In Changing Places, David Lodge’s 1975 novel, American and British college professors exchange teaching positions for part if the 1969 academic year. Mousy Philip Swallow finds himself basking in California sunshine in Berkeley, but embroiled in campus shenanigans, student protests, and an exciting new world of counterculture experimentation. On the other side of the Atlantic, Morris Zapp, a flamboyant and famous Austen scholar takes his new “red brick” college by storm, wowing the English Department as well as the wife of his colleague.

Lodge guides the reader along the crisscrossed paths of the two scholars, from one comical escapade to the next, but never shies away from the difficulties that arise. This is the type of story at which Lodge excels – examining how people react when outside events force them to reexamine what they believe in and hold dear.

He makes it funny, but the underlying dilemmas are as serious as they come. For example, the scene where Zapp realizes that his flight to England was so cheap because it was a charter flight of pregnant women taking advantage of Britain’s newly relaxed abortion laws, includes this passage: . . .

Read the rest of the review here on Rose City Reader.