By Larry Mazzeno

On a recent trip I ended up staying one night at a Country Inn & Suites, which prides itself on having a ‘lending library’ – a small collection of books that are available for guests to take with them if they’ve not finished reading them by checkout time. All one is asked to do is return the book to a Country Inn & Suite location – presumably on the next visit. Not having anything to read that evening, I picked up a copy of British writer David Lodge’s Small Truths, a slim novella published in 1999. Ten minutes into the story, I was hooked.

Small Truths, adapted from a play Lodge wrote a year earlier, tells the story of three people who were an inseparable trio in college. When the novel opens, all are approaching middle age. Adrian Ludlow is a former novelist who now compiles anthologies; he and his wife Eleanor live in a nondescript suburb in London. Though they have drifted apart from their university friend Sam Sharp, a prolific screenplay writer, they apparently are not surprised when arrives at their home one Sunday complaining about a savage profile of him recently published in a prominent London paper by Fanny Tarrant. The young gossip columnist makes it a point of attacking public figures and exposing their foibles and failings – the ‘small truths’ referred to in the title. Adrian and Sam cook up a plan to get back at Tarrant by having her come to interview Adrian while he secretly gathers information to write an unflattering profile of her. The plan backfires, of course, and Tarrant ends up learning much about the Ludlows and Sharp that they all thought they could keep buried. How this happens is at times deliciously humorous, at times depressingly sad. Without giving away too much, suffice it to say that Fanny does a similar hatchet job on Adrian. In a climactic final scene, Tarrant shows up at the Ludlows’ home with disturbing news. No one will be reading her profile of Adrian, she says, because the papers are carrying a much more compelling story: News of a tragic accident involving Princess Diana, driven to her death – some would say literally – by the papparazi, whose insatiable appetite for ‘dirt’ knows no bounds.

Lodge does much in the space of a hundred pages, letting the dialogue carry the story and exposing his characters’ thoughts and motivations through clever conversation and an occasional authorial observation. Most importantly, Lodge’s novel asks some compelling questions: How much should we know about others’ private lives? Is it acceptable for reporters to dig into the lives of the rich and famous, no matter what the cost? And what does it say about the rest of us, who support this kind of activity by buying up newspapers and magazines filled with salacious tidbits about celebrities? The answers to those questions might reveal some ‘small truths’ about ourselves.