David Lodge’s books always have a vaguely autobiographical air about them involving as they do young British Catholics in the late 50′s and early 60′s, fading Catholic academics of the 70′s and 80′s, and aging male academics with some tenuous Catholic connections and with definite father issues of 
the 90′s and 00′s. They are also observant, bittersweet , honest, and very, very funny.
Deaf Sentence was published in 2009 but I didn’t get around to reading it until last week. It’s the fictional journal of Desmond – a retired linguistics professor who is slowly but surely losing his hearing as well as dealing with a strange American female graduate student and a stubborn aging father.
The book is not altogether successful – the graduate student plotline, while not extraneous (it adds a necessary tension that leads to important plot and character development) does not exactly cohere either.
Despite that, I enjoyed the book quite a bit. It was typical Lodge in a way but with an additional contemplative layer in which deafness and death – limits and mortality – are continually held up to one another – not in tidy analogies but in a rueful, resigned hall of mirrors.
I liked the book also; I’ve enjoyed all of David Lodge’s novels.