The late David Lodge‘s 1975 novel Changing Places mildly satirizes college professors, the two in this book being exchange academics, Morris and Philip, from America and Great Britain respectively. They “change places” for a long while, leaving their relatives back home. Both are English professors. Morris never starts his ambitious project of analyzing Jane Austen’s novels, but instead drifts into the attempted seduction of Philip’s wife. There is much erotic misbehavior from the reserved Philip, and, yes, it likewise involves Morris’s wife. In part, the novel has to do with Letting Go—at the university—but where does this leave education or anything else?

CP is fairly short and a bit avant garde. Not as funny or memorable a novel about academic life as Lucky Jim, it is nevertheless buoyant and clever and nicely character-driven. I think it’s almost a patch on Lodge’s novel, Therapy.