The disturbing experience of David Lodge when the subject of his last novel, Author Author, turned out to have inspired at least two other novelists is well documented, not least by the author himself in his volume of essays, The Year of Henry James. For his latest novel, Deaf Sentence, he has returned to the security of the genre in which he, with the late Kingsley Amis and Malcolm Bradbury, was a pioneer: the campus novel.

This, however, as the ruefully punning title suggests, is not the campus novel priapic, triumphalist, militant in its own radical cleverness, but the campus novel elderly, semiretired and anxious. Lodge's hero, Desmond Bates, is a former professor of linguistics four years into a gratefully taken early retirement. Lately, however, the activity with which he had imagined that he would fill his freedom from academic servitude has begun to languish. He misses the structure of the university calendar that spared him for so long from waking, as he does now every morning, to confront the question: what shall I do with myself today?

There is more: Desmond's second wife, Fred (short for Winifred) has undergone a middle-aged renaissance - launching a successful interior-design business and simultaneously subjecting herself to a radical makeover. The effect on Desmond, he records, is “an unexpected onset of... late-flowering lust”.

Something beside his vague sense of purposelessness is bothering Desmond: the eight-year age gap between Winifred and himself seems to be widening, his sense of it intensified by the contrast between his increasing deafness and occasional impotence, and Winifred's newfound vigour. The scene is set for catastrophe and it duly approaches from two directions, embodied by Desmond's elderly father and a disturbing young American student, Alex Loom, who is determined that Desmond, rather against his will, should supervise her PhD thesis on the stylistic content of suicide notes.

There is a wealth of thematic richness and Lodge explores it painstakingly, alternating between the first and third person as he recounts Desmond's struggles with ageing, mortality, seduction, isolation, loss and hope. This is, as you might expect, given the twin academic specialisms of author and narrator, a very bookish novel. Desmond may be retired, but the academic in him is uneasy with experience until he has trapped it in a web of literary antecedents.

The effect on Lodge's narrative can be engagingly digressive - it's always a bonus to discover an unfamiliar poem (in this case, a chunk of Thomas Hood's A Tale of a Trumpet) embedded in a new novel. But the digressiveness, while no doubt faithfully representing the thought processes of a nice man in late middle age with a lot of important things on his mind, lends the text a halting, meandering, inhibited quality.

There are fine set pieces, such as the death of Desmond's father, but the overall effect is strangely muffled, as though the text itself suffered from the deafness that it describes.

Deaf Sentence by David Lodge
Harvill Secker, £17.99 Buy the book here

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