bit painful. The opening scene of him pretending to hear a conversation with a girl in a noisy art gallery reminds me of an experience I had when I forgot to wear my hearing aids to school. I had gone to the photo lab (at the University of Hawaii) to work on a project. It was very late and the only other person in the lab was the lab manager, Roger. Poor Roger poured his heart out to me about his girlfriend. I pretended to hear what he said, and I guess he only needed someone to listen to him because I rarely needed to respond. I think. All the while, I was matting prints and making what I hoped to be appropriate facial expressions while he went on about his relationship. I went home that night with no idea what he had said. It bothered me so much that the next day I told him that I had not heard a word he said the night before, and offered to hear him now that I had my hearing aids in. He just shrugged and told me that it was OK. There are things I will never know and the conversation (albeit one-sided) from that night is one of them.

I found Lodge’s book to be educational. I never knew or just forgot that the official name for people talking louder in a noisy room is called 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.” My own mother, along with the girl in the art gallery, is an exception to this rule. While it was she who toted me to hearing specialist after hearing specialist, even pointing out to them that if I could see them during the test that I was most certainly cheating, she will not automatically raise her voice when speaking to me in a noisy environment. She will after multiple repeats, but not initially. If she is speaking about something particularly serious, she also will keep her voice down so that I have to strain to hear her. I may look normal on the outside, but on the inside I’m like Hiro from Heroes when he’s stopping time. Anyway, Lodge’s character being a Professor of Linguistics helps justify all the educational parts in the book. He even switches from first person to third person in one section as an exercise. I thoroughly enjoyed these parts because I happen to really like Linguistics. The Lip Reading Class near the end also becomes a source of interesting information.

I also enjoyed all the British jargon. It was obvious to me early on that the character was British when he said,”going to the gents” (going to the men’s room) and “battery packed up” (battery died) and “hallo” (hello) and “put the phone down” (hung up the phone). I just think it’s funny how they say things so differently and wish that I could use them, too, but know they would not go over well being that I’m American. Wouldn’t it be loverly if I could just once say, “Oh dang, I’m craving  chocolate, but all the shops are shut.” I would love to incorporate that phrase into my normal mode of conversation.

It is not lost on me that the character that I so easily relate to is a 60-something-year-old man. It makes it all the more funny to me. The parts that I cannot relate to by personal experience in this book just so happen to be the not so terribly funny parts. Namely, the relationship with his elderly father, the crazy meetings with the Fatal Attaction-like young American woman, retirement, the effects of alcohol on libido, and the visit to Auschwitz. Silence was tangible to me when he described how he kept his hearing aids in even though he was alone on the grounds of the extermination camp “because [he] wanted to hear the silence”. In all these subjects, the writing is honest and human, but not heavy or melodramatic. He doesn’t hold back and because the book is written in a diary form, we can forgive the flaws.

There is so much that I like about this book, but at the same time, I wouldn’t readily recommend it to my friends. There are so many parts to it… like an onion, as Shrek would say, that would not float everyone’s boat. How funny could it be to someone with perfect hearing I wonder? Well, I’m sure that David Lodge did not write this book just for me, so there must be something that my friends could get out of it. Still, it’s not entertaining in the sense that Harry Potter was entertaining. There’s no magic in this book, but there seems to be a bit of magic in the writing.

Posted on February 25th, 2009 by trish
Filed under: In My Opinion