From Publishers Weekly
Lodge's (Thinks) meticulously researched but disappointingly tepid "docu-novel" opens in 1915, with Henry James on his death bed, and quickly establishes the context of this take on the great Anglo-American writer's life: James's conflicted jealousy about his friend George Du Maurier's success with the now virtually forgotten novel Trilby, his chaste relationship with the American novelist Constance Fenimore Woolsey, and the fateful evening of January 5, 1895, when his play Guy Domville premiered in London and James was humiliated by the booing from the cheap seats. Why does a man who believes that the theater was noteworthy for "its vulgarity and aesthetic crudity" aspire to be a playwright? For the banal reason that "it was for an author the shortest road to fame and fortune." It may be Lodge's point that James sublimated his desires for love or sex into a longing for acclaim and wealth, but the James of this novel—the second this year to deal with his theatrical career, after Colm Tóibín's The Master—is petty, priggish and egocentric in the extreme (his reaction to the apparent suicide of Woolsey: "what he really dreaded was finding some evidence that she had done it on account of him"). Even if this portrayal is accurate—and given the author's scholarly credentials, there's no reason to doubt it—it makes for a singularly undramatic story. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
At the close of a sterile negotiation with Sam Goldwyn over a possible screenplay, George Bernard Shaw is supposed to have told the movie mogul that he finally understood their aesthetic differences: "You, sir, are interested principally in art. I am interested only in money." Many literary authors have tried to make this Faustian bargain with the Mammon faction, imagining that one good killing at the Hollywood or Broadway box office will free them to produce their principled, deathless, elevated prose. Faulkner, Greene, Waugh . . . the only one who seems to have got away with it -- or should I say had it both ways? -- is Gore Vidal. Still, it is something of a struggle to imagine Henry James himself descending into this vulgar arena, and the chief virtue of David Lodge's latest novel is that he convincingly shows us "The Master" as he begins to make his sordid, pecuniary calculations. The action is set in England (and, part of the time, in Italy) on the cusp of the 1880s and early '90s. Mr. James has become distinctly stout and more than a little pompous, and the success of Portrait of a Lady (his only actual thriller, in my opinion) is receding behind him. Used to his comforts, he is uneasily aware of declining sales and a possible shortage of ready money. Meanwhile, as is always the case from the standpoint of those wedded to art, the cheap and the meretricious continue to flourish. James's friend, the popular illustrator George Du Maurier, writes a popular and sentimental novel called Trilby, which becomes the runaway seller of the age. An amoral showoff named Oscar Wilde seems unstoppable with his crowd-pleasing efforts. Most disconcerting of all, perhaps, Constance Fenimore Woolson, a tough-minded American authoress, continues to produce fiction that is both worthy and "accessible." James cannot shake the feeling that this woman also has a design to lay siege to his long-guarded bachelorhood. Lodge is very deft in two aspects of his reconstruction: the sexual and the contextual. He makes it seem quite plausible that James thought about sex a good deal ("It was . . . necessary to this project that the novelist should know exactly what it was he was leaving out") and, eschewing any undue nudging, he also rightly infers that the bed into which James never got would have contained a lissome male. There is a scene in a London restaurant, in the course of which the visiting Guy de Maupassant tries to talk about women with his host, which made me laugh aloud. As for the historical, Lodge recreates the little world of London's West End stage with great charm and care. I say "little world," even though its dramas and defeats were enacted before a wide and growing public. James slaved on a plot that he hoped would bring him riches and fame as well as praise from the cognoscenti, and the result was the play "Guy Domville." On opening night, the theater critics of the London press included George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and Arnold Bennett, and this on an evening when Oscar Wilde's "An Ideal Husband" was having its premiere only a few hundred yards away. (James chose to attend this first night, rather than his own, because of an excess of nerves.) I knew what had later happened to James on that night of nights, and could feel it coming on again as I turned the pages. It says a great deal for Lodge that he kept me in suspense for a considerable time about a denouement that I understood in advance, and then made that climax into something more shattering than I had anticipated. I shall give away nothing to the uninitiated, except to say that the pain we share with James is much diminished when we appreciate that this saved him for the writing of later novels such as The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl. Obviously Lodge would have to write at supra-Jamesian length if he put in everything about those late-Victorian, Edwardian and Great War decades in England. He resolves the problem by risking anachronism and by starting and finishing in the year of James's death. I wish he had included that other low moment in the great man's career: the awful snub administered to the aspirant Anglophile and potential Englishman by the brash young half-American Winston Churchill. But one cannot, as James himself ruefully conceded, hope to have everything. The novelist Peter De Vries once said that he wanted a mass audience large enough for his elite audience to despise: This is the third novel this year (anticipated by both Colm Toibin's The Master and Emma Tennant's Felony) to have James as its virtual sex object, so it would appear that the "wrong" sort of fame and immortality lies still within his posthumous grasp.Reviewed by Christopher Hitchens Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Timing is everything, and Lodge seems to have written the wrong book at the wrong time. Author, Author, his novel about a novelist, is the third title this year—following Colm Tóibín’s The Master (**** Selection, Sept/Oct 2004) and Emma Tennant’s Felony—to feature Henry James as its protagonist. Although it’s clear Lodge respects James, that admiration is not enough to make this book a "must read." Here, Lodge depicts James as a pompous, selfish, ambitious scribe overcome with professional jealousy. While most critics enjoyed Lodge’s writing style and meticulous attention to accurate scholarship, the fictionalized James did not, overall, find a sympathetic audience with modern day readers.Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From Booklist
Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Edgar Allan Poe have fared quite well as the stars of novels dramatizing their lives, and now it's Henry James' turn. The great writer is the focus of Colm Toibin's aptly named novel The Master [BKL Ap 1 04], and here Lodge fictionalizes James' doomed attempt to shore up his finances by writing plays. The author of such intellectual romps as Therapy (1995) and Thinks (2001), Lodge is primarily a satirist, but he is also a literary critic, a discipline palpable in this expert if slightly awkward tribute. Lodge can't help but launch into extended biographical and critical disquisitions but then, as though to leaven his erudition, renders his hero a bit too charmingly eccentric. And yet Lodge's take on James' theatrical adventures is suspenseful and empathetic, and his re-creation of James' colorful milieu, including his quirky family, is vivid. Ultimately, Lodge portrays a genius who is aware of both his gifts and shortcomings and who revels in friendships. And, indeed, it is Lodge's vital interpretations of James' close ties to the Punch artist turned best-selling writer George du Maurier, and more problematic relationship with the popular American writer Constance Fenimore Woolson, that infuse this smart novel with its satisfyingly piquant insights into a seminal, and persistently enigmatic, literary genius. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Book Description
Framed by a dramatic and moving account of Henry James’s last illness, Author, Author begins in the early 1880s, describing James’s friendship with the genial Punch artist, George Du Maurier, and his intimate but problematic relationship with fellow American novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson. At the end of the decade Henry, worried by the failure of his books to sell, resolves to achieve fame and fortune as a playwright while Du Maurier diversifies into writing novels. The consequences that ensue mingle comedy, irony, pathos, and suspense. As Du Maurier’s novel Trilby becomes the bestseller of the century, Henry anxiously awaits the opening night of his make-or-break play, Guy Domville. This event, on January 5, 1895, and its complex sequel form the climax to Lodge’s absorbing novel. Thronged with vividly drawn characters, some of them with famous names, Author, Author presents a fascinating panorama of literary and theatrical life in late Victorian England. But at its heart is a portrait, rendered with remarkable empathy, of a writer who never achieved popular success in his lifetime or resolved his sexual identity, yet wrote some of the greatest novels about love in the English language.

About the Author
David Lodge is the author of a novella and eleven novels, including Changing Places, Small World and Nice Work (both shortlisted for the Booker Prize), Paradise News, Therapy, and Thinks. . . . He is also the author of many works of literary criticism, including The Art of Fiction, The Practice of Writing, and Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Framed by a dramatic and moving account of Henry James's last illness, Author, Author begins in the early 1880s, describing James's friendship with the genial Punch artist George Du Maurier and his intimate but problematic relationship with fellow American novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson. At the end of the decade Henry, worried by the failure of his books to sell, resolves to achieve fame and fortune as a playwright while Du Maurier diversifies into writing novels. The consequences that ensue mingle comedy, irony, pathos and suspense. As Du Maurier's novel Trilby becomes the bestseller of the century, Henry anxiously awaits the opening night of his make-or-break play, Guy Domville. This event, on January 5, 1895, and its complex sequel, form the climax to Lodge's novel.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Lodge's (Thinks) meticulously researched but disappointingly tepid "docu-novel" opens in 1915, with Henry James on his death bed, and quickly establishes the context of this take on the great Anglo-American writer's life: James's conflicted jealousy about his friend George Du Maurier's success with the now virtually forgotten novel Trilby, his chaste relationship with the American novelist Constance Fenimore Woolsey, and the fateful evening of January 5, 1895, when his play Guy Domville premiered in London and James was humiliated by the booing from the cheap seats. Why does a man who believes that the theater was noteworthy for "its vulgarity and aesthetic crudity" aspire to be a playwright? For the banal reason that "it was for an author the shortest road to fame and fortune." It may be Lodge's point that James sublimated his desires for love or sex into a longing for acclaim and wealth, but the James of this novel-the second this year to deal with his theatrical career, after Colm Toibin's The Master-is petty, priggish and egocentric in the extreme (his reaction to the apparent suicide of Woolsey: "what he really dreaded was finding some evidence that she had done it on account of him"). Even if this portrayal is accurate-and given the author's scholarly credentials, there's no reason to doubt it-it makes for a singularly undramatic story. Agent, Emilie Jacobson at Curtis Brown. 4-city author tour. (Oct. 11) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

So who's the author of the title? The immortal Henry James, here about to fail as a playwright, or his pal, Punch artist George Du Maurier, who has just become a best-selling author with Trilby? With a four-city author tour; note that Colm Toibin's The Master (LJ 5/1/04) covers similar ground. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews