This first volume of an informal trilogy introduces the recurring settings of Rummidge University and Euphoria State and the characters Philip Swallow, a mild-mannered British professor of English literature, and Morris Zapp, a brash American scholar and literary critic. This story combines the features of the comic novel and the campus novel into a satire that contrasts English and American higher education; it is also a roman à clef that draws on some noted members of the literary establishment for its characters.

Rummidge and Euphoria have long exchanged visiting scholars every spring term. In 1969, Philip Swallow and Morris Zapp wind up changing places, and before the novel is over, they have changed much more. The novel’s plot is ancillary to the author’s design of placing selected features of English and American life side by side to contrast them.

Each visiting scholar must first find lodging, and each meets a young woman, but where Philip finds a casual sex partner, Melanie, in his apartment building (later to discover that she is Zapp’s grown daughter by a previous marriage), Morris finds a pregnant American girl, Mary Makepeace, fleeing to England for an abortion in the days before Roe v. Wade. While Morris, who is anything but a traditional man, urges his new acquaintance toward traditional domesticity, Philip winds up allowing his new acquaintance to live with Charles Boon, a young Englishman and Philip’s former student, who has become a talk-radio sensation in Euphoria and a squatter in Philip’s apartment.

The parallel situations allow Lodge to comment on English and American academic offices, book collections, teaching schedules, student behaviors, scholarly expectations, and party-going manners. Small and large disasters befall each scholar’s living quarters, and the adventures of the two men gradually place each one into more frequent contact with the other’s wife, so that each winds up living under the roof of his opposite number. The shared domestic arrangements start off properly enough in each case, but Philip’s contented domesticity quickly becomes so indispensable to Désirée Zapp that they become lovers, while Hilary Swallow’s growing suspicions about Philip eventually push her into the arms of Morris Zapp.

Lodge’s narrative strategies in putting this story together vary across the course of the book. He begins with a third-person omniscient narrator relating all the experiences and thoughts of Morris and Philip, Désirée and Hilary. In chapter three, “Corresponding,” however, he switches to an epistolary style and provides the reader with the texts of letters (and one telegram) exchanged between the two pairs of spouses.

In chapter four, “Reading,” Lodge adopts yet another indirect narrative strategy and presents snippets from the Euphoric Times, the Plotinus Gazette, the Rummidge Morning Post, the Esseph Chronicle, and various flyers, handbills, and announcements. The first two chapters enable these snippets to stand on their own and advance the plot in a highly efficient and amusing manner.

In chapter five, “Changing,” Lodge returns to traditional omniscient narration, but it is now dominated by dialogue between Philip and Désirée in Euphoria and Morris and Hilary in Rummidge, with one conversation between Philip and Hilary broadcast by radio to the universe. Then the final chapter, “Ending,” turns into a movie screenplay, abandoning narrative completely. Lodge ends his story in a freeze-frame rather than a conclusion, leaving readers to tie up the ambiguity of loose ends for themselves.

Changing Places is a clear example of a novel in the style of postmodernism: the text makes reference to itself as an artifact of literature both through explicit observations from the characters and from the shifting narrative structure. Although the setting, characters, events, and puns will appeal most strongly to a specialized coterie audience of college English professors, the satirical contrasts of English and American cultures, attitudes, and behaviors should amuse any well-prepared reader.

Bibliography

Friend, Joshua. “‘Every Decoding Is Another Encoding’: Morris Zapp’s Postructural Implication on Our Postmodern World,” English Language Notes 33, no. 3 (March 1996): 61–67.

Martin, Barbara Arizti. “Shortcircuiting Death: The Ending of Changing Places and the Death of the Novel,” Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies 17 (1996): 39–50.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

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