Description: "Thinks..". is David Lodge's wonderful new work of fiction, a campus novel about secret infidelities and the nature of consciouness. Ralph Messenger is a Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Gloucester in England, a man who believes that the mind is a computer and computers may one day be conscious. Helen Reed is a novelist who comes to the university as a visiting writer for a semester; she belives that fiction constitutes the richest record of human consciousness. "Thinks..". is told in the alternating voices of Ralph (as he dictates into recorders and voice recognition computers) and Helen (as she writes in her journal), and tells how Ralph and Helen fall for each other and have an affair even as Ralph's wife Carrie secretly carries on with another man. Lodge here offers a wonderful and witty take on love and life in the English midlands, a male midlife crisis novel of sorts which also chews over in a playful and never pedantic way such topics as knowledge, the self, the interpretation of the world, the nature of thinking, the modern novel, and the fundamental human need for narrative.

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