Deaf Sentence

Poor Professor Bates! The hero of David Lodge's Deaf Sentence won't see sixty again and, in a synergistic purgatory that may seem familiar to aging boomers, he's uncomfortably sandwiched in between the needs of adult children, concerns about his ailing father, a domestic role reversal prompted by his wife's business, and an infirmity of his encroaching old age that drives the action of this hilarious novel: after years of swimming against the tide of hearing loss, Desmond Bates must accept the fact that he is all but deaf.

It's a problem, all right. Weary of the constant professional humiliations posed by his deafness, Bates throws in the towel and retires from his teaching position at a university in Northern England. But, retirement simply presents its own set of hearing challenges. Hearing aids provide little relief so he tends to just wing it in social situations. Pretending he can hear when he actually has no idea what's just been said is frequently funny and occasionally catastrophic,